DREDF is proud to establish the John R. Lewis Intersectionality Award. Mr. Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement has continually recognized that the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as disability, race, class, and gender create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. In speaking up against an amendment to the ADA which proposed to bar people with HIV from working in the food industry and which threatened to gut the ADA, Mr. Lewis stated “Listen to the health experts, not the hate experts, not the fear experts. Discrimination was wrong in 1964, discrimination was wrong in 1965, discrimination was wrong in 1968 and discrimination is wrong now.” We honor Mr. Lewis’ long standing recognition of the similarities between race and disability discrimination, his knowledge that socially disadvantaged categories often exist in the same person and his life long commitment to put himself on the line to fight injustice.