The award recipients will be honored at an awards luncheon ceremony on Wednesday, April 24, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Each winner will receive $5,000 and a plaque commemorating his/her achievements in defending the First Amendment. "New York Times" columnist Anthony Lewis will serve as Master of Ceremonies.

In the education category, author and teacher Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua is being recognized for courageously defending the right to keep the works of Mark Twain in American classrooms. In 1993, Chadwick-Joshua was at the center of a controversy in Plano, Texas, when parents objected to the word "nigger" in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which has the dubious distinction of being the fifth most frequently challenged book in classrooms for its racial slurs. Chadwick-Joshua was the only African-American teacher to defend the novel and had to battle several black Plano residents, including members of her own church. However, she continued to advocate teaching the novel as an important tool for learning about racism and slavery in their historical context. The school board ultimately refused to remove the novel from the required reading list. As associate director of the Teachers Academy at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Chadwick-Joshua has instructed hundreds of teachers in using Twain as a valuable tool in fighting racism. She currently is writing a book entitled "Jim: Nobody's Fool -- The Problem of Audience in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

Retired "Washington Post" investigative reporter Morton Mintz will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement award for his principled service to the freedom of the press. Throughout his nearly 50 years as a journalist, 30 at the "Post," Mintz aggressively reported on corporate misconduct and economic malfeasance practiced by pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry, automakers and other manufacturers of consumer products. In 1962, Mintz stunned the nation with his report on thalidomide, the sedative/tranquilizer routinely prescribed to pregnant women, which caused thousands of serious birth defects. He also wrote in 1966 that General Motors had retained a private investigator to spy on Ralph Nader's automotive safety-related activities. In 1973 and in a five-part series in 1985 that became the basis for the book, "At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield," Mintz exposed the makers of the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device (IUD) that was implanted in 2.2 million American women without being tested for safety, causing thousands to suffer life threatening pelvic infections and child-bearing problems. Since retiring eight years ago, Mintz has continued to free-lance for the "Post" and numerous other publications, including "The Nation" and "The Progressive." He has written several books, was a 1964 Nieman Fellow and was a 1983 winner of the coveted Columbia Journalism Award.

In the arts and entertainment category, Mary Morello, a 72-year-old retired high school history teacher and founder of the anticensorship organization Parents for Rock and Rap, will receive an award for her tireless efforts to organize parents and young people in opposing censorship of popular music. Morello started Parents for Rock and Rap out of her suburban Chicago home in 1987 after she saw a video produced by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), the group that promotes parental advisory labels on tapes and CDS. Her indignation was fueled further in 1990 when her son, Tom, a rock musician for the group Rage Against the Machine, gave her a folder of clippings about music censorship. Morello launched an anticensorship newsletter using a mailing list from "Rock and Rap Confidential," and she issued a press release urging people to join her coalition. She soon began a campaign on behalf of the rap group 2 Live Crew, which had come under attack for some of its lyrics, and attracted considerable media attention for her efforts. Parents for Rock and Rap has grown to include more than 700 members, including parents, young people, colleges and universities and anticensorship organizations.

Former U.S. Forest Service employee Jeffrey DeBonis is being honored in the government category for empowering federal employees to become a collective voice for reform. DeBonis had become increasingly disturbed by the Forest Service's willingness to ignore the massive environmental damage occurring as a result of excessive timber cutting. When he was told to alter an official document to cover up this activity, he went public. After attending a seminar on the environmental effects of timber cutting in 1989, DeBonis e-mailed a memo to all 30,000 U.S. Forest Service employees that openly challenged the agency's policy of blaming declining jobs and mill closings on the spotted owl and environmentalists urging management to retake the moral high ground and end its cozy relationship with the timber industry. Although he was supported by a few of his superiors, he was ordered to cease and desist or risk termination. At that point, he took his cause to the media, receiving local and national coverage in "The New York Times" and on "Prime Time Live" and the "ABC Evening News."

That same year, DeBonis launched the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE) to promote agency reform, a renewed commitment to professional ethics and support for the environment. He left the Forest Service in 1990 to become AFSEEE's executive director. He then expanded his efforts by founding Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) in 1993, of which he is currently executive director. Under DeBonis leadership, PEER has organized public employees nationwide into a vital force for environmental protection and served as an important information resource for public policymakers.

"San Francisco Examiner" legal and investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld will be honored in the print journalism category for his successful 14-year struggle to gain access to documents exposing the FBI surveillance and harassment of individuals and organizations associated with the University of California-Berkeley. While still a Berkeley student in 1981, Rosenfeld reported on political spying and threats to civil liberties based on records of FBI activities at Berkeley obtained by the campus newspaper. Realizing that the FBI had many more relevant documents, he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking additional university records. The FBI refused, citing a law enforcement exemption to FOIA requests, and prompting Rosenfeld to file the first of three FOIA lawsuits. Although the FBI released only some of the requested files, Rosenfeld filed two more lawsuits during the next five years, undertaking a groundbreaking examination of the FBI's campus conduct in an extraordinary effort to promote government accountability, protect academic autonomy and defend the right to dissent. In a precedent-setting legal victory in June 1995, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FBI had exceeded any legitimate law enforcement purpose in its investigation of the 1964 Free Speech Movement and ordered the release of more records on its covert operations at Berkeley. The documents proved that, as late as 1974, the FBI continued surveillance of campus activists. The court's order was based on evidence gathered by Rosenfeld that showed the FBI had sought to oust now retired University of California-Berkeley President Clark Kerr from office.

Tom Hull, cofounder of the Oregon Coalition for Free Expression (OCFE), will receive the award in the law category for building, educating and mobilizing a broad coalition of voters to successfully defeat censorship efforts in Oregon. A staunch crusader against censorship legislation, Hull worked with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association to establish the OCFE, a nonprofit coalition of 100 business leaders, artists, librarians and individuals committed to the defense of free expression, diversity of thought and the defeat of censorship. After halting a number of bills in 1993-94, Hull played a key leadership role in stopping a referendum that would have allowed every Oregon city and county to enact separate laws regulating obscenity. Through his "No Censorship-No on 19" campaign, he testified before the Oregon legislature, raised money for a statewide direct mail campaign describing the measure's threat to voters rights and remonstrated the dangers of censorship on numerous radio and television talk shows. In the end, Hull's relentless commitment to freedom catapulted the campaign to a 54 to 46 percent margin of victory at the polls.

The award winners were selected by an independent panel of judges, including Chris Finan, executive director of the Media Coalition; Marjorie Heins, staff counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union Arts Censorship Project; and Sydney Schanberg, award winning author and columnist and 1991 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award winner.

Established in 1979 by the Playboy Foundation, the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards program honors individuals who have made significant contributions to uphold First Amendment rights. Eligibility is not restricted by profession, but nominees traditionally have come from the areas of print and broadcast journalism, education, publishing, law, government and the arts and entertainment industries.

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