National Underground Railroad Freedom Center announces 2025 International Freedom Conductor Awards

This spring, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center will bestow its highest honor to modern-day freedom heroes and equity advocates during their International Freedom Conductor Awards program, presented by Procter & Gamble. The program coincides with the Freedom Center’s 30th anniversary and will be a celebration of three decades of social justice education, advocacy and heroes who are leading the fight for justice today.

The Freedom Center’s International Freedom Conductor Awards will be presented during the honors program May 24 at the Aronoff Center. The program will feature live music performances and reflections from award honorees. Limited seats will be available, but the honors program will be taped live and rebroadcast nationally.

The International Freedom Conductor Award is the Freedom Center’s highest honor, awarded to recognize the contributions of contemporary individuals who, by their actions and personal examples, reflect the spirit and courageous actions of conductors on the historic Underground Railroad, the nation’s original social justice movement. Award recipients reflect positive impact on contemporary freedom issues and inspire others to act.

“Freedom calls to each of us. For generations, individuals have answered the call, risking their lives to light the way for the oppressed and the unfree. But as freedom conductors persist, so, too, do old systems and hardened hearts rise to challenge them,” said Woodrow Keown, Jr., president and COO of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. “Our International Freedom Conductors remind us that we are all worthy of being torchbearers and we must all answer the call to lead through the darkness, moving ever closer to the brilliant light of freedom.”

The 2025 International Freedom Conductor Award will be presented to:

Opal Lee, the Grandmother of Juneteenth

Opal Lee campaigned for decades to make Juneteenth a federal holiday – the date news reached Galveston, Texas that the Civil War was over and enslaved African Americans were now free on June 19, 1865. Each year, she walked 2.5 miles, representing the 2.5 years it took for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas. At the age of 89, she conducted a symbolic five-month walk from Fort Worth to Washington, DC. Largely through her efforts, Juneteenth was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden in 2024 and was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2022. She is just the second African American to have her portrait hung in the Texas State Senate.

Lonnie G. Bunch III – First African American Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
Lonnie G. Bunch III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, a position that oversees 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers and several education units and centers. Previously, Bunch was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. When he started as director in 2005, he had one staff member, no collections, no funding and no site for a museum. Driven by optimism, determination and a commitment to build “a place that would make America better,” Bunch transformed a vision into a bold reality. The museum has welcomed more than 11 million visitors since it opened in September 2016 and has compiled a collection of 40,000 objects that are housed in the first “green building” on the National Mall. In 2019, the creation of the museum became the first Smithsonian effort to be the topic of a Harvard Business Review case study.

Toni Morrison*, Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved
Toni Morrison was one of the most celebrated authors in the world. In addition to writing plays and children’s books, her novels earned her countless prestigious awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. As the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Morrison’s work has inspired a generation of writers to follow in her footsteps. Her award-winning novel Beloved is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner who, after escaping enslavement in Northern Kentucky, crossed the Ohio River in Cincinnati with her young children. Pursued by slave catchers, Garner killed one of her children before capture, an act of love to spare her child from enslavement, a fate worse than death.

Isabel Wilkerson – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author
Isabel Wilkerson, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country and our current era of upheaval. Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality. Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won multiple awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities.

 

*Awarded posthumously.

 

The 2025 honorees will join a legacy of International Freedom Conductors that includes:

• Rosa Parks, 1998
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 2000
• Dorothy Height and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, 2003
• President George H.W. Bush, 2007
• President Bill Clinton, 2007
• His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, 2010
• Fred Shuttlesworth, 2013
• Nicholas Kristof, 2013
• Lech Walesa, 2014
• Nelson Mandela, 2014
• Nathaniel R. Jones, 2016
• Amal Clooney, 2021
• George Clooney, 2021
• Congressman John Lewis, 2021
• Bryan Stevenson, 2021

Tickets for the 2025 International Freedom Conductor Awards will go on sale April 11. For more information visit freedomcenter.org/ifca25.

Rare Toni Morrison short story, Recitatif to be released as a book on Feb. 1, 2022

On February 1, 2022 "Recitatif," written by Morrison in the early 1980s and rarely seen over the following decades will be released as a book.

In this 1983 short story--the only short story Morrison ever wrote--we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.

Another work of genius by this masterly writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?

A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.

PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY OF RECITATIF

Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison dies at 88

Toni Morrison, the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is gone. But her unique voice – earthy, poetic, powerful, elliptical – endures in novels like "Beloved, "Song of Solomon," "Sula" and "The Bluest Eye."

She died Monday at age 88 in New York following a short illness, according to her family and publisher.

The Morrison family issued this statement via Morrison's publisher: “It is with profound sadness we share that, following a short illness, our adored mother and grandmother, Toni Morrison, passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends. She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing. Although her passing represents a tremendous loss, we are grateful she had a long, well lived life."

The family continued: "While we would like to thank everyone who knew and loved her, personally or through her work, for their support at this difficult time, we ask for privacy as we mourn this loss to our family. We will share information in the near future about how we will celebrate Toni’s incredible life.”

Morrison won a Pulitzer, the Nobel Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Read more: Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner, author of 'Beloved,' dies at 88

Book of the week: The Origin of Others (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) by Toni Morrison

America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison’s fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books―Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.

If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.

Check out the book.

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