Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Wangari Maathai of Kenya will be the first recipient of a freedom award unable to accept her honor in person at the National Civil Rights Museum.
Maathai, winner of the International Freedom Award, recently had surgery and cannot make the trip to Memphis. She is sending her daughter, Wanjira Mathai, to accept in her behalf.
“It’s amazing that in the 19 years we’ve done this, this has never happened before,” said museum president Beverly Robertson.
She said National Freedom Award winner Dorothy Cotton and Legacy Award winner Eva Longoria Parker do plan to attend today’s 10 a.m. public award ceremony at Temple of Deliverance Church and a sold-out 6:30 p.m. banquet for the winners at Memphis Cook Convention Center.
Robertson said Maathai and her daughter’s last names are spelled differently because when a mother divorces in Kenya and some other parts of Africa, her children alter their last names by subtracting a letter.
The award to Maathai, 70, recognizes her founding of the Green Belt Movement, an environmental conservation effort. She later broadened the movement to promote democracy, supporting voter registration, constitutional reform and freedom of expression in her African nation.
Cotton, the National Freedom Award winner, worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to become one of the highest ranking women in the U.S. civil rights movement.
“We were determined to change this country,” says Cotton, 80, now of Ithaca, N.Y.
Originally of Goldsboro, N.C., Cotton grew up in a family of sharecroppers and attended college by working in a college dining hall and cleaning dormitories to pay tuition. As a student activist, she drew the attention of King and worked her way up to education director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She has spent a lifetime as a civil rights organizer, strategist and consultant.
Parker, 35, became famous as a sometimes adulterous housewife on the ABC-TV series “Desperate Housewives.” Her Legacy Award is for her philanthropic work, including the founding of Eva’s Heroes, a charity inspired by her developmentally disabled older sister.
Longoria, of Mexican heritage, was named philanthropist of the year in 2009 by the Hollywood Reporter for her commitment to Latino causes and received the 2010 Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Medallion of Excellence for Leadership and Community Service.
It is the first time the Civil Rights Museum’s annual awards all will go to women. Robertson said the award committee’s selection “speaks to the compassion, the power and the energy that women have when it comes to creating change.”
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