Gates and Farrow, Honored for Embracing the Heart of Africa

Stepping out of an elevator at the Kennedy Center on Thursday evening, just before accepting an honor from the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation, Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. spied a tall, dark-haired woman in a red silk halter dress. Gates, festooned in black-tie finery, turned to the man next to him to communicate his aesthetic appreciation.

"That's my wife," the man responded. The woman in question was Hope Masters, president of the foundation.

"I told her, if she'd told me she was going to wear that red dress, I'd have been here yesterday," Gates mused during his acceptance speech later that evening. "I might be a scholar, but I ain't dead."

Leon Sullivan (Hope Masters's father) died in 2001 after a storied life of civil rights leadership, Africa-focused social activism, corporate success and fervent Christianity. A Baptist minister born and raised in West Virginia, Sullivan was the first African American member of the General Motors board, an active opponent of apartheid and a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The Sullivan Honors -- winners of which this year included Gates, as well as actress-activist Mia Farrow and 14-year-old Winston Duncan, founder of the Wheels to Africa charity -- are awarded by the foundation in recognition of personal efforts that foster African development. Previous honorees include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. The Sullivan Honors have been awarded for the past six years in conjunction with the Leon H. Sullivan Summit, which unites American and African leaders in discussion of African social and economic issues.

The event was Oscar-esque in length, pomp, circumstance and glitz. On the Kennedy Center's outdoor terrace overlooking the Potomac, guests began the evening with hors d'oeuvres and a well-stocked bar and ended with an after-party. (This is the first time the Sullivan Honors celebration has taken place in the Kennedy Center. Previous ceremonies, Masters says, have been dinners in local hotels.)

Turned out in an array of tuxedos, evening gowns and dashikis, guests mingled, posed for photographs and subtly calculated the slyest way to duck under elbows and breeze past the decor (tall, charming, treelike structures fashioned out of wire and adorned with tea lights) in a calculated beeline toward Farrow.

Farrow -- mother of 15, Woody Allen's former companion and collaborator, and UNICEF ambassador -- received a Sullivan award in recognition of her vocal opposition to the violence in Darfur (Farrow has traveled to Sudan, as well as blogged and written op-eds on the subject). Wearing a black silk pantsuit over a white silk V-neck, Farrow smiled patiently at an unrelenting barrage of press and guests while cradling a class of cabernet.

Farrow told The Post that she'd flown to D.C. from Connecticut a mere two hours before the ceremony. When asked about receiving this honor, Farrow reached into her small beaded clutch and dug out an envelope from the State Plaza Hotel, on which she'd written out a very humble acceptance speech, with important bits underlined.

Farrow told us that when she was contacted by the foundation, the first thing she did was research Sullivan.

"Honest to God, he knocked my socks off," Farrow said. "I was so sorry he was dead. . . . I'm all about my kids and what [Sullivan] has done for them, for a future that he isn't here to share," said Farrow, the mother of African children.

The ceremony, which unfurled in the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater, featured (in addition to the obligatory acceptance speeches) a huge array of musical performances, dance numbers and spoken-word interludes from African and African American performers. Plus a benediction and a blessing, not to mention the nods to donors, friends, family, God and corporate sponsors.

It was like the Oscars, except that no one got cut off by swelling music. Which is not to say that the program wasn't diverse and textured and enthusiastic and respectful of Sullivan, but simply that it was long. "Lord of the Rings" long.

Celebrated by the foundation for his continued scholarly interest in genetics and Abraham Lincoln, among other things, the famously arrested Gates regaled the audience with lengthy, cheery remarks, in which he reflected on his long-nurtured adoration of Farrow and recalled having "a two-foot-high Afro and a closet full of dashikis" while a student at Yale University in the '70s.

But Gates was often earnest, in his way (though he did crack a "beer summit" joke and was later the object of a cop joke). Paying tribute to Leon Sullivan, Gates said: "He inspired me to do the work I do."