For Immediate Release
Contact: Robert Mitchell, rpm.cambridge@gmail.com 617-780-9465
Sept. 23, 2024
Spike Lee, LeVar Burton, Ice T
Among Recipients of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center forAfrican & African American Research’s W. E. B. Du Bois Medals
Sept. 23, 2024 Cambridge, Mass. AcademyAward winner, filmmaker, writer and producer Spike Lee; Emmy and Peabody award winning actor, director and television host LeVar Burton; and GrammyAward-winning hip-hop legend, actor and producer Ice T are among the honorees to receive the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal at the ninth Hutchins Center Honors presented by the Hutchins Center for African & AfricanAmerican Research at Harvard University. Recipients will also include legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director of African American Policy Forum; renowned former (1982-2022) Harvard University women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith; Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden; Colombia Vice President Francia Márquez Mina; andAfrican technology entrepreneur and philanthropist Strive Masiyiwa.
The medal honors those who have made significant contributions toAfrican andAfricanAmerican history and culture. The ceremony, originally scheduled for October 2023, will take place on Tues., Oct. 1, 2024, 5 p.m. in Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, 45 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center, said, “The Hutchins Center recognizes the contributions of these eight Du Bois Medalists whose genius is evident not only in their respective fields but also in their unwavering commitments to combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia, to protecting the freedom of thought and expression, and to celebrating the rich history and cultures of people of African descent throughout our rich diaspora.”
Glenn H. Hutchins, co-founder of North Island and chairman of the National Advisory Board of the Hutchins Center, said, “We honor an extraordinary group of individuals whose accomplishments have created new standards in academia, education, sports, the arts, entertainment, and business. In addition to celebrating their achievements, our awards ceremony seeks to share their example with the many students who are able to join us, plus the broader community, and beyond.
This is a group that inspires us all to persist in our work of bending the arc of history toward justice.”
LeVar Burton, burst onto the scene in 1977 with his groundbreaking role as Kunta Kente inAlex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, theABCTV mini-series that broke all audience ratings. Other notable roles include Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Martin Luther King Jr. in Ali, Cap Jackson in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Tommy Price in The Hunter, for which he was awarded an NAACP Image Award for OutstandingActor in a Motion Picture. In addition, for 23 years, he was host of the PBS Kids series Reading Rainbow for which he received 12 Daytime EmmyAwards and a PeabodyAward.
Other accolades for Burton include a GrammyAward for Best Spoken Word Album for his narration of the book The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., and in 1990 he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is an alumnus of the University of Southern California.
Regarding his appearance on Finding Your Roots with Gates, Burton posted on Facebook, “Y’all, I’m SO excited…The day we shot the episode, back in 2022, was one of the most profound days of my life!”
Law school professor and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw, an inductee into the 2024 National Women’s Hall of Fame, is a leader in the study of critical race theory and is noted for having developed and introduced the concept of intersectionality, “a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice,” according to her Columbia University biography.At Columbia, her courses have focused on issues related to social justice and human rights; family, gender and sexuality; feminism and law; and intersectionality.
Crenshaw is also Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, LosAngeles. She has written numerous books, including #SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of State Violence and Public Silence (2023, foreword by Janelle Monáe), The Race Track: Understanding and Challenging Structural Racism, Reaffirming Racism: The Faulty Logic of Colorblindness, Remedy and Diversity, and Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color.
Crenshaw has received several honors and awards, including election to the AmericanAcademy of Arts & Sciences; the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Service Award from theAssociation of American Law Schools; and the No. 1 Most Inspiring Feminist by Ms Magazine. She holds an LL.M degree from the University of Wisconsin, J.D. from Harvard Law School, and B.A. from Cornell.
Kathy Delaney-Smith is the winningest coach of any sport in the history of the Ivy League. For the past five decades, she has shown an unwavering
commitment to gender equity and Title IX activism. Fueled by her belief that sports can be a powerful classroom, she is passionate about teaching, training, inspiring, and empowering young women to lead. She is a graduate of Bridgewater State University.
In 2022 Delaney-Smith marked her 40th and final season as the head coach of Harvard Women’s Basketball. She holds one of the longest coaching tenures in the history of Division I basketball. She has won 11 Ivy League titles, had several post-season tournament appearances, and she also won three gold medals competing with USABasketball in Croatia, Turkey, and Brazil.
Delaney-Smith was part of the inaugural class inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame in October 2003. She has received many honors, including the Gilda Radner Award for demonstrating hope and determination in facing cancer, and the WBCA’s Carol EckmanAward for her exceptional sportsmanship, commitment to student-athletes, honesty, ethics, and courage. Further, she serves on the Board of Directors for Shooting Touch, a global sportfor-development organization whose mission is to use the mobilizing power of basketball to bridge health and opportunity gaps for youth and women facing racial, gender, and economic inequalities. She is writing a leadership memoir intended to empower others with her message and call-to-action for equity.
Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of the renowned Studio Museum in Harlem, devoted to visual art by artists of African descent. Golden’s curatorial and museum work in the visual arts is long and deep. While in high school, she trained as a curatorial apprentice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Following her first curatorial position in 1987 at the Studio Museum, she went on to the Whitney Museum of AmericanArt in New York. There, she helped organize the museum’s 1993 biennial, and was director of the Whitney “outpost” midtown Manhattan center. She also curated the landmark Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, featuring works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe and Glenn Ligon, among others. Golden returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, before becoming director in 2005.
Golden holds a B.A. degree inArt History andAfricanAmerican Studies from Smith College. She also has honorary degrees from City College of New York, San FranciscoArt Institute, Smith College, and Moore College of Art and Design. She serves on the Boards of Directors for the Barack Obama Foundation and the LosAngeles County Museum of Art. She was a 2008 Henry Crown Fellow at theAspen Institute, received theAudrey Irmas Award for
Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and was appointed as a Ford FoundationArt of Change Visiting Fellow in 2015.
Since the early 1980s, Ice T (b.1958, Newark, N.J.), now the longestrunning male actor in a TV series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, has been a critical influence on the evolution of hiphop culture as a GrammyAward-winning musician, one of the original pioneers of gangster rap, a record label founder, actor, and a host and producer for several TV shows and documentary films. Known as a cultural icon and consummate storyteller, Ice T’s first song, “6 in the Mornin”, is widely considered a defining track of the gangster rap subgenre, initially called reality rap.
Ice T’s music, free speech, and social justice advocacy work made him a controversial figure early in his career and the ire of politicians and conservative groups. He has debated and lectured about music and censorship and paved the way for several artists such as NWA, Dr. Dre, and Snoop. Ice T released eight solo rap albums, and his nine metal albums with Body Count sold over eight million copies worldwide.
In 2018, Body Count released the LP Bloodlust, which garnered a 2018 Grammy nomination for “Black Hoodie.” In 2020, Body Count released Carnivore, which won a Grammy in 2021 for “Bum Rush,” 30 years after Ice T’s first Grammy win. Ice T was the voice of NBC’s 2022 Super Bowl and NFC promos. He is currently filming his 26th season of Law & Order: SVU and recording the next Body Count LP, Merciless. On Feb. 16, 2023, Ice T received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Spike Lee burst onto the international scene with his 1986 groundbreaking film She’s Gotta Have It. He has produced, directed, written and/or starred in numerous films produced by his production company, 40Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Most notable among the long list are Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, and 4 Little Girls, all of which, along with She’s Gotta Have It, have been included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Working with noted actors such as Denzel Washington, Rosie Perez, Laurence Fishburne and Samuel L. Jackson, Lee has tackled difficult issues related to the Black experience and race relations.
Among his numerous honors and awards, Lee received the 2019Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for BlacKKKlansman. Lee is a tenured professor at New York University’s Tisch School of theArts Graduate Film Program where he is alsoArtistic Director. He has also taught film at Harvard. He earned an MFAdegree from NYU and a bachelor’s from Morehouse College.
Lawyer, environmental and human rights activist Francia Márquez
Mina is Colombia's first Black vice president. She is also the country’s Minister of Equality and Equal Opportunity. Known for her committed environmental activism, she worked to stop illegal gold mining for its devastating impacts on indigenous communities, for which she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. In protest of the illegal mining, she mobilized the women of her home region to march 350 miles to the halls of congress in Bogotá, resulting in the abolishment of illegal mining the country. Calling her a “climate hero”, One Earth declared, “She dreams that one day, human beings will change the economic model of death to build a model that guarantees life, and women will lead the way.” The New York Times said, “Ms. Márquez’s biting analysis of social disparities cracked open a discussion about race and class in a manner rarely heard in the country’s powerful political circles.”
From her early years as a housekeeper, Márquez Mina later earned an LL.B. from Santiago de Cali University. Overcoming both racist tropes and assassination attempts, she is, according to the Times, the “champion” for “a segment of Colombians who are clamoring for change and for more diverse representation.”
ApioneeringAfrican entrepreneur and philanthropist, Strive Masiyiwa is Founder and Chairman of Econet Group and Cassava Technologies, pan-African and global companies empoweringAfricans with technology, digital tools, and connectivity for economic prosperity. His businesses and investments also span Europe, India, the Middle East, the UK, and the USA.
An International Honorary Member of theAmericanAcademy of Arts & Sciences, Masiyiwa currently serves on the boards of Netflix Inc., Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and National Geographic Society, and previously The Rockefeller Foundation, Unilever Plc, and Morehouse College, among others.
Born in Zimbabwe and now living in the UK, Masiyiwa is also known for philanthropy. Giving Pledge signatories, he and his wife Tsitsi co-founded Higherlife Foundation in 1996. The family’s social impact philanthropies have supported over 300,000African youth scholarships and continue transforming lives acrossAfrica.
Masiyiwa has led battles against major public health crises inAfrica, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, malnutrition, and COVID-19, serving as African Union Special Envoy for COVID Response for two years. In recognition of his African food security efforts as Chairman of theAlliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, he received the prestigious Norman E. Borlaug World Food Prize Medallion. Masiyiwa holds a BSc in Engineering from Cardiff University and
honorary doctorates from his alma mater as well as Yale, Morehouse College, and Nelson Mandela University.
In addition to these recipients, at an earlier ceremony, Kenneth E. Reeves and Linda Sowell Jackson, founders of Harvard’s Kuumba Singers, were awarded Du Bois Medals, marking the 50th anniversary of the singing group.
Tickets to the Hutchins Center Honors: Free tickets (2 per person) will be available through the Harvard Box Office on Fri. Sept. 20, at noon. More information is available at the Harvard Box Office website (boxoffice.harvard.edu).
Note to media: Media passes to the ceremony will be available beginning at 4 p.m. on Oct. 1 in the lobby outside Sanders Theatre. Media members must enter the Memorial Hall door from the circular drive on Kirkland St.