Denzel Washington received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden during a January 4 ceremony at the White House, where he was described as a generational talent and national role model.

“The admiration of audiences and peers is only exceeded by that of the countless young people he inspires,” the White House citation read. “With unmatched dignity, extraordinary talent, and unflinching faith in God and family, Denzel Washington is a defining character of the American story.”

Washington was one of 19 “truly extraordinary people” Biden recognized for “their sacred effort to shape the culture and the cause of America.” World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and primatologist Jane Goodall were among the other honorees.

The award was a year and a half in the making for Washington, whose many honors include two Academy Awards, a Tony Award, two Golden Globes, and the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award. He had been slated to receive the medal from Biden in July 2022, but a case of COVID-19 kept him from attending the ceremony that year.

This year’s honor comes on the heels of his starring role in the film Gladiator II, and as he prepares to return to Broadway to star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in a revival of Shakespeare’s Othello. Performances are scheduled to begin on February 24 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Washington last played Shakespeare’s “noble Moor” five decades ago, as a Fordham senior. He starred in a March 1977 production of the play at the University’s Lincoln Center campus, about a dozen blocks north of where he’ll reprise the role next month.

Fordham Roots—and a Legacy of Giving Back

Washington grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, not far from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. He has often said that he “kind of backed into” acting—and fell in love with it—during his time at the University.

One of the first people on campus to recognize Washington’s potential was English professor Robert Stone. Decades earlier, he had acted with the legendary Paul Robeson in a Broadway production of Othello.

“Denzel gave the best performance of Othello I’d ever seen,” Stone told Fordham Magazine in 1990, referring to the 1977 Fordham production. “He has something which even Robeson didn’t have … not only beauty but love, hatred, majesty, violence.”

Since his college days, Washington has become a Hollywood and Broadway legend, deeply respected not only as an actor but also as a producer and director.

No matter how many accolades he amasses, however, he makes time to give back: For more than 25 years, he’s served as national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. And he gives to the Fordham community. In 2011, he made a $2 million gift to endow the Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre and a $250,000 gift to establish the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship for an undergraduate student studying theatre at Fordham.

Through the chair, scholarship, and campus visits, Washington has been a mentor to young Fordham artists.

Eric Lawrence Taylor, FCLC ’18, a former recipient of the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship, described the actor’s subtle mentoring style best in a 2018 interview: “In a very cool, non-publicity-seeking way, Denzel Washington has been mentoring artists of color for a long time,” he said, “and really providing space for a lot of us to succeed.”

VIDEO: Watch Denzel Washington Receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Fordham’s 6 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients

The Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—is presented to individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, to world peace, or to other significant societal, public, or private endeavors.

Washington is now the sixth Fordham graduate to receive the medal since 1963, when it was established by President John F. Kennedy. Here are Fordham’s other honorees:

Cardinal Terence Cooke: A New York City native, Cooke was ordained a Catholic priest in 1945 by Fordham graduate Cardinal Francis Spellman, archbishop of New York. He taught at the University’s Graduate School of Social Service during the 1950s and earned a master’s degree from Fordham in 1957. After Cardinal Spellman’s death in 1968, Cooke was named archbishop of New York and, later, military vicar to the U.S. armed forces.

President Ronald Reagan honored him posthumously in April 1984, six months after Cardinal Cooke died of leukemia at age 62, calling him a “man of compassion, courage, and personal holiness.”

Sister M. Isolina Ferré: Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1914, the youngest daughter of one of the island’s wealthiest families, Ferré entered the Missionary Servants of the Holy Trinity in 1935. In the 1950s, her work as a nun brought her to New York. She earned a master’s degree in sociology from Fordham in 1961 while gaining national recognition for her work with Puerto Rican youth gangs in Brooklyn. She later established community aid centers in Ponce, and in 1988 founded Trinity College of Puerto Rico, a school that provides leadership and vocational training.

President
 Bill Clinton honored her in August 1999, praising her ability to combine “her deep religious faith with her compassionate and creative advocacy for the disadvantaged.”

Irving R. Kaufman: A 1931 Fordham Law School graduate, Kaufman is perhaps best known as the federal judge who sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death on April 5, 1951. But he also ruled in some landmark First Amendment, antitrust, and civil rights cases during four decades on the bench.

When he died in 1992 at age 81,
 The New York Times wrote, “It was Judge Kaufman’s hope that he would 
be remembered for his role not in the Rosenberg case, the espionage trial of the century, but as the judge whose order was the first to desegregate a public school 
in the North, who was instrumental 
in streamlining court procedures, who rendered innovative decisions in antitrust law and, most of all, whose rulings expanded the freedom of the press.”

President Ronald Reagan honored Kaufman in 1987 for his “exemplary service to our country” and “his multifaceted effort to promote an understanding of the law and our legal tradition.”

