PHILADELPHIA – The National Constitution Center will use part of a $6.4 million grant to establish a journalism institute named after late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings.
The funding for the Peter Jennings Institute for Journalists and the Constitution comes from the Annenberg Foundation and will also support six other outreach programs. Jennings, the longtime anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight," died last summer of lung cancer.
"It is through their generosity that we will be able to create these seven civic and public initiatives that will help us truly live up to the `National' in our name," Richard Stengel, the center's president and CEO, said in a statement Wednesday.
The grant, to be used over five years, also will fund an annual Constitutional Convention for national leaders and youth delegations, a series of debates, Constitution Day programs and three classroom-related initiatives.
The Canadian-born Jennings became an American citizen in 2003, though he retained dual citizenship.
"In the last years of his life, he developed an even greater affection for his adopted home, one that grew in part through his increasing admiration for the Constitution and a fascination with the men who created it," his widow, Kayce Freed Jennings, said in a statement.
"The copy of the Constitution he carried in his back pocket was dog-eared and frayed from his reading and rereading it," she said.
In New York on Tuesday, the block of 66th Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park was renamed for Jennings, who worked in the neighborhood and lived nearby.
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