New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis, a former associate editor of The New York Sun, will receive the North Star News Prize tonight. Two other journalists, Farai Chideya, author of “Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters,” and a senior correspondent on PBS’s “Now,” Maria Hinojosa, will also receive this award at a benefit held by North Star Fund, a community foundation based in New York. The group raises money from individuals who support community organizing in low-income neighborhoods of New York.

The North Star News Prize is named for the abolitionist newspaper that Frederick Douglass founded in Rochester, N.Y., in 1847. It celebrates Frederick Douglass’s legacy by honoring journalists of color who have made significant contributions to journalism and communication.

“Errol’s great contribution,” said North Star Fund executive director Hugh Hogan, “is through his column, he helps us to see alternatives that are rooted in our democratic ideals” and through his journalism, helps fight for a livable city for all New Yorkers.

Mr. Louis co-founded the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union in 1993 and served as executive director of the Bogolan Merchants Association, which promotes business in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. Last year, he earned a law degree from Brooklyn Law School.

The award recognizes Douglass’s career as a publisher and journalist. Mr. Hogan said Douglass’s journalism career as author and journalist was as important as his achievements as orator and reformer. The idea behind the award, said Mr. Hogan – who has previously worked on land and resource rights issues in West and Southern Africa – “is that reporting the truth is reporting social change.”

Each awardee receives the opportunity to give a $2,500 grant to a community-based group. The recipient that Mr. Louis has designated is Bailey’s Cafe, a small non-profit based in Crown Heights that connects young people with senior citizens for joint work on cultural projects such as oral history, murals, and protection of community gardens.

Each awardee also receives a plaque with a quote from Frederick Douglass: “I see before me a life of toil and trials. But justice must be done, the truth must be told… I will not be silent.”

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COLUMBIA KUDOS One of the realities about insight is that the insightful are rarely recognized for that vision. Thanks to the Consul General of Japan, however, there is at least one instance in which that is not true. In a formal ceremony at his residence, ambassador Motoatsu Sakurai recently gave professor Jagdish Bhaghwati the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star on behalf of Japan.

Mr. Bhagwati is a professor at Columbia and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was being recognized for an argument he made in the late 1980s and early 1990s: that the economic growth of the Land of the Rising Sun itself was no threat to the America. Mr. Bhagwati also made clear that American protectionism hurt not only Japan but also America. In 1987, for example, Professor Bhagwati scolded protectionists, including a protectionist White House saying in the New York Times: “The complacent Democrats should recall the consequences of the punitive tariffs ordered by President Reagan against Japan on March 27 of this year.” Mr. Bhagwati noted that Reagan’s folly had driven down both the dollar and markets.

In receiving the medal, Mr. Bhagwati was joined by his wife,the scholar Padma Desai, the Gladys and Ronald Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems at Columbia University and a scholar of Russian and other former socialist countries’ transition problems. She is the editor/author of a new collection of revealing interviews with Russian leaders titled, “Conversations on Russia.” Also present was their daughter, a Stuyvesant alumna and U.S. marine.

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At the Jewish Cultural Achievement Awards in the Arts sponsored by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, actor Brian Stokes Mitchell accepted the Performing Arts Award on behalf of the winner Tovah Feldshuh, who won critical acclaim for her role in “Golda’s Balcony.” On video, Ms. Feldshuh (rehearsing for her upcoming lead role in “Hello Dolly”) recalled the exchange between Henry Kissinger and Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when the Jewish state’s existence stood on the line. With perfect inflection, she mimicked the accent of the former secretary of state who supposedly said to Meir, then Israel’s prime minister: “I am first an American, second a Secretary of State, and lastly a Jew” to which Meir retorted, “Yes, I perfectly understand. We in Israel read from right to right.”

gshapiro@nysun.com