Atlanta - Two exceptional books will be recognized with this year's Lillian Smith Book Awards. These awards were established in 1968 by the Southern Regional Council to recognize authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.
This year's Forty-Sixth Anniversary Awards Ceremony is a partnership between the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, and the Georgia Center for the Book. It will be presented in connection with the Decatur Book Festival at the DeKalb County Public Library in Decatur, Georgia on Sunday, August 31, 2014 at 2:30 p.m.
The 2014 Award Recipients are:
We Shall Not Be Moved
The Jackson Woolworth Sit-In and the Movement it Inspired
By M.J. O'Brien
By M.J. O'Brien
Once in a great while, an image captures the
essence of an era. Three people--one black, two white--sit at a lunch
counter while a horde of cigarette smoking hot shots pour catsup, sugar,
and other counter condiments on the sitters’ heads and down their
backs. The image strikes a chord for all who lived through those
turbulent times of a changing America. And for those too young to have
endured that period, it evokes an era, not that long ago, when the
ordinary act of getting a cup of coffee with a friend of another race
could spark a riot.
We Shall Not Be Moved is a triple threat: part biography, part
history, and largely just good old fashioned storytelling. The book
enables the reader to get behind the iconic image of the Jackson
Woolworth’s sit-in and into the hearts and minds of those participating
in this harrowing event. It’s history from the bottom up. We Shall Not
Be Moved tells the entire story of the Jackson Movement, which the
sit-in sparked to life, and the three weeks of demonstrations that put
Jackson on the front page of every major newspaper in America.
Sadly, this uprising led to severe retaliation. Two weeks after the
Jackson Woolworth’s sit-in, Medgar Evers, the local leader of the
movement, was assassinated. We Shall Not Be Moved chronicles this
horrific event through first-person accounts of those who endured it,
and then reveals how these movement figures carried on after their
leader was taken down.
In Peace
and Freedom: My Journey in Selma
by Bernard Lafayette Jr. and Kathryn Lee
Johnson foreword by Congressman John Robert Lewis afterword by Raymond
Arsenault
Bernard Lafayette Jr. (b.
1940) was a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
a leader in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, a Freedom Rider, an associate
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
and the national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign. At the young age of
twenty-two, he assumed the directorship of the Alabama Voter Registration
Project in Selma—a city that had previously been removed from the
organization’s list due to the dangers of operating there.
In this electrifying memoir, written with Kathryn Lee Johnson, Lafayette shares the inspiring story of his years in Selma. When he arrived in 1963, Selma was a small, quiet, rural town. By 1965, it had made its mark in history and was nationally recognized as a battleground in the fight for racial equality and the site of one of the most important victories for social change in our nation.
Lafayette was one of the primary organizers of the 1965 Selma voting rights movement and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and he relates his experiences of these historic initiatives in close detail. Today, as the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is still questioned, citizens, students, and scholars alike will want to look to this book as a guide. Important, compelling, and powerful, In Peace and Freedom presents a necessary perspective on the civil rights movement in the 1960s from one of its greatest leaders.
In this electrifying memoir, written with Kathryn Lee Johnson, Lafayette shares the inspiring story of his years in Selma. When he arrived in 1963, Selma was a small, quiet, rural town. By 1965, it had made its mark in history and was nationally recognized as a battleground in the fight for racial equality and the site of one of the most important victories for social change in our nation.
Lafayette was one of the primary organizers of the 1965 Selma voting rights movement and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and he relates his experiences of these historic initiatives in close detail. Today, as the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is still questioned, citizens, students, and scholars alike will want to look to this book as a guide. Important, compelling, and powerful, In Peace and Freedom presents a necessary perspective on the civil rights movement in the 1960s from one of its greatest leaders.
The Southern Regional Council (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 social critic 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 Book became a partner in 2007,
when the awards ceremony first became part of the Decatur Book Festival.
The 2013 winners of the Lillian Smith Book Awards were Benjamin Elijah Mays: Schoolmaster of 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.
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