Remarks at the Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony for 2014 by Charles S. Johnson, President of the Southern Regional Council