Jack Keane: A retired four-star U.S. Army general and widely respected national security and foreign policy expert, Keane grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He began his military career at Fordham as a cadet in the University’s Army ROTC program. After graduating in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, he served as a platoon leader and company commander during the Vietnam War, where he was decorated for valor. A career paratrooper, he rose to command the 101st Airborne Division and the 18th Airborne Corps before he was named vice chief of staff of the Army in 1999. Since retiring in 2003, he has often provided expert testimony to Congress. He received the Fordham Founder’s Award in 2004, and he is a Fordham trustee fellow.

President Donald Trump honored Keane in 2020, lauding him as “a visionary, a brilliant strategist, and an American hero.”

Vin Scully: A 1949 Fordham graduate, Scully is best known for his nearly seven-decade stint as voice of the Dodgers—first in Brooklyn, later in Los Angeles—and widely considered one of the best sports broadcasters of all time. He got his start at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, announcing football, basketball, and baseball games before joining the Dodgers broadcast team in 1950. Scully was inducted into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, and Fordham presented him with an honorary degree in 2000.

President Barack Obama honored Scully in 2016. “Vin taught us the game and introduced us to its players. He narrated the improbable years, the impossible heroics, [and] turned contests into conversations,” Obama said.

For Lind, a 2005 Fordham Theatre grad, the Shakespearean role is somewhat of a homecoming. One of her first plays was a middle-school production of Twelfth Night in which she and her twin sister, Christina Bennett Lind, FCLC ’05, played twins Sebastian and Viola. And in 2010, she appeared in both of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park productions—as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale and as Jessica, daughter to Al Pacino’s Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice. But while those two characters were wide-eyed ingénues, Lind’s Desdemona is more complex.

“What’s been really interesting doing this production is that Desdemona is often thought of as naive, that she’s blind to the dangers she’s entering upon, and she’s so pure that the accusation of infidelity shatters her,” Lind says. “I think on closer look [at the text], she makes a lot of choices that aren’t innocent, with full knowledge of the risks she’s taking. She disappoints and breaks her father’s heart. She lies sometimes to Othello [about losing the handkerchief, for example]. She’s not a saint. She’s bold. And she really has a lot of opportunities to be surprising.”

Lind’s interpretation has pleased reviewers—The New York Times said it “was a pleasure to see a Desdemona so full of verve and increasing, chin-raising indignation. Ms. Lind has given us an unblushing bride who appreciates her own worth,” while assuring audiences that her “love for Othello is never in doubt.”

It has also resonated with theatergoers, including Rachael Hilliard, GSAS ’18, who recently earned a Ph.D. in English at Fordham, completing her dissertation on the intersection of Shakespeare, new media, and performance. “Desdemona can so easily fade into the background,” Hilliard says, “a Venetian ornament to adorn her father’s house, then Othello’s. Lind’s Desdemona, though, is feisty and even playful with Othello. Even in her (spoiler alert) death scene, she fights tooth and nail for another breath: This is no dying swan scene.”

Despite the inevitable ending, Lind’s portrayal is the perfect Desdemona for the current moment, when a greater awareness for women’s diverse voices and experiences has entered the mainstream—including through the #MeToo movement, which Lind has supported. “I often think of women as having muzzles on, the kind they give to really violent dogs,” Lind says. “What’s been a great change to watch is seeing women taking the muzzles off a little. I think that’s the biggest change we could have made as women. So many things have been taken away from us out of the fear to speak out, or the fear of being punished, which has happened in so many cases.

“I’ve noticed that there’s a little bit more respect for what experience a particular woman is having now,” Lind says. “I feel proud to be a part of a lot of conversations that were being had. It’s taught me a lot about really listening more closely to people who have no power.”

It’s something Lind has been doing for a long time through her acting, and what drew her to the profession in the first place—communicating different human experiences. It’s also why she found her philosophy minor at Fordham so helpful. “I don’t think I knew the value of it until I graduated, but it is so informative for my acting and my artistic perspective, for figuring out the basics of making ideas articulable,” Lind explains. “It gave me a real respect for asking the right questions.”

Those questions are particularly important when Lind is acting in a period piece, as she did recently for her starring role in TV’s Turn: Washington’s Spies and in her work in Shakespeare in the Park. It’s something that allows her to see the tragedy of Othello in a more complex way.

“It can be frustrating as a modern woman to feel the injustices of the social restrictions of the time period so deeply,” Lind says. “But Desdemona gets to express how unjust the world can be to her, and to Othello as well. I think the tragedy of the play is that we get to see the potential of what that couple could have been. I think they’re equals in a big way, and it’s such a tragedy to see that fall apart.”

Lind was grateful for the opportunity to take on such a complex role, and to return to the Delacorte, the outdoor theater that’s home to the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park.

“It’s challenging in lots of ways—there are airplanes and raccoons and stuff that you don’t have to deal with at normal theaters,” she says. “But it’s magical. There’s a real supernatural quality about the park. It’s fun and unexpected. And it’s one of the best experiences that I think you can have as an actor in New York—it’s a real thrill to work there.”

Othello ends its run on June 24. This season of Shakespeare in the Park continues with Twelfth Night, running from July 17 through August 19.