The Human and Civil Rights Awards are the NEA’s highest honor. Once a year, at a gala held alongside the Representative Assembly, the honorees walk on stage in front of a few thousand educators. Before each of them does, the room goes dark and a film plays. This year the assembly was in Denver, and the films were ours.
Making those films is a particular kind of assignment. You get a few minutes per honoree, sometimes less. You are often meeting someone for the first time on the morning you film them, in a school hallway or a church basement or the front room of a legal aid office, and you have one day. And the audience is not a jury that needs convincing. They already voted. Your job is to make a room of strangers feel their why.
Nobody in these films set out to be honored. They set out to fix something in front of them, and then they kept going.
Sixty years of a tradition that was inherited, not invented
The awards are older than they look, and they exist because of school desegregation. In 1966 the NEA merged with the American Teachers Association, the organization that represented Black educators in the segregated schools of the South. That merger was one of the long consequences of Brown v. Board of Education: as the dual school systems came down, the dual teacher organizations had to come together too. The process was not clean. Thousands of Black teachers and principals lost their jobs in the desegregation years, which is why one of these awards is named for Rosena J. Willis, a displaced Black teacher.
ATA brought a tradition into the merger. Every year it had honored leaders of the justice and civil rights movement at an awards dinner, and the NEA agreed to keep it going. The first Human and Civil Rights Awards were given in 1967. Two categories still carry ATA names: H. Councill Trenholm, who led the association for twenty-one years, and Carter G. Woodson, who founded the organization behind Black History Month. The 2026 gala was the fifty-ninth.
The NEA and ATA merger, and the birth of the Human and Civil Rights Awards.
1966
NEA and the American Teachers Association merge after desegregation
1967
First Human and Civil Rights Awards given
59th
Annual awards, held in Denver in 2026
16
Named awards in the program, 10 of them presented this year
Fourteen of those awards are open for nomination each year, from the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award to the SuAnne Big Crow Memorial Award for students under twenty. Two more sit outside that list: the Acción y Compromiso award and the President’s Award, which the NEA president gives at their own discretion. No category is filled on schedule. They are given when someone earns them, which is why the number changes year to year. In 2026, ten were presented.
What the work actually looks like
Small crews. One or two of us, occasionally a local camera operator with us on a video call while we direct from a laptop. We have found that the fewer people in the room, the faster somebody tells you the true version of the story instead of the press release version.
We also film the community before we film the honoree. The pantry, the classroom, the courthouse hallway, the line outside the clinic. By the time we sit down for the interview, the person already knows we have seen what they built, and the conversation starts about three questions deeper than it otherwise would.
Then there is the map. A cycle like this one has us covering as many as fourteen states at the same time, each of them at a different stage: scouting and pre-production in one, filming in the next, a rough cut due in a third, color and mix on a fourth. First call to final delivery is often under eight weeks for the whole slate. It only works because the planning is finished before anyone gets on a plane.
All ten of this year’s films are in the carousel below, and each one is about three minutes long. A recurring problem with this kind of film is the subject who does not want to be the subject. It happened repeatedly this year. The answer is usually to let them be right. Make the film about the movement and let the person stand inside it. The honor still lands, and it lands truer.
59th annual · 2026 recipients
This year’s awardees
01 / 10
Education Minnesota
Minnesota
NEA President’s Award for Human and Civil Rights
Honored for standing with immigrant students and families during federal enforcement actions in Minnesota: safety patrols near schools, food and transportation for families, expanded virtual learning, and a federal lawsuit to keep enforcement off school grounds.
02 / 10
Vital Immigrant Defense Advocacy and Services
Santa Rosa, California
Rosa Parks Memorial Award
VIDAS provides immigration legal representation and deportation defense to low-income immigrant communities in Sonoma County, often for families with nowhere else to turn.
03 / 10
The Fairness Campaign
Louisville, Kentucky
Virginia Uribe Award for Creative Leadership in Human Rights
Kentucky’s oldest LGBTQ+ rights organization, which won the state’s first local anti-discrimination ordinance twenty-five years ago and has been the template for every fairness ordinance passed there since.
04 / 10
Emanuel “Dupree” Jackson, Jr.
Delray Beach, Florida
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award
Founder of the EJS Project, which has reached roughly five thousand teenagers with tutoring, mental health workshops, leadership training and career preparation.
05 / 10
Brian Whitecalf
Grand Island, Nebraska
Reg Weaver Human and Civil Rights Award
An educator who builds community service projects around students with disabilities and runs a school pantry so that his students and their families have reliable access to meals and essentials.
06 / 10
Dr. O’Nae Chatman
Mississippi
H. Councill Trenholm Memorial Award
Author, speaker and educational consultant who mentors young people and teaches the life skills that make academic success possible, in schools and communities across the country.
07 / 10
HOPE-Esperanza
Lincoln County, Nebraska
George I. Sánchez Memorial Award
A rural organization helping marginalized families reach essential services and build self-sustaining households, through food distribution, health initiatives and advocacy.
08 / 10
Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement
Nebraska and southwest Iowa
César Chávez Acción y Compromiso Human and Civil Rights Award
CIRA provides legal and social services to immigrants and refugees, including defending workers’ rights during immigration enforcement operations at Nebraska worksites.
09 / 10
Nebraska Urban Indian Health Coalition
Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska
Leo Reano Memorial Award
Culturally responsive health care for urban Native communities, including safe spaces where people can process grief and trauma together.
10 / 10
Girls Inc.
New York
Mary Hatwood Futrell Award
Mentoring and programming that equips girls to navigate trauma and toxic stress, mental health, bullying, healthy relationships, financial literacy and civic life.
Click a film to play. Drag, scroll or use the arrows to move through them.
What’s our why
Awards films have a reputation for being throwaway work. Three minutes, plays once, lights up, dinner is served. We do not think that is what happens in that room. For most of these honorees it is the only film that will ever be made about what they did, and it outlives the night. It goes on their site, into their grant applications, in front of their boards, and eventually in front of the next person who is deciding whether to start something.
Our hope for each of these films goes past the honoree. Support them, yes. But we are also hoping that somebody in that room, or somebody who finds the film later, watches a school pantry or a legal clinic or a Kentucky ordinance come together and thinks: I could start that here. That is the point of putting a light on people like this. One person acts, the people around them act, and it keeps going outward. Ripples of change moving across the country, one community at a time.
Which is a fairly good description of why we do any of this. The longer answer is in the first of these Field Notes.
None of this is our torch. It was lit in 1967 by educators who had spent their careers in schools the law kept separate, and it has been carried forward every summer since, through fifty-nine years of people who decided that something in front of them had to change. We get to carry it for about three minutes at a time, in a dark room, right before the lights come up and the next hero walks on stage. It is the best job we have.
We write these between films. If you want the next one, the sign-up is just below.