Ava DuVernay to Receive Freedom Award
Selma director Ava DuVernay has been a long standing supporter of civil rights in America and her efforts to uplift and inform the community are not going unnoticed. The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis has decided to honor DuVernay with the Freedom Award.
AL.com reports that she, in addition to activist and educator Ruby Bridges-Hall, and civil rights movement organizer and Freedom Rides participant Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, will receive the award at the ceremony taking place on October 22.
The National Civil Rights Museum has direct ties to the movement as it is built at the site of the old Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.
DuVernay is very much deserving of this prestigious honor as she directed and wrote the critically acclaimed Selma, which brings to light several key moments in the civil rights movement. Her fellow honorees' qualifications are also impressive with Mulholland being the first white person to integrate Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and helping to plan the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Brudges-Hall integrated a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 at just 6-years-old.
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Rewind! Watch Black Girls Rock: Ava DuVernay Paints Her Own Story in the video below.
