U2's Bono, Georgia congressman honored for civil rights work

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- U2 lead singer Bono and a civil rights leader from Georgia received awards Monday from the National Civil Rights Museum at the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.\nBono, a native of Ireland, was honored with the international Freedom Award for promoting greater Western involvement in improving medical care and reducing poverty in Africa.\nBono said in a speech to 3,500 public school students before the ceremony that the kind of energy young people brought to the civil rights movement is needed in the fight against AIDS.\n"What are the blind spots of our age, of these times? What might you help the rest of us to see?" he said. "It might be something as simple as the idea that every human life, no matter where they live, has equal worth."\nRep. John Lewis, D-Ga., was the national award winner for his civil rights work in the 1960s. He was jailed during a protest at a whites-only lunch counter in Nashville in 1960 and joined the marches and voter registration drives aimed at breaking racial segregation in the South.\nThe National Civil Rights Museum opened in 1991 at the former Lorraine Motel, where King was shot in 1968 while in Memphis to lead a strike by city sanitation workers.\nPast Freedom Award recipients include King's widow, Coretta Scott King; former South African President Nelson Mandela; Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Presidents Carter and Clinton.