Rights museum picks Gore, Nash for Freedom Awards

MEMPHIS — Former Vice President Al Gore and civil rights activist Diane Nash were named Tuesday as recipients of the National Civil Rights Museum's annual Freedom Awards.

They will receive the awards at a banquet in Memphis in October. The museum is built around the former Lorraine Motel where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

The museum said it chose Gore and Nash because of their "sacrifices, influence and awareness" in working for the common good.

Gore will be honored for helping raise the world's awareness of the dangers of man-made climate change, the museum said in an announcement. Nash will be recognized for her pioneering civil rights work in the 1960s.

Since losing the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, Gore has made combatting global warming his primary public focus. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for that work, and his documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award.

Nash was an organizer of protest sit-ins at all-white lunch counters in Nashville in the 1960s. She helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which played a major role in freedom rides, racially integrated bus trips through the South to challenge racial segregation.

Past recipients of the museum's Freedom Awards include Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Desmond Tutu and former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

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