WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will recognize the accomplishments of actors, activists and athletes today when he awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 16 people.

Film star Sidney Poitier, civil rights icon the Rev. Joseph Lowery and tennis legend Billie Jean King are among those set to receive the medal, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Other recipients include Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who has been battling brain cancer, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

Obama, awarding his first presidential medals, also will make posthumous awards to former Republican Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, the quarterback-turned-politician who died in May, and gay rights activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978.

The other recipients are:

• Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a leading breast cancer grass-roots organization

• Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., assistant dean of academic affairs at Florida International University School of Medicine

• Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and mathematician known for his work on black holes and his best-selling 1988 book "A Brief History of Time"

• Joe Medicine Crow, the last living Plains Indian war chief, who fought in World War II

• Chita Rivera, actor, singer, dancer and winner of two Tony Awards

• Mary Robinson, Ireland's first female president and one-time U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

• Dr. Janet Davison Rowley, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.

• Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his global, pioneering work extending "micro loans" to poor people.