WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama awarded the nation's highest civilian honor to 16 "agents of change" on Wednesday.
Film star Sidney Poitier, civil rights icon the Rev. Joseph Lowery and tennis legend Billie Jean King joined former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa in receiving the Medal of Freedom honor.
Another medal recipient, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., was at home battling brain cancer.
Obama gave posthumous honors to former Republican Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, and gay rights activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978.
The other recipients included Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure; Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., assistant dean of academic affairs at Florida International University School of Medicine; Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and mathematician; Joe Medicine Crow, the last living Plains Indian war chief; Chita Rivera, actor, singer and dancer; Mary Robinson, Ireland's first female president and one-time U.N. high commissioner for human rights; Dr. Janet Davison Rowley, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, and Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his global, pioneering work in "micro loan."
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