Tyler Perry Gives Powerful Acceptance Speech After Winning Humanitarian Award

The Academy announced back in January that they would honor filmmaker, Tyler Perry with this year’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 93rd Annual Academy Awards. While accepting his Award, Perry delivered one of the most powerful speeches of the evening telling all that would listen to “refuse hate.” Tyler Perry Gives Powerful Acceptance Speech After Winning Humanitarian Award

Whoopi Goldberg helped celebrate the influence that Perry has had through his humanitarian work in a pre-recorded clip. “There is no harm in caring,” she said.

“This man exemplifies the best you can ask from any human, and that is to care about your fellow human beings,” Whoopi Goldberg said in a prerecorded video segment that aired Sunday.

In the clip, Perry said that his humanitarian side through the Perry Foundation came from him simply wanting to help people. During his speech, Perry told a story of helping a homeless woman near his studio who needed shoes. He took her inside the studio to pick out a pair. After deciding on a pair, she said, “thank you Jesus, my feet are off the ground.”

This year, Perry developed Camp Quarantine and got production up and running by July at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. Earlier this month, Perry partnered with a local hospital and covered the costs of turning his studios into a vaccination site. He has been reported, through his foundation, has done everything from buying groceries for those in need to paying tuition for students. Tyler Perry Gives Powerful Acceptance Speech After Winning Humanitarian Award

Perry took the stage after a moving introduction by Oscar winner Viola Davis.

Perry explained his late mother had grown up in the Jim Crow South and experienced a bomb threat working at a Jewish community center — and despite it all, taught him to “refuse hate.”

“She taught me to refuse blanket judgment,” Perry said, adding, “I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican or because they are Black or white or LGBTQ. I refuse to hate someone because they are a police officer. I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian.”

He dedicated his award to anyone willing to “stand in the middle” with him.

“Because that’s where healing happens, that’s where conversation happens, that’s where change happens, it happens in the middle,” he said. “So anyone who wants to meet me in the middle to refuse hate, to refuse blanket judgment and to help lift someone’s feet off the ground, this one is for you too.”