Give Peace a Sign

“I was in despair,” Holtom is quoted as saying. “Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.”

Holtom’s design would be placed on five hundred cardboard posters used during the first major anti-nuclear march. The march was from Aldermaston, where British nuclear weapons were and still are manufactured, to London.

The symbol would almost at once cross the Atlantic. A representative of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. attended the anti-nuclear protest rally and brought the symbol of protest Holtom had designed back to the United States. Martin Luther King, Jr. used the symbol as part of his civil rights marches throughout the nation. Soon it would appear on anti-Vietnam posters. Soldiers back from the war splashed the symbol on their helmets; flowerchildren and hippies adorned themselves with the symbol; musicians, artists and the 60s counterculture embraced the symbol as their own. Easier to draw than Picasso’s peace dove, the symbol became known, first in the US and then around the world, as the peace symbol.

Eric Austin of Kensington CND made the first badges using the peace symbol. He made the badges out of white clay and painted the peace sign in black. The badges were distributed with a note explaining that in the event of nuclear war, the fired pottery badges would be among the few human artifacts to withstand the nuclear inferno.

Although the symbol was specifically designed for the CND it has never been copyrighted. A symbol of freedom, the peace sign is free for all to use. From the Berlin Wall to the streets of South Africa, on the graves of victims of military dictators from the Greek Colonels to the Argentinian Junta, the peace symbol crosses all party lines and will endure for all time.