Richard Rhodes
Richard Rhodes will receive the Henry Blackwell Award.
Blackwell, the husband of Suffrage leader Lucy Stone, was a
longtime supporter of women’s equality.
Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-four books
including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer
Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book
Critics Circle Award and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen
Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History.
His latest book, Hedy’s Folly, is the story of the 1940s Hollywood
actress Hedy Lamarr, an amateur inventor who co-invented a
frequency-hopping radio signal, to help the Allied war effort in the
early years of the Second World War. She donated the patent to the
U.S. Navy, which made no use of it until the mid-1950s, when it was
revived and applied to ship-to-ship communications, radio control
of missiles and much more. Declassified in the late 1970s, it was then
applied to digital wireless technology in the form of satellite uplinks
and downlinks, wireless telephones, Bluetooth and more. Hedy never
made a penny on it, but she did eventually receive several awards in
recognition of her inventive gifts.
Rhodes has received numerous fellowships for research and writing,
including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim
Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation Program in International
Peace and Security and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been
a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and a host and correspondent
for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American
Experience series.
He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and
Cooperation at Stanford University. Rhodes lectures frequently to
audiences in the United States and abroad.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, but
grew up in Chicago. Both her parents supported Brooks’ passion for
reading and writing, and by the age of thirteen, she had published
her first poem, “Eventide.” By seventeen Brooks had written over
seventy-five poems, many of which were published in the Chicago
Defender, a local African American newspaper.
Brooks further honed her craft through involvement in the local
community, which provided the inspiration for the poems published
in her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Five years later,
in 1950, Brooks produced her Pulitzer-Prize winning collection,
Annie Allen, and became the first African American author to win that
distinction. That same year, Brooks also published her first and only
novel, Maud Martha, which detailed an African American woman’s
life in short vignettes.
Many of Brooks’ works displayed a political consciousness. Her
1960 collection The Bean Eaters, focused on several cultural issues,
including the Little Rock school integration and the rampant
lynchings in the South. As her works took on a more political bent,
Brooks’ writing style changed and she experimented with free verse
and other non-traditional writing techniques.
Brooks spent the later parts of her life encouraging others to write.
She sponsored writers’ workshops for children and adults, as well
as poetry contests at prisons in Chicago. In 1985 Brooks became
the first African American woman appointed as poetry consultant
to the Library of Congress. Committed to her craft, she refused to
retire, stating “I’ve always thought of myself as a reporter. When
people ask why I don’t stop writing, I say, `Look at what’s happening
in this world. Every day there’s something exciting or disturbing to
write about.’ With all that’s going on, how could I stop?” Brooks died
of cancer at the age of 83 on December 3, 2000, at her home in
Chicago’s South Side.
Dr. Maya Angelou
Dr. Maya Angelou will receive the Gwendolyn Brooks Living
Legacy Award for her achievements in the arts.
Born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Maya Angelou was
raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. As a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s
love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at
San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San
Francisco’s first African American female cable car conductor. She
later finished high school, giving birth to her son a few weeks after
graduation.
In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the
opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham
and danced on television variety shows. In 1958, she moved to New
York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild.
In 1960, Dr. Angelou moved to Cairo, Egypt where she served as editor
of the English language weekly The Arab Observer. The next year, she
moved to Ghana where she taught at the University of Ghana’s School
of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review
and wrote for The Ghanaian Times.
With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she
began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings. Published in 1970, it was published to international acclaim
and enormous popular success.
Dr. Angelou has served on two presidential committees, was awarded
the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and
has received 3 Grammy Awards. President Clinton requested that she
compose a poem to read at his inauguration in 1993.
Dr. Angelou has received over 30 honorary degrees and is Reynolds
Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.
Clara Barton
Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was born on
December 25, 1821 in Massachusetts. In 1854, at the age of thirty-three,
Barton moved to Washington, D.C. to work as a recording clerk at the
U.S. Patent Office, where she was paid the same salary as her male
peers. Barton was working in D.C. when the Civil War broke out in 1861.
The 6th Massachusetts Infantry was attacked en route to Washington,
D.C. by southern-sympathizers, and were in bad shape when they
arrived. Barton heard about their condition and brought supplies from
her home to aid them. This act started a life-long career of aiding
people in times of conflict and disaster.
Barton continued to aid wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C. and
established a distribution agency of supplies. In 1862, she received
official permission from the Surgeon General to transport supplies to
battlefields. Throughout the Civil War, she was at all of the major battles
in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, providing supplies to doctors
and surgeons, and tending to the wounded and ill, even though she
had no official medical training. After the end of the war in 1865, Barton
helped locate missing soldiers, find and mark thousands of graves and
testified in Congress regarding her experiences during the war.
