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Mercedes Ellington, third from left, received Equity’s Paul Robeson Award. Also present at the presentation were, from left, Phoebe Jacobs, Julai Breanetta Simpson, Andre De Shields and Ellington’s mother, Ruth Batts (seated). |
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Dancer, director and choreographer Mercedes Ellington received Actors’ Equity’s 2007 Paul Robeson Award for her commitment to workers and human rights.
Julia Breanetta Simpson, co-chair of Equity’s Eastern Region Equal Employment Opportunity Committee, says:
Mercedes Ellington personifies each of the precepts on which the Paul Robeson Award is based: concern for and service to fellow humans, respect for the dignity of the individual, freedom of expression, universal brotherhood and the artist’s responsibility to the profession and to the greater society.
Ellington has been involved in more than 10 Broadway shows and has formed her own tap dance company. She was the only woman of color to become a June Taylor Dancer on the Jackie Gleason Show, which ran on national TV from 1952 to 1970.
WIN Week In Review November 23-25, 2007
By Doug Cunningham
Catholic Charities’ Candy Hill says her group has launched a campaign to cut poverty in half by 2020.
[Hill]: “What we see happening in our agencies are more and more people, particularly working people, who are coming to our doors. And they’re hungry and they don’t have places to live or they need utility assistance. And it’s more than we’ve seen in many, many years in our agencies.”
As a country, Hill says, we’ve made economic policy choices that have created an entire class of poor working families. Hill says it’s both a crisis and a moral failure of government, and the fault doesn’t lie only with the Bush administration.
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