Today, President Obama awarded the late Harvey Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. He said Milk’s “message of hope, hope unashamed, hope unafraid, could not ever be silenced.”
Here are his full remarks:
His name was Harvey Milk. And he was here to recruit us, all of us, to join a movement and change a nation. For much of his early life he had silenced himself. In the prime of his life he was silenced by the act of another. But in the brief time in which he spoke and ran and led, his voice stirred the aspirations of millions of people. He would become, after several attempts, one of the first openly gay Americans elected to public office. And his message of hope, hope unashamed, hope unafraid, could not ever be silenced. It was Harvey who said it best: You gotta give ’em hope.
