The Friends of Adin Ballou hold their seventh annual Hopedale Peace Picnic on August 6th at 3pm at Adin Ballou Memorial Park at the corner of Hopedale Street and Peace Street. This event is free and open to the public. Join us as we rally to wage peace, seek justice and end war. There is an open mike, and we welcome any and all attendees to use that open mike to recite poems, sing songs or just make a statement on furthering peace and social justice. Also, the winning essays from the Adin Ballou Peace Essay Contest will be read aloud. Please bring a chair or blanket, food and drink, and your friends!
In the 1800’s the Anti-Slavery Picnic, commemorating the emancipation of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1834, was one of the most beloved traditions of the Hopedale Community. The first was held in 1842, only four months after the Community took up residence in Hopedale. The members, still living in cramped and uncomfortable quarters, set aside a day for an event that was part celebration, part demonstration against social injustice.
The Community’s newspaper, the Practical Christian, reported, “In a humble manner a few names gathered beneath a rude bower in His temple who fills all space, to commemorate the glorious First of August.” The event grew until, by the mid-1850s, it was attracting between one and two thousand people, with well-known speakers such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.
Friends of Adin Ballou revived the tradition with “Poetry for Peace in the Park” in 2010. The “Picnic in the Park” is a family event with an open mike to speak on social issues, play music, share poetry or other readings. Like the Hopedale pioneers, in August we gather “in a humble manner, beneath a rude bower” to express our visions of peace and our aspirations toward justice.
The Friends of Adin Ballou honors the life and legacy of Rev. Adin Ballou, founder of the utopian community at Hopedale, Massachusetts. The goals of Friends of Adin Ballou are to research and study the words and deeds of Adin Ballou and the Hopedale Community, and to find ways to keep that legacy alive in the modern world.
Friends of Adin Ballou sponsor three events per year:
• Peace Essay Contest for 7th to 12th graders
in April
• Peace Picnic the first weekend of August
• Fall Lecture in October/November
Visit our Website at www.adinballou.org
Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AdinBallou
Follow us on Twitter @AdinBallou
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Ballou was a minister and theologian, a tireless reformer, and a leading nineteenth-century exponent of pacifism.
Adin Ballou (1803-1890), the founder of the Hopedale utopian community, was an abolitionist and pioneering theorist of nonviolence, whose teachings influenced such peace-giants as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Ballou created the theory of “Non-Resistance,” a form of nonviolent protest, which he and others in the Hopedale Community used to effect radical social change in the areas of abolitionism, equal rights for women and peace advocacy. Unlike many other abolitionist peace advocates of his time, Ballou did not abandon his nonviolent principles during the Civil War. In later life Ballou trusted that his ideas would be taken up again, perhaps a century or more in the future. Ballou’s ideas on how we can effect change without harming others and thus live together in loving peace and cooperation are as relevant in the 21st century as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries.