OUR FOUNDER
Read article featuring the founder in Smithsonian Folklife Magazine
Grand Master MyungSu YuSung Kim
1927-1999
Grand Master Kim was born in South Korea and led a highly disciplined life. He diligently practiced martial art from a young age and began teaching as a teen. He was a scholar, educator, and principal of a technical high school. Grand Master Kim founded the forerunner to The Peace School in 1953 and expanded it with branches throughout South Korea by the 1960s. In all of his schools, meditation and yoga were taught alongside Traditional Taekwondo, which he knew to be an art of deep peace.
Grand Master Kim emphasized that every human being has the ability, responsibility and mission to create peace for themselves and the world. He decided to leave his homeland and bring his unique ideas for peacemaking to the United States. In his mind, the best chance for global peace would be for peace to begin in the U.S., a place comprised of all races, languages and cultures. He moved with his family to Chicago in 1972 and founded The Peace School.
For decades, Grand Master Kim did a vast amount of research and hours of meditation every day. He was seeking a method that could provide the life-changing benefits of meditation and would be easy for people in the busy modern world to practice. It finally came to him, a simple method he called Peace Breathing: inhale world, exhale peace. Another one of his ideas came to fruition in 1978 when our Mayor established the annual observance of Peace Day in Chicago thanks to Grand Master Kim’s urging.
Grand Master Kim had a vision of Chicago becoming a Model City of Peace for the world to follow and did everything in his power to move this vision forward.