Two civil rights leaders with Vineyard ties are being honored with the National Civil Rights Museum’s annual Freedom Awards.

Oak Bluffs resident Charlayne Hunter-Gault is this year’s recipient of the international freedom award, while longtime seasonal visitor Robert Parris Moses will receive the national freedom award.

Hall of Fame baseball player Frank Robinson is receiving a lifetime achievement award from the museum.

The Freedom Award was established in 1991 by the National Civil Rights Museum, which is based in Memphis, Tenn. The award has served as a symbol of the ongoing fight for human rights, the museum said, and this year’s winners are examples of the theme “Breaking Barriers, Advancing Freedom.”

Ms. Hunter-Gault, who lives much of the year on the Vineyard, is an author and veteran journalist who has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times; she has also been a national correspondent for NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. the chief correspondent in Africa for National Public Radio and South Africa bureau chief for CNN. In 1961, she was one of the first two black students to enroll at the University of Georgia. In her book To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement, Ms. Hunter-Gault recounted the Civil Rights movement from 1959 to 1965.

“I wanted to help young people know where they came from,” Ms. Hunter-Gault told the Gazette in a 2012 interview. “I wanted them to know the courage that it took, the reasons students did what they did, the reasons they were willing to make sacrifices, and that in order to keep democracy true to it’s promise, you have to stay vigilant. That’s where young people of this generation come in.”

Mr. Moses is one of the most influential leaders in the Civil Rights movement. He helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, and was field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations during the Freedom Summer of 1964, when thousands of students went to Mississippi to engage in voter registration and shine light on the violence and hardship in that state. Mr. Moses participated in a panel discussion this summer in Oak Bluffs about the Freedom Summer.

In 1982, Mr. Moses received a MacArthur Genius Grant and started the Algebra Project, which teaches math skills to minority students. 


The Freedom Awards will be presented Dec. 2 at the Cannon Center for Performing Arts in Memphis.