Friday, April 28, 2000
Bishop Tutu next 'Freedom Conductor'
Will accept human rights award in August
By Mark Curnutte
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Tutu
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Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his efforts to achieve racial harmony in his native South Africa, will receive the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center's second human rights award.
Freedom Center officials announced the selection Thursday. Bishop Tutu will accept the International Freedom Conductor Award Aug. 5 during a ceremony at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center in Covington.
U.S. civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks was the award's first recipient in 1998.
“As South Africa tore off the burdensome shackles of apartheid, Desmond Tutu has been in the forefront of efforts to replace evil with goodness, hypocrisy with truth, violence with peace,” said federal Judge Nathaniel Jones, co-chairman of the center's board of trustees.
“He has conducted his countrymen along the rocky path to freedom and, in doing so, captured the imagination and respect of the world.”
Bishop Tutu, 69, is archbishop emeritus of the 2.5-million-member Diocese of Cape Town.
Installed in 1986 as the first black to lead the Anglican Church there, Bishop Tutu immersed the Episcopal Church in the political struggle to end racial oppression in his homeland.
His persistence and moral authority helped to move South Africa President F.W. de Klerk to issue a series of decisions that led to the dis solution of apartheid, the nation's officially sanctioned system of racial segregation.
He recently headed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to expunge the legacy of racial separation.
As the award was being announced in Cincinnati, Bishop Tutu completed a two-year stay as a visiting professor of theology at Emory University in Atlanta.
Ed Rigaud, the center's president and chief operating officer, said Mrs. Parks and Bishop Tutu — in accepting the award — give it and the center credibility.
Bishop Tutu visited Cincinnati in 1994 as part of an 18-day U.S. tour, asking companies to invest in the new South Africa. That plea came four years after he was here preaching economic sanctions and divestiture.
For ticket information, call 412-6912.
www.undergroundrailroad.com
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