Another posthumous honor went to civil rights leader Minoru Yasui, who challenged the constitutionality of a military curfew order during World War II on the grounds of racial discrimination and spent months in solitary confinement during the legal battle.
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Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg were among the 17 Americans honoured with the nation’s highest civilian award at The White House on Tuesday (24Nov15). “I’m getting all verklempt just thinking about it”, the president said, making a joke in Yiddish, and citing the Saturday Night Live skit “Coffee Talk”. He made his major-league debut with the then-New York Giants on May 25, 1951 – 19 days after he turned 20 and a little more than four years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Barbara Streisand along with baseball greats Willie Mays and Yogi Berra. Berra, who died in September, was a famed NY Yankees’ catcher, an 18-time All-Star and 10-time World Series champion.
Among them – singer and actress Barbra Streisand and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
The politicians bestowed the honor are Democrats: Sen.
Berra was a fine selection for the award considering he was a veteran of the United States Navy who served in World War II and took part of the D-Day invasion and stormed the beaches of Normandy.
Mays didn’t speak during the ceremonies, but the nation’s first black president recounted what he had said to Mays in an earlier conversation, that it is “because of giants like Mays, (that) someone like me could even think about running for president”.
Obama recounted how Grammy Award-winning Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan, and her producer/songwriter husband, Emilio Estefan, both honorees, first met. Obama said, Hamilton has “helped steer the course of American history in a spirit of bipartisanship, and he continues to strengthen the homeland and promote diplomacy”. He also helped arrange an agreement with the automobile industry to require catalytic converters to reduce automobile pollution.
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Johnson, the NASA mathematician, broke barriers of gender and race as she ascended to a position tracing the paths for early space flights, Obama said.
