Lillian Smith Book Award

The Lillian Smith Book Awards' are an award which honors those authors who, through their outstanding writing about the American South, carry on Lillian Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding. The award is jointly presented by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries.

Lillian Smith Book Award emblem

Since 1968, the awards have been presented annually, except for 2003 when the Southern Regional Council experienced funding shortfalls.[1] It is the South's oldest and best-known book award, and is presented in fiction and non-fiction categories.[2]

Past honorees

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1968 winner

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1969 winner

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  • Dan T. Carter for Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, Louisiana State University Press.

1970 winner

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  • Paul M. Gaston for The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, Alfred A. Knopf.

1971 winner

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1972 winner

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1973 winners

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1974 winners

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1976 winners

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1977 winners

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1978 winners

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1979 winners

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  • Marion Wright and Arnold Shankman for Human Rights Odyssey, Moore Publishing.
  • Ernest J. Gaines for In My Father's House, Alfred A. Knopf.

1980 winners

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1981 winners

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1982 winners

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1983 winners

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1984 winners

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1985 winners

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1986 winner

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  • A.G. Mojtabai for Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas, Houghton Mifflin.

1987 winners

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  • Thomas L. Johnson, and Phillip C. Dunn (ed.) for A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936, Algonquin Books.
  • Pauli Murray for Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, Harper & Row.
  • Mary Hood for And Venus is Blue: Stories, Ticknor & Fields.

1988 winners

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1989 winners

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1990 winners

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  • Wayne Flynt for Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites, University of Alabama Press.
  • Dori Sanders for Clover: A Novel, Algonquin Books.

1991 winners

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1992 winners

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1993 winners

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  • Charles W. Eagles for Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, University of North Carolina Press.
  • William Baldwin for The Hard To Catch Mercy, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
  • Margaret Rose Gladney for How Am I To Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, University of North Carolina Press.

1994 winners

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1995 winners

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1996 winners

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1997 winners

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1998 winners

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1999 winners

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  • J. Morgan Kousser for Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, University of North Carolina Press.
  • Leroy Davis for A Clashing of the Soul: John Hope and the Dilemma of African-American Leadership and Black Higher Education in the Early Twentieth Century, University of Georgia Press.

2000 winners

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  • Lawrence N. Powell for Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press.
  • Andrew M. Manis for A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, University of Alabama Press.
  • Michael Keith Honey for Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism and the Freedom Struggle, University of California Press.

2001 winners

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2002 winners

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  • Anthony Grooms for Bombingham, Free Press.
  • Mark Newman for Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995, University of Alabama Press
  • Keith Wailoo for Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health, University of North Carolina Press.
  • William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad editors, with Paul Ortiz, Nicole Waligora-Davis, Robert Parrish, Jennifer Ritterhouse, Keisha Roberts, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, The New Press.

2004 winners

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  • Barbara Ransby for Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; A Radical Democratic Vision, University of North Carolina Press.
  • Elizabeth R. Varon for Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy, Oxford University Press.
  • Frank X. Walker for Buffalo Dance, The Journey of York, The University Press of Kentucky.

2005 winners

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2006 winners

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2007 winners

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2008 winners

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2009 winners

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2010 winners

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  • Amy Louise Wood, for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, University of North Carolina Press
  • Charles W. Eagles, for The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss, University of North Carolina Press

2011 winners

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  • Steve Lerner, for Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States, The MIT Press
  • Danielle McGuire, for At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance-A New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Alfred A. Knopf

2012 winners

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  • Tomiko Brown-Nagin, for Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Right Movement, Oxford University Press
  • John C. Inscoe, for Writing the South Through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography, University of Georgia Press

2013 winners

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  • Randal Maurice Jelks, for Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: a Biography, University of North Carolina Press
  • Francoise N. Hamlin, for Crossroads at Clarkdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, University of North Carolina Press

2014 winners

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  • Bernard Lafayette, Jr., for In Peace and Freedom, My Journey in Selma, University Press of Kentucky
  • M. J. O'Brien, for We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth's Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired, University Press of Mississippi

2015 winners

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  • Lee W. Formwalt, for Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Southwest Georgia Freedom Struggle, 1814-2014, Albany Civil Rights Institute and Georgia Humanities Council
  • Andrew Maraniss, for Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, Vanderbilt University Press

2016 winners

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  • Cheryl Knott, for Not Free, Not For All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, University of Massachusetts Press
  • Minion K. C. Morrison, for Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator, University of Arkansas Press

2017 winners

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2018 winners

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2019 winners

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2020 winners

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  • Jelani M. Favors, for Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism, University of North Carolina Press
  • Brandon K. Winford, for John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, University Press of Kentucky

2021 winners

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  • William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, for From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century, University of North Carolina Press
  • Lawrence Goldstone, for On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of American Voting Rights, Counterpoint Press

2022 winners

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2023 winners

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  • Linda Villarosa for Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, Penguin Random House
  • Tomiko Brown-Nagin for Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, Pantheon Books

References

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