He also served the United Nations as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador.
He wrote three more books after This Life. The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, published in 2000, was a meditation on the values that had shaped his choices — the values he traced back partly to Cat Island, partly to his parents, partly to the specific encounters and mentors and moments that had redirected his life at critical junctures. Life Beyond Measure, published in 2008, was addressed to his granddaughter — a collection of letters about what he had learned and what he wanted to leave behind.
In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. The citation acknowledged his artistic achievement and his role in the Civil Rights era, his refusal to play roles that degraded Black people, the specific quality of dignity that he had brought to American film at a time when dignity was not always on offer.
Montaro Caine, a novel, came in 2013. His last acting role is generally listed as The Last Brickmaker in America in 2001. After that, he worked primarily as a writer, a diplomat, and a public figure whose presence at any event carried the accumulated weight of everything he had done.
He received the Kennedy Center Honors. He received honorary degrees from universities whose doors had been closed to Black students when he was a young man in New York. He gave speeches and interviews and participated in retrospectives of his career that kept returning to the same themes: Cat Island, the early years in New York, the reading lessons, the theater apprenticeship, the responsibility of representation, the distance between where he started and where he ended up.