In 1869, at the advice of her doctor, Barton traveled to Europe to
regain her health. While in Switzerland, she learned about the Red
Cross organization that was established in Geneva in 1864. Upon her
return home, Barton focused her attention on educating the public
and obtaining support for the creation of an American Society of the
Red Cross. She wrote pamphlets, lectured, and met with President
Rutherford B. Hayes. On May 21, 1881, the American Association of the
Red Cross was formed and Barton was elected President in June.
Barton spent most of the rest of her life leading the Red Cross, lecturing,
aiding with disasters, helping the homeless and poor, writing about her
life and the Red Cross, and lecturing on women’s rights and suffrage.
Barton died in 1912, at the age of 91, at her home in Maryland.
Senator Elizabeth
Dole
Senator Elizabeth Dole will receive the Clara Barton Living Legacy
Award for her leadership of the American Red Cross.
A native of Salisbury, North Carolina, Elizabeth Dole graduated with
distinction from Duke University as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, earned
a law degree from Harvard Law School, and a Master of Arts in Teaching
from Harvard University.
She served as Deputy to the Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs
during the Nixon Administration, launching a career of dedication to
public safety. Her resume includes six years as a member of the Federal
Trade Commission, and two years as Assistant to President Reagan for
Public Liaison. In 1983, she became the first woman to serve as United
States Secretary of Transportation and the first woman to head a branch
of the Armed Forces, the United States Coast Guard, which was then
located within the Department of Transportation. She later served as
United States Secretary of Labor.
Elizabeth Dole was only the second woman to serve as president since
Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881. She totally
restructured the world’s largest humanitarian organization during
her eight years as president. Following the Red Cross, she sought the
Republican Presidential nomination, becoming the first viable female
candidate from a major political party. Senator Dole became the first
woman to represent North Carolina in the United States Senate, and
served from 2003 to 2009.
Dole’s awards are numerous, ranging from honors for civic service and
leadership in government to accolades for her charitable commitments
and dedication to issues surrounding women in the workplace. She has
also received the Foreign Policy Association Medal and the Radcliffe
College Medal for her outstanding accomplishments. Elizabeth Dole
served eleven years on the Duke University Board of Trustees and six
years on Harvard University’s Board of Overseers.
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was born on May 25, 1895 in Hoboken, NJ. She
went to school in Manhattan but frequently skipped class to wander
the Lower East Side, witnessing how the poor, middle-class and rich
lived. She reluctantly enrolled in college for teaching, but dropped
out soon afterward and took a photography class at Columbia
University. At the age of twenty-three, Lange moved to San Francisco
where she started a successful portrait studio.
During the Great Depression, Lange was drawn to the plight of the
unemployed and homeless, venturing outside her studio to take her
first documentary photograph in 1934 of men in a soup line with
the caption White Angel Bread Line. In 1935 Lange was hired by the
Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration)
to document the conditions of the sharecroppers, migrant workers
and displaced farmers.
Lange’s best-known photograph, Migrant Mother, nearly did not
happen, as she had initially passed by the pea pickers in Nipomo,
CA but returned to photograph a woman with her children. Lange’s
photograph was published in the San Francisco News, bringing in
$200,000 in donations to help displaced farm workers in Nipomo.
Lange’s depression-era photographs were featured in exhibits,
newspapers, used in a report to the U.S. Senate, and to bolster
support for the establishment of migrant camps. She was the first
female awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography in 1941,
which she subsequently gave up after the attack on Pearl Harbor
to document the internment camps of Japanese Americans for the
Army.
Lange suffered from poor health the last several decades of her life.
Her final project was to design a one-woman show at the Museum
of Modern Art, which she completed before she died on October 11,
1965.
Annie Leibovitz
© Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz will receive the Dorothea Lange Living Legacy
Award for her accomplishments in photography.
Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, CT.
She began her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970,
while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her
pictures have appeared regularly on magazine covers ever since, and
her large and distinguished body of work encompasses some of the
most well-known portraits of our time.
Leibovitz’s first major assignment was for a cover story on John
Lennon. She became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973,
and by the time she left the magazine, she had shot one hundred
and forty-two covers and published photo essays on scores of
stories. In 1983, when she joined Vanity Fair, she was established as
the foremost rock music photographer and an astute documentarian
of the social landscape. She developed a large body of work—
portraits of actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, and
political and business figures, as well as fashion photographs—that
expanded her collective portrait of contemporary life.
Several collections of Leibovitz’s work have been published and
exhibitions of her work have appeared at museums and galleries
all over the world. Leibovitz is also the recipient of many honors.
In 2006 she was decorated a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts
et des Lettres by the French government. The previous year, in
a compilation of the forty top magazine covers of the past forty
years by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), she
held the top two spots. In 2009, she received the International
Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, ASME’s first
Creative Excellence Award, and the Centenary Medal of the Royal
Photographic Society in London. Leibovitz has been designated a
Living Legend by the Library of Congress.