Thirty-Nine Books Nominated for 2014 Lillian Smith Book Awards

The Southern Regional Council (SRC) recently announced that thirty-nine books have been nominated for the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2014 to be presented in Decatur, Georgia on August 31, 2014.

SRC is an inter-racial organization founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice in the South. SRC initiated the Lillian Smith Book Awards shortly after Smith's death in 1966 to recognize authors whose writing extends the legacy of the outspoken writer, educator and socialcritic who challenged her fellow Southerners and all Americans on issues of social and racial justice. Since 2004 the awards have been presented by SRC in a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries, whose Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts. The Georgia Center for the Bookbecame a partner in 2007, when the awards ceremony first became part of the Decatur Book Festival.

The award recipients for 2013 were Benjamin Elijah Mays: Schoolmaster to the Movement by Randal Maurice Jelks and Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II by Francois Hamlin.

 

The 2014 nominated books are:

BOOK TITLE	AUTHOR	PUBLISHER
From the Bullet to the Ballot:  The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago	Jakobi Williams	University of North Carolina Press
W.E.B. DuBois and The Souls of Black Folk	Stepanie J. Shaw	University of North Carolina Press
Greater Than Equal:  African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965	Sarah Caroline Thuesen	University of North Carolina Press
Atlanta, Cradle of the New South:  Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath	William A. Link	University of North Carolina Press
James J. Kilpatrick:  Salesman for Segregation	William P. Hustwit	University of North Carolina Press
One Place:  Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia	Photographs and text by Paul Kwilecki, Edited by Tom Rankin	University of North Carolina Press
Blinded by the Whites:  Why Race Still Matters in 21st Century America	David H. Ikard	Indiana University Press
That The Blood Stay Pure:  African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia	Arica L. Coleman	Indiana University Press
Healing Histories:  Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals	Laurie Meijer Drees	University of Alberta Press
Flashes of War:  Short Stories	Katey Schultz	Loyola University’s Apprentice House
How It Feels to be Free:  Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement	Ruth Feldstein	Oxford University Press
NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936-1965	Thomas L. Bynum	University of Tennessee Press
In Peace and Freedom:  My Journey in Selma	Bernard LaFayette Jr. and Kathryn Lee Johnson	University Press of Kentucky
A Cold Coming	W. Jeff Bishop	Boll Weevil Press
Between North and South:  Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism	Brett Gadsden	University of Pennsylvania Press
The Fall of the House of Dixie:  The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South	Bruce Levine	Random House
According to Our Hearts:  Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family	Angela Onwuachi-Willig	Yale University Press
I Am Troy Davis	Jen Marlowe	Haymarket Books
Drama High:  The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater	Michael Sokolove	Riverhead Books
Looking for Palestine:  Growing up Confused in an Arab-American Family	Najla Said	Riverhead Books
Pitch Dark Anarchy:  Poems	Randall Horton	Northwestern University Press
Autogeography:  Poems	Reginald Harris	Northwestern University Press
I Am Malala:  The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban	Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb	Little, Brown and Company
Defining the Struggle:  National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915	Susan D. Carle	Oxford University Press
From Selma to Montgomery:  The Long March to Freedom	Barbara Harris Combs	Routledge
A Different Sun:  A Novel of Africa	Elaine Neil Orr	Berkley Books/Penguin
Stars of the Savanna	Melanie R. Martel	WPR Books
The Investigator:  Fifty Years of Uncovering the Truth	Terry Lenzner	Blue Rider Press
We Shall Not Be Moved:  The Jackson Woolworth’s Sit-In and the Movement it Inspired	M. J. O’Brien	University Press of Mississippi
Wash:  A Novel	Margaret Wrinkle	Grove Atlantic, Inc.
On Sal Mal Lane:  A Novel	Ru Freeman	Graywolf Press
Men We Reaped:  A Memoir	Jesmyn Ward	Bloomsbury
A Campaign of Quiet Persuasion:  How the College Board Desegregated SAT® Test Centers in the Deep South, 1960-1965	Jan Bates Wheeler	LSU Press
Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi:  Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965	James P. Marshall	LSU Press
A Thousand Hills to Heaven:  Love, Hope and a Restaurant in Rwanda	Josh Ruxin	Little, Brown and Company
Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities	Chris Kluwe	Little, Brown and Company
Remembering Medgar Evers:  Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement	Minrose Gwin	University of Georgia Press
Turn Me Loose:  The Unghosting of Medgar Evers:  Poems	Frank X. Walker	University of Georgia Press
Saving the Soul of Georgia:  Donald L. Hollowell and the Struggle for Civil Rights	Maurice C. Daniels	University of Georgia Press