What defines a living treasure?
In compiling this list, I settled on the following criteria. A living treasure is someone who has:
1) demonstrated a lifetime commitment to changing the world for the better;
2) reached a certain age and has been a positive force for several decades;
3) worked tirelessly to promote human rights, social change, and pacifism.
Using those criteria, here are my picks for the 8 Greatest Living American Treasures. The list is in no certain order, as the contributions of each of those listed is immeasurable. Who would you add?
1. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton. Before she added a powerful voice for women’s rights into the Supreme Court, she was the first female member of Harvard’s Law Review, the first female tenured professor at Columbia University, and won six landmark cases for gender equality while serving on the board of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.?As a Supreme Court Justice, Ginsburg has been a staunch advocate for gender equality, arguing in favor of laws around pay discrimination and reproductive rights for the past 20 years.
2. Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali, the Louisville Lip, The Champ, The Greatest. Ali won a gold medal in the Olympics in 1960 and the Heavyweight Championship against Sonny Liston in 1964. Ali fought a 1967 conviction for draft evasion after he refused the draft due to his religious beliefs, and the Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1971.
Ali regained his heavyweight title by defeating George Foreman in 1974. Since his retirement from boxing, Ali has been active in charity work and has been memorialized in his hometown of Louisville, KY at The Ali Center, which includes a museum devoted to Ali’s life and multicultural programming for youth and adult education, promoting Ali’s six core principles: confidence, conviction, dedication, giving, respect, and spirituality.
For his extensive domestic and international humanitarian work, Ali has earned awards such as The United Nations Messenger of Peace Award, The?Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the State of Kentucky’s Kentuckian of the Century Award.
3. Representative John Lewis
Born in Alabama in 1940, John Lewis attended segregated schools and lived the oppressive experience of Jim Crow Laws. Inspired by the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, Lewis began organizing at Fisk University in the 1960s. He volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides in 1961 and helped to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and served as its director soon after.
By 1963, he was considered one of the Big Six Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement?(John Lewis,Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, James L. Farmer, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King) and was a keynote speaker at the March on Washington at the age of 23. Leading over 600 protesters for voting rights into Selma, AL in 1965, Lewis was one of the many victims of police brutality during “Bloody Sunday,”?shortly after which the Voters Rights Act of 1965 was passed. Lewis was appointed by President Carter to direct the volunteer efforts of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency.
In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council and in 1986 to Congress as a Representative for Georgia. For his work in human rights activism and education, he’s earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the?Martin Luther King, Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize, and the only John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage Award” for Lifetime Achievement ever granted by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, as well as a 2014 American Library Association (ALA) Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor for his first book March: Book One.
4. Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter won election to the Georgia Senate in 1962 and became governor of Georgia in 1971. In 1976, Jimmy Carter became the 39th President of the United States. While president, Carter is known for accomplishments such as the Panama Canal Peace treaties, the peace treaties between Egypt and Israel, and promoting global human rights. His domestic policies advanced education, energy, environmental protections, communications, and technology.
He is the author of 28 books. Carter has continued his commitment to human rights activism, founding Habitat for Humanity and creating The Carter Center, an organization that joins with President Carter in global “efforts to resolve conflict, promote democracy, protect human rights, and prevent disease and other afflictions.” In 2002, President James Earl Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in advancing democracy, education, peace, and human rights across the world.
5. Alice Walker
The third Georgian on the list, Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta and Sarah Lawrence in New York City and graduated the same year she published her first short story, in 1965. “To Hell with Dying” was also featured in Langston Hughes’s 1967 anthology, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. Walker coined the term “womanism” in her 1983 work, “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden,” inspiring collective movement by longtime feminists of color to join and work separately from what they saw as white, middle-class, heteronormative feminism toward equality for all women.
After over a decade of writing poetry, short stories, and essays, it was Walker’s third novel, The Color Purple, that brought her into the national spotlight. She has taught African American Women’s Studies atWellesley, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Yale, Brandeis, and the University of California at Berkeley. She continues to work as a political activist for human and environmental rights and is still publishing amazing writing at the age of 70. She won a Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple in 1983 as well as the National Book Award, was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and was named “Humanist of the Year” by the American Humanist Association in 1997.
6. Temple Grandin
Grandin was born in 1947, when autism?was often misdiagnosed as brain damage. Grandin’s mother, Eustacia Cutler, refused doctor’s suggestions to have her institutionalized, choosing to take her to neurologists and to hire speech tutors, instead. As a result, Grandin later earned a degree in psychology in 1970, followed by a master’s and a Ph.D. in animal science.
Despite significant difficulties in social settings, Grandin spoke publicly about autism at the request of the Autism Society of America in 1980. She also works to improve conditions for animals at slaughterhouses across the country and is the inventor of numerous devices meant to create humane environments for those animals. Her work in both autism advocacy and animal rights has earned her The President’s Award from the National Institute of Animal Agriculture, the American Humane Associations’s National Humanitarian Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Center for Autism, and honorary doctorates from Duke, Arizona University, University of Illinois and many more.
7. Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, born in 1928 in Philadelphia, is a leading theoretical linguist, author, journalist, and political activist. His contributions to the field of linguistics is described as “similar to that of Charles Darwin on evolution and biology.” Chomsky is a staunch pacifist and free speech advocate and has continued to write and speak on foreign policy and other political issues throughout his long career.
While his views are often controversial, his achievements and contributions to society cannot be ignored. Chomsky has published?scores of books and articles on linguistics, news and media criticism, political science, psychology, and various other topics. He won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2011, the Ben Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, and holds dozens of honorary doctorates.
8. Elie Wiesel
Author of Night, the autobiography that details Wiesel’s lived experience in Auschwitz at the age of 15, brought to the world a firsthand account of the horrors of the Holocaust. His books Dawn and Day, along with that seminal work,?form a trilogy that look “closely at humankind’s destructive treatment of one another.” In additional to writing dozens of more books, Wiesel serves as a human rights activist, speaking out against injustices in such countries as Bosnia and Rwanda.
He was appointed Boston University’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the 1970s and is also on the faculty of religion and philosophy. President Carter appointed him Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust in 1978 and he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Additionally, he’s been awarded the Man of the Year award from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Light of Truth award from the International Campaign for Tibet, and countless other honors and distinctions.
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Carissa is a proud feminist and self-described nerdy chick and pop culture junkie. She graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Louisville and is currently completing her master’s degree. Her previous work experience is in social justice along with two full-time AmeriCorps terms as a language tutor for immigrant children. In her spare time, Carissa enjoys reading, heavy metal music, and being the Crazy Aunt to her nieces and nephews.
