National Civil Rights Museum To Give Ava Duvernay Freedom Award

National Civil Rights Museum To Give Ava Duvernay Freedom Award

Sometimes we have to recognize our own instead of waiting for white folks (see, Oscars) to do it.

Via NYPost

“Selma” director Ava DuVernay will receive the Freedom Award handed out by the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

The museum says activist and educator Ruby Bridges-Hall and civil rights movement organizer and Freedom Rides participant Joan Trumpauer Mulholland also will receive the award in an Oct. 22 ceremony.

The museum is built at the site of the old Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.

DuVernay wrote and directed the film “Selma,” which depicts key moments in the civil rights movement. Mulholland is the first white to integrate Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and helped plan the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Ruby Bridges-Hall was 6 years old when she integrated a New Orleans elementary school in 1960.

Congrats, Ava!

Image via Getty