WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to 16 “agents of change” on Wednesday, highlighting their accomplishments as examples of the heights a person can reach and the difference they can make in the lives of others.
“What unites them is a belief . . . that our lives are what we make of them, that no barriers of race, gender or physical infirmity can restrain the human spirit, and that the truest test of a person’s life is what we do for one another,” Obama said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, filled with guests.
Film star Sidney Poitier, civil-rights icon the Rev. Joseph Lowery and tennis legend Billie Jean King joined former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa in receiving the honor, the first such medals awarded by Obama.
Another recipient, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., was at home battling brain cancer and mourning the death Tuesday of his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver. His daughter, Kara, accepted the award for him.
Obama gave posthumous honors to former Republican Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, the quarterback-turned-politician who died in May, and gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, assassinated in 1978.
The other recipients:
• Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast-cancer grassroots organization.
• Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., founder of the Camillus Health Concern in Florida, which treats thousands of homeless patients annually.
• Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and mathematician known for his work on black holes and his best-selling 1988 book “A Brief History of Time.”
• Joe Medicine Crow, the last living Plains Indian war chief, who fought in World War II wearing war paint beneath his uniform.
• Chita Rivera, actor, singer, dancer and winner of two Tony awards.
• Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president and one-time U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
• Dr. Janet Davison Rowley, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.
• Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, for his work extending “micro loans” to poor people who don’t have collateral.
There was no time allotted for the recipients to speak, but that didn’t stop Medicine Crow. Passing the microphone on his way back to his seat, he declared, “I’m highly honored.”
Lowery wiped away tears after he sat back down.
