SALEM — A Renaissance literature professor who has spent nearly a decade trying to bring peace to Sudan and stop the genocide in Darfur was presented last night with the 16th annual Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice.

A crowd of more than 200 gave Eric Reeves a standing ovation when he was given the award by Mayor Kim Driscoll and Salem State College President Patricia Maguire Meservey. The Smith College professor was accompanied by his wife and a daughter to a ceremony at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Meservey called Reeves "an extraordinary crusader for justice."

Reeves, 58, is considered one of the world's leading experts on the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, where nomadic Arab-speaking militias backed by the Sudanese government have killed, by most estimates, several hundred thousand black African villagers over the past few years.

In accepting the award, Reeves lamented that he has not been able to do more to stop the mass killings and rapes, the destruction of villages, and the uprooting of a people. He said he has an "intense and incessant awareness of our failures in Darfur measured by the suffering and (loss of life) that continues ..."

Reeves made a point of acknowledging all of the humanitarian workers, especially those from Sudan, who risk their lives almost daily to try to save others.

"They cannot be here this evening so I plead only for the honor of speaking on their behalf," he said.

Congressman John Tierney of Salem praised Reeves for his informative testimony before Congress last year, and for his extensive articles and other publications carried in newspapers and magazines and on Web sites around the world.

"It is from his writing and his work that young people around the world ... have joined the cause," Tierney said. "He has spent the greater part of a decade rectifying what some have called the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Two Darfur activists who spoke as part of last night's program also praised Reeves.

"More than anyone I have met, (Reeves) exemplifies the citizen of conscience," said Susannah Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights, which has documented the killings and rapes in Darfur.

The Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, who founded a humanitarian women's group that has partnered with women from the Sudan, credited Reeves with helping educate her and countless others about a human tragedy that was largely ignored until recent years.

"Undeniably, he is the father of this grass-roots movement," she said.

The Salem Award is given annually in memory of the 20 innocent victims of the Salem witch hysteria of 1692 as a way of remembering that tragedy and of trying to prevent future ones. Past winners include Chinese dissident Harry Wu, late Anti-Defamation League Executive Director Leonard Zakim and Gregory Allan Williams, hero of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

Reprinted with permission from The Salem News.