President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Susan Rice,
receiving the prestigious Phoenix Award from the Congressional Black Caucus is
rich with irony.
“When
I was in high school, some 30 years ago, one of your most distinguished
predecessors, the great pioneer, Augustus Hawkins of California, gave me my
very first opportunity to serve in government,” says Rice, who received the
honor along with Wyclef Jean, actors Danny Glover, Cicely Tyson, Sheryl Lee
Ralph and Georgia state Rep. Calvin
Smyre, who is also the president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. “I had
the privilege of spending three summers working as an intern on [Smyre’s] house
education and labor committee and subcommittee on employment opportunities,
both of which he chaired so ably,” Rice added.
Wyclef
Jean, the Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and humanitarian, was recently
featured on the seminal news program “60 Minutes” for his almost superhuman,
one-man activist efforts in his impoverished home nation of Haiti.
Danny
Glover, who is most famous for his roles as Albert Johnson in The Color Purple and as Detective Roger
Murtaugh of the popular Lethal Weapon
franchise, has also achieved international recognition for his relentless activism in Africa. Glover first joined the efforts of the
Congressional Black Caucus in 1987, when the CBC was petitioning President Bush
to impose sanctions on South
Africa’s Apartheid government. Glover was able to play out this real-life fight on the big screen in
1989’s Lethal Weapon 2, whereby he
and actor Mel Gibson eventually toppled a corrupt cadre of businessmen from South Africa.
“We, African Americans, and our struggle for justice has been at the moral thinner of this nation’s composition,” Glover said. “We have given new and imaginative vision to this word ‘democracy,’ and how is it used not simply as a mechanism to vote but as a force that changes the material consequences of the millions of this planet’s citizens who live in abject poverty and structural inequity?”
For
Obama’s ambassador Rice, it was yet another CBC member, Georgetown professor Eleanor Holmes Norton,
who helped direct Rice’s career compass away from becoming just another lawyer into
something greater. “I was torn and I
turned to another member of the CBC for guidance. She challenged me to look
beyond the law,” Rice said. “She said ‘If you’re passionate about international
affairs you should go on and get your Ph.d. There are a lot of us who are
lawyers. There are very few of us who are in diplomacy and national security’.
Well, needless to say her advice proved pivotal and setting my career path.”
Obama,
who gave the keynote address at the star-studded event that attracted over 4,000
attendees, received the Phoenix award last year
as an Illinois
freshman senator and leading Democratic candidate for the presidency. Essence
editor emeritus Susan Taylor and actor Jeffrey Wright hosted this year’s event. The
awards are given for “efforts and accomplishments that have made significant
contributions to society, and symbolizing the immortality of the human spirit
and an eternal desire to reach its full potential.” – terry shrophire
