National Humanities Medal

In December 2000, President Clinton awarded twelve Americans the National Humanities Medal for their outstanding efforts to deepen public awareness of the humanities.

Robert Bellah is a sociologist, philosopher, and interpreter of contemporary American society. In his book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Bellah compared how Americans believe they ought to live with how they actually conduct their lives. Beginning his career with a focus on Eastern religion and Far Eastern languages, Bellah taught Islamic studies at McGill University in Canada and at Harvard before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Bellah retired in 1997 and is Elliot Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Berkeley.

Will Davis Campbell is a Southern preacher whose ideas and actions crossed color lines during the Civil Rights movement. After being ordained in the Baptist church at the age of seventeen, Campbell went on to study at Yale Divinity School. During the 1950s and 60s, he was at the center of the Civil Rights movement, as a troubleshooter on race relations for the National Council of Churches and then as director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen. He helped escort nine African American students through mobs opposed to desegregation at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was the only white minister asked by Martin Luther King Jr. to attend the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Campbell is the author of sixteen books and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Tennessee American Civil Liberties Union.

Television producer Judy Crichton believes that "history is filled with magnificent stories," and as the founder of the American Experience series on PBS has worked to bring history to television. During her tenure with the series she produced the documentaries Andrew Carnegie: The Richest Man in the World, The Donner Party, and Lindbergh. She and the American Experience have won four George Foster Peabody awards, two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Journalism awards, and seven Emmys. Crichton's early television career took off when she became the first woman writer and producer for CBS Reports in 1974. She went on to become a writer and producer for ABC's Closeup documentary unit. She told NEH Chairman William R. Ferris, "Among the things I am most proud of is working on projects that had enough time to be achieve a piece of work in a thoughtful way."

David C. Driskell is an art collector, educator, and curator who has devoted himself to preserving cultural traditions by collecting African American art and artifacts from the era of slave ships to modern times. By buying and preserving pieces outside the "quality canon," Driskell has helped change art collecting trends in collections around the world. He was a teacher and curator at the University of Maryland for more than twenty years. He has curated numerous exhibitions, lectured throughout the country, and taught around the globe including Abafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Driskell is the recipient three Rockefeller Foundation fellowships.

The novels of Ernest J. Gaines evoke the essence of small-town southern Louisiana in the early part of the twentieth century. He is renowned for his tales about Bayonne, Louisiana, based on Pointe Coupee Parish, where Gaines spent his childhood and early adolescence. He gained fame for his book The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, based on a fictional, hundred-year-old former slave. His most recent work, A Lesson Before Dying, takes place in the 1940s, and depicts the struggle of an educated black man whose highest achievement is limited to being a school teacher. Gaines has been author-in-residence at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette since 1983.

As the director of the Guam Humanities Council since 1992, Herman T. Guerrero has worked to reclaim the islands' colonial history and the legacy of the Chamorro people. One of his and the council's efforts is the Genealogy Project, which is being conducted with the help of the University of Guam's Micronesian Area Research Center. Another project he helped create with the Northern Mariana Island Museum of History is called "Spain in the Marianas: First Contact and Aftermath." Guerrero says, "The humanities and humanities education allows the indigenous people of the Northern Mariana Island Archipelago a rediscovery and an affirmation of native identity."

Through a career that spans fifty years of arranging, writing, and performing American music, Quincy Jones has been a champion for African American artists and a voice for humanitarian causes. He has written scores for thirty-three motion pictures and co-produced the film version of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. "Everything starts with a story or a song," says Jones. "Once you have a great story, you look for the elements you need to make a piece of art." Jones has received twenty-six Grammy Awards and one Emmy, produced NetAid concerts, and founded Listen Up, which has brought youth from South Central Los Angeles to build houses in South Africa. Jones serves as a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Barbara Kingsolver sees literature as a way of spreading awareness of injustices in the world through the telling of a good story. Her 1998 novel, Poisonwood Bible, is the story of a missionary family caught in the turmoil of the Belgian Congo in 1959. On one level it is the story of the dissolution of a family, while on another it deals head-on with themes of colonialism, religion, and racism. Kingsolver's belief in the power of literature led her establish the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded biannually for a first novel that represents outstanding literary quality and a commitment to social change.

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison says "All my life I have been teaching books, writing books, or reading books." Her own novels tackle difficult subjects: in Beloved she tells the story of a runaway slave who chose to kill her own child instead of letting her spend a life in bondage; in The Bluest Eye she depicts a black adolescent impregnated by her father. Morrison has been inspired to write nonfiction about controversial subjects of our times especially when they broach issues of power, race, and gender, such the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clarence Thomas hearings. As the Robert F. Coheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, Morrison has taught students how to look beyond the surface for the true human story embedded in history.

Historian Edmund S. Morgan has written and edited eighteen books on the intellectual foundations of early American life. In his latest work, The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, Morgan says that the popular control of government is a largely fictional concept, but a belief essential to our system of government. At eighty-four, he is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. He also taught at the University of Chicago and Brown University before arriving at Yale in 1955. His topics of research have ranged from the Puritans in New England to the slave-owners in the colonial South. "In the end," Morgan says, "history can't get too far from questions of power, who has power and how they wield it."

Earl Shorris believes that understanding the words of Socrates and Plato helps the poor more than learning the skills for a technical job. As a result, in 1995 Shorris created a program of study known as the Clemente Course to bring the humanities to residents of impoverished inner-city neighborhoods. The program, run by Bard College in New York City, has spread to fourteen different courses-on political philosophy, American history, classics, and others--around the country. "The humanities have a great appeal to give people a sense of self, to see the world and themselves differently," he says.

For thirty years Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve has written children's books with the intention of dispelling stereotypes and negative images of American Indians. Her books include Jimmy Yellow Hawk, published in 1972, and more recently The Trickster and the Troll, which combines Lakota and Norwegian folklore. "I write from my own experience and about Native Americans I've known all my life," she says. Sneve is the daughter of an Episcopal priest and Lakota Sioux mother. She grew up on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota and was an English teacher and counselor in Rapid City public schools and at the Flandreau Indian School for forty years.