At Du Bois awards, the stars aligned
When the stars come out, it is not always nighttime. Take, for instance, the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal ceremony on Wednesday afternoon at Sanders Theatre. The six medalists included a White House adviser (Valerie Jarrett), a playwright with a Pulitzer Prize (Tony Kushner), a U.S. representative called “the conscious of Congress” (John Lewis), an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Sonia Sotomayor), the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (David Stern), and a Hollywood director with three Oscars (Steven Spielberg). The medals, awarded since 2000, go to writers, artists, philanthropists, and others for outstanding contributions to African-American culture. Jarrett and Lewis did not attend because of this week’s shutdown crisis in Washington, D.C. “It’s one thing for our Republican friends to shut down the government,” mused Henry Louis Gates Jr., the event’s host and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. “It’s another to disrupt this...