Freedom award for Bono
U2 frontman Bono and a civil rights leader from Georgia have received awards from America’s National Civil Rights Museum, at the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Irishman Bono was given the international Freedom Award for promoting greater Western involvement in improving medical care and reducing poverty in Africa.
Bono said in a speech to 3,500 school pupils before the ceremony that the kind of energy young people brought to the civil rights movement was needed in the fight against Aids.
“What are the blind spots of our age, of these times? What might you help the rest of us to see?” he said. “It might be something as simple as the idea that every human life, no matter where they live, has equal worth.”
Georgia Democratic Rep John Lewis was the national award winner for his civil rights work in the 1960s. Lewis was jailed during a protest at a whites-only lunch counter in Nashville, Tennessee in 1960 and joined the marches and voter registration drives aimed at breaking racial segregation in the south.
The National Civil Rights Museum opened in 1991 at the former Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was shot in 1968 while leading a strike by city sanitation workers.
Past Freedom Award recipients include King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, former South African president Nelson Mandela, US secretary of state Colin Powell and former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
