Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman will be the recipient of The Oxford American’s inaugural award for Outstanding Contributions to Southern Culture at the magazine’s Best of the South Gala in Little Rock on April 3.
Freeman is an Academy Award-winning actor whose voice and presence has become ubiquitous in American culture. He spent his childhood in the Mississippi Delta, around Charleston and Greenwood, and he never forgot his roots there. Today he owns the Ground Zero Blues Club and Madidi restaurant in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he remains active in the community. He encouraged and financed the first integrated prom in Charleston in 2008, an event documented in the film, “Prom Night in Mississippi.”
Freeman was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2008, and in 2007 he won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
Freeman has been a leading Hollywood figure for the last three decades. But his life began in the South, and he embodies the very best of Southern culture.
“We are very pleased that Morgan Freeman will be the first recipient of this award, which we hope will create a long-standing pantheon of great Southern cultural figures,” said Warwick Sabin, the publisher of The Oxford American. “He was our first choice for this recognition, not only because of his remarkable career and accomplishments, but because he has remained involved with his community in Mississippi and has done so much to improve it.”
The Oxford American is a national magazine based on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas. The magazine is dedicated to featuring the very best in Southern writing while documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. The magazine’s presence on campus gives students an opportunity to have hands-on experience in producing a national publication. Founded in 1992, The Oxford American bills itself as “The Southern Magazine of Good Writing.” Recently, entertainment magazine Paste ranked The Oxford Magazine sixth on its list of 20 Best Magazines of the Decade.
