SIDNEY POITIER: Distinguished Gentleman

By Karu F. Daniels, AOL Black Voices

Sidney Poitier is among a group of internationally acclaimed leaders and achievers who will be honored for their lifetime accomplishments with the 28th Annual Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service on April 28, 2007. For a man who just celebrated his 80th birthday a few weeks ago, Sidney Poitier is having the best year ever.

And it's only late March.

Thanks --in a very large part -- to the very public admiration of media mogul Oprah Winfrey, the first black male Academy Award winner achieved a career first and landed on the top of the 'New York Times' bestseller's list with his seven year old inspirational memoir 'The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography.'

And it was just recently announced that the cinematic trailblazer is among a group of internationally acclaimed leaders and achievers who will be honored for their lifetime accomplishments with the 28th Annual Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service.

Veteran broadcast journalist Cokie Roberts, British novelist Ian McEwan, and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, and Poitier, will all receive a shared prize of $200,000 at the Common Wealth Awards ceremony April 28 at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware.

The Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service were first presented in 1979 by the Common Wealth Trust, created under the will of the late Ralph Hayes, an influential business executive and philanthropist. Hayes conceived the awards to reward and encourage the best of human performance worldwide. In their 28-year history, the Common Wealth Awards have conferred $4 million in prize money to 161 honorees of international renown. The awards are funded by the Common Wealth Trust.

Past winners include human rights leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former statesman Henry Kissinger and author Toni Morrison, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, children's television icon, the late Fred "Mister" Rogers, actress Meryl Streep; television journalist Walter Cronkite; and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.