Lauded by National Civil Rights Museum president Russ Wigginton as a “systems-changing voting rights warrior,” Stacey Abrams received a rapturous rock-star welcome during Thursday night’s National Civil Rights Museum’s Freedom Award ceremony at the Orpheum.
But Abrams — the former Georgia state legislator whose ballot-box activism was credited as being crucial to Joe Biden’s White House victory — was more like the member of a band than a solo star. Though the three recipients of the 32nd Freedom Awards spoke separately, they formed an urgent united front, delivering remarks that rebuked reactionary politics and testified to the value of a truthful reckoning with U.S. racial history; the need to confront institutional injustice; and the power of free elections.
“We no longer want to be a nation in which it is better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent,” said Freedom Award honoree Kerry Kennedy, an international human rights advocate, in a lengthy oration that proved to be the evening’s most rousing speech. Kennedy didn’t name names; judging from the crowd’s enthusiastic response, she didn’t have to.
In addition to Abrams, 49, and Kennedy, 64, Stanford history professor Clayborne Carson — who since 1985 has headed the effort to edit and publish the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — was a 2023 Freedom Award honoree.
Carson, 79, who walked to the podium with the aid of a cane that he said he has used since a recent stroke, was raised at the makeshift Los Alamos community in New Mexico, where his father was the first Black security inspector while J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues were developing the atom bomb. “What a fortunate life I’ve had,” he mused, pondering his journey from Los Alamos — “where seeing a Black person was a special day in your life” — to being a witness of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington to being a professor of African American history charged with organized King’s papers. “Forty-five years and 60,000 documents later, I’m still not finished,” he said.
In what was apparently intended to be a critique of recent efforts by legislatures in Tennessee and other states to suppress school lessons about race that might cause “discomfort” to some students, Carson emphasized the necessity of confronting the honest facts of U.S. history. Wigginton introduced this theme in opening remarks that alluded to attempts to whitewash America’s racial record: “The National Civil Rights Museum is not confused about historical inequities and injustices.”
Abrams, too, was a particularly pertinent Freedom Award choice in these early months of the 2024 presidential election campaign, as cultural debates and legal battles over gerrymandering, voter ID laws, “insurrection” and other issues continue to embroil legislatures, the courts and social media.
Thursday’s ceremony was the second public Freedom Award gala since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. That year’s event was canceled, while the 2021 awards were presented in a livestreamed “virtual” show at the Orpheum that was closed to the public. The first ceremony was in 1995.
Billed by the museum as its “signature event” and “one of the nation’s most prestigious events,” the Freedom Award — now in its 32nd year — has been given to close to 100 honorees. Some past recipients include Coretta Scott King, Jimmy Carter, Lech Walesa, Sidney Poitier, Stevie Wonder, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Bishop Desmond Tutu and at least three people so famous — Bono, Oprah and Usher — they don’t need last names.
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In 2018, Joe Biden was a recipient, while Michelle Obama was among the 2021 honorees.
The National Civil Rights Museum opened in 1991 on what Wigginton called the “sacred ground” of the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated in 1968. According to its mission statement, the museum celebrates King’s legacy and continues King’s work by serving as “a catalyst to inspire action to create positive social change.” As Wigginton said Thursday night, the museum through its programs aspires to “elevate the consciousness of our country.”
Through their activism, each year’s Freedom Award honorees effectively support the museum in this effort. As a museum press release states, the recipients are “individuals who have shown unwavering commitment to promoting justice and equality.”
Hosted by actor Tobias Truvillion (a cast member on “One Life to Live” and “Empire”), the Orpheum ceremony was preceded by a red-carpet gala at the adjacent Halloran Centre and a morning “student forum” at the museum. Performers during the show included a house band led by Memphis musician Gary Goin; rapper Tyke T; and an Amsterdam dance trio named Let It Happen, who demonstrated with their slippery footwork that Memphis jookin has made its way to the Netherlands. The event also included a tribute to Harry Belafonte, the actor, singer, King confidante and 1999 Freedom Award honoree who died April 25 at the age of 96.
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Here is some more about the Freedom Award honorees:
Stacey Abrams
Founder of Fair Fight Action, an organization founded in 2018 to combat voter suppression, Abrams became the face of voters’ rights during the hotly contested federal elections of 2020. She served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, and was the first African American female major-party gubernatorial nominee in 2018, when she narrowly lost the Georgia governor’s race to Republican candidate Brian Kemp.
Clayborne Carson
Professor emeritus at Stanford University, Carson’s “profound work centers on the study of Martin Luther King Jr. and the human rights movements that his legacy has inspired,” according to a statement from the museum. A student participant in the historic 1963 March on Washington, the Buffalo-born Carson is director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, where he oversees the encyclopedic, long-term effort to organize, edit and publish King’s papers.
Kerry Kennedy
Seventh child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy (and ex-wife of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo), Kerry Kennedy was 8 years old when her father was assassinated in 1968. A lawyer and human rights activist who has specialized in women’s rights, environmental justice and child labor issues, she is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a Washington-based nonprofit human rights advocacy organization.
