The Interfaith Center of New York is proud to announce this year’s honorees:
Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.
Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.
Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. These new national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.
Mr. Stevenson’s work has won him numerous awards including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Prize; the ABA Medal, the American Bar Association’s highest honor; the National Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union after he was nominated by United States Supreme Court Justice John Stevens; the Public Interest Lawyer of the Year by the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers; and the Olaf Palme Prize in Stockholm, Sweden for international human rights. In 2002, he received the Alabama State Bar Commissioners Award. In 2003, the SALT Human Rights Award was presented to Mr. Stevenson by the Society of American Law Teachers. In 2004, he received the Award for Courageous Advocacy from the American College of Trial Lawyers and also the Lawyer for the People Award from the National Lawyers Guild. In 2006 New York University presented Mr. Stevenson with its Distinguished Teaching Award. Mr. Stevenson won the Gruber Foundation International Justice Prize and was awarded the NAACP William Robert Ming Advocacy Award, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award and the Roosevelt Institute Franklin D. Roosevelt Freedom from Fear Award. In 2012, Mr. Stevenson received the American Psychiatric Association Human Rights Award, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Fred L. Shuttlesworth Award, and the Smithsonian Magazine American Ingenuity Award in Social Progress. Mr. Stevenson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2014 and won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. In 2015, he was named to the Time 100 recognizing the world’s most influential people. In 2016, he received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award. He was named in Fortune’s 2016 and 2017 World’s Greatest Leaders list. He received the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, from the King Center in Atlanta in 2018. In 2020, he received the Right Livelihood Award from The Right Livelihood Foundation in Sweden. In 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden.
Mr. Stevenson has received over 50 honorary doctoral degrees, including degrees from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Oxford University. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller,?Just Mercy, which was named by Time Magazine as one of the 10 Best Books of Nonfiction for 2014 and has been awarded several honors, including the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal for best nonfiction book of 2015 and a 2015 NAACP Image Award.?Just Mercy?was adapted as a major motion picture and the film won the American Bar Association’s 2020 Silver Gavel Award as well as four NAACP Image Awards. Mr. Stevenson is also the subject of the Emmy Award-winning HBO documentary?True Justice. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government.
The Honorable Jonathan Lippman served as Chief Judge of the State of New York and Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals from February 2009 through December 2015. During his tenure on the Court of Appeals, Chief Judge Lippman authored major decisions addressing constitutional, statutory and common law issues shaping the law of New York, the contours of state government, and the lives of all New Yorkers. Judge Lippman is now Of Counsel in the New York office of Latham & Watkins LLP.
As the state’s Chief Judge, he championed equal access to justice issues in New York and around the country and took the leadership role in identifying permanent funding streams for civil legal services. Chief Judge Lippman made New York the first state in the country to require 50 hours of law-related pro bono work prior to bar admission and established the Pro Bono Scholars and Poverty Justice Solutions Programs to help alleviate the crisis in civil legal services. He strengthened the state’s indigent criminal defense system, addressed the systemic causes of wrongful convictions, created Human Trafficking Courts across New York State, and led efforts to reform New York’s juvenile justice, bail and pre-trial justice systems.
From January 1996 to May 2007, Judge Lippman served as the longest-tenured Chief Administrative Judge in state history, playing a central role in many far-reaching reforms of New York’s judiciary and its legal profession. From May 2007 to 2009, Judge Lippman served as the Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, First Department, dramatically reducing the court’s pending backlogs. In 2008, Judge Lippman received the William H. Rehnquist Award for Judicial Excellence, presented each year by the nation’s Chief Justice to a state court judge who exemplifies the highest level of judicial excellence, integrity, fairness and professional ethics.
Judge Lippman was selected for his “unparalleled ability to promote and achieve reform in the state courts. His leadership in the New York courts contributed to numerous improvements in that state’s justice system and served as an example for courts across the country.” In 2013, the American Lawyer named Chief Judge Lippman one of the Top 50 Innovators in Big Law in the Last 50 Years. Upon Judge Lippman leaving his role as Chief Judge to join Latham and Watkins, the New York Times stated that Judge Lippman had left an altered legal profession in New York by using “his authority to promote an ideal of lawyering as a public service.”
Judge Lippman presently serves as the Chair of the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, a blue ribbon commission, formed to examine the future of the Riker’s Island jail facilities in the context of systemic criminal justice reform. The report of the Commission, under Judge Lippman’s leadership, played a pivotal role in the City Council passing landmark legislation to close the Rikers jail facilities by August, 2027. The Commission is now known as Rikers 2.0 and has a new mandate to provide an updated roadmap to close the Rikers jails at the earliest possible date.
Judge Lippman was appointed by Governor Hochul to review and investigate antisemitism and discrimination at the City University of New York. His report to the Governor last September is now used as a blueprint in New York and around the country to combat antisemitism and hate on college campuses in public and private universities.
Join us June 23Past Award Recipients
2024
His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis) of America, Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
Judy Collins, Singer, Songwriter, Social Activist
Faith Justice Hero Award:
Gambian Youth Organization
Synagogue Coalition on the Refugee and Immigration Crisis
2023
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah
Dr. Uma Mysorekar, F.A.C.O.G., President of the Hindu Temple Society of North America
Director Joshua Seftel and the creative team behind the Academy award nominee documentary short Stranger at the Gate
Faith Justice Hero Award:
Imam Omar Niass
Adama Bah
2022
Ruby Bridges, civil rights activist who established the Ruby Bridges Foundation, and recipient of the NAACP Martin Luther King Award (among others)
Amed Khan, human rights advocate, political activist, and philanthropist, founder of Elpida Home and president of Zaka Khan Foundation.
Faith Justice Hero Award:
Dr. Sarah Sayeed
2021
Dr. Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University and Founder of The Pluralism Project
Congresswoman Grace Meng, U.S. House of Representatives, 6th District of New York, and Sponsor of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act
Faith Justice Hero Award:
Vijah Ramjattan
Pandit Vyaas Sukul
2020
Anna Deavere Smith, Actress, Playwright, Teacher, and Author.
Marian Wright Edelman, Founder and President Emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)
Faith Justice Hero Award:
The Venerable Ming Yu
2019
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Sex Therapist, Media Personality, and Author
The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church
Faith Justice Hero Award:
Chaplain Imam Dr. Ahmed Atlig, Imam and Secretary-General of Journalists and Writers Foundation (JWF)
2018
Mary Jane Brock, ICNY’s first board chair in 2002 and vice-chair of the Big Apple Circus 1990-2015
Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations
Ryan Deitsch and Chris Grady, Parkland, Florida student activists
2017
Preet Bharara, former US attorney of the Southern District of New York
Ann Rockefeller Roberts, founder, and president of the Fund of the Four Directions, philanthropist, humanitarian, and best-selling author.
The Community of Sant’Egidio, a Roman Catholic movement of 60,000 lay people based on prayer, solidarity, ecumenicism, and dialogue
2015
Bob Abernethy, Executive Editor, and Host of PBS/Thirteen’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
Promise for the Future Award:
James Venturi, Urban Strategist
2014
The Honorable Al Gore, 45th Vice President of the United States, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Peter L. Zimroth, Senior Counsel, Arnold & Porter LLP; Director, Center on Civil Justice, NYU Law School
Mrs. Gaetana Enders, Humanitarian
His Holiness Sri Swami Satchidananda (posthumous), Interfaith Visionary; Founder, Integral Yoga International
2013
Rev. Dr. C. T. Vivian, Veteran Civil Rights Activist & Colleague of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bill Moyers, Host, PBS Bill Moyers Journal
Judith Moyers, CEO, Public Affairs Television
Russell Simmons, Chairman, Foundation for Ethnic Understanding
Sister Pat Farrell, OSF, Vice President, Sisters of St. Francis of Dubuque & Past President, Leadership Conference of Women Religious
2012
Leymah Gbowee, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Abigail Disney, Philanthropist and Filmmaker
2011
Wynton Marsalis, Composer and Musician
2010
Philip Glass, Composer and Musician
2009
Thomas Cahill, Author
The Hon. Judith S. Kaye, Chief Judge of the State of New York
2008
Dr. Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Foundation
Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, Rabbi of Jewish Community in the Hague and Dutch Interfaith Leader
His Holiness the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, Spiritual Leader of the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism
2007
Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, Environmental Human Rights Interfaith Leader
Rev. Kyotaro Deguchi, Japanese and Global Shinto Interfaith Leader
Nicholas D. Kristof, Pulitzer-Prize winning Op-Ed columnist and Global Human Rights Advocate
Steven Rockefeller, Educator and Global Environmentalist; creator of The Earth Charter
Carl Sagan, Posthumous award for pioneering work in astronomy, the environment, and interfaith activities
Paul Winter, Environmental Musician
2006
The Hon. Stephen Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the IAEA AND 2005 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Richard Gere, Human Rights Activist
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and his wife, Daisy Khan, Founders American Society for Muslim Advancement
Her Holiness Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma), Spiritual Leader and Humanitarian from southern India
2005
No award, instead there was a celebration of The Very Rev. James Parks Morton’s 75th birthday
2004
Santiago and Robertina Calatrava, Spanish Architect and his wife/administrator/lawyer
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Actors and Civil Rights Activists
Judge Shirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Muslim Judge, Human Rights Activist
Philippe Petit and his partner Kathy O’ Donnell, World Trade Center High Wire Walker
2003
Daniel and Nina Libeskind, Architects and Winners of the Master Plan Design for Ground Zero
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, former Archbishop of Southern Africa
2002
Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States of America
Alan Slifka, Interfaith Philanthropist
James Carroll, Author
1997
H. H. the Dalai Lama, 1989 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Mary Robinson, Former President of Ireland and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights
Ravi Shankar, Musician and Peace Activist
The James Parks Morton Interfaith Award is named in tribute of The Interfaith Center of New York’s founder the Very Rev. James Parks Morton and recognizes individuals or organizations that exemplify an outstanding commitment to promoting human development and peace — values shared by the world’s great religious traditions.
