Norton to Accept Estelle Witherspoon Lifetime Achievement Award in Alabama for Work on Economic and Social Equality, Thursday
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congresswoman Norton will accept the Federation of Estelle Witherspoon Lifetime Achievement Award on Thursday, August 14, 2014 at 7:00 p.m. at the Birmingham Sheraton Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. Norton is being honored for her lifelong efforts to create and sustain equitable treatment for low-income people of color in the workplace and under the law. A reception honoring Norton will be held at the historic Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and will be followed by the 47th Anniversary Celebration and 13th Estelle Witherspoon Lifetime Achievement Award Dinner. The award is named for Estelle Witherspoon, civil rights activist, as well as founder of the Freedom Quilting Bee in Alabama, and celebrates individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of social and economic equality, justice, and civil rights. Before her congressional service, Norton participated in many aspects of the Civil Rights Movement. She was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to serve as the first woman to chair the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
"Through her quilting, Estelle Witherspoon started and continued a movement that brought people together not only to make a living, but to further the democratic ideals of the Civil Rights Movement," Norton said. "Civil rights was her passion, as it is mine. It will be a special honor to be recognized by an organization that continues to work for social and economic equity at the grassroots level, as Estelle Witherspoon did."
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, whose major job discrimination provision Norton enforced as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As a student, Norton worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to help organize the 1964 Freedom Summer and was on the staff of the 1963 March on Washington. As a young lawyer she helped write the brief for the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party that challenged the segregated Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention; and she ran the lobbying challenge to the traditional Mississippi Democratic delegation.
Norton recently visited Mississippi with other congressional leaders to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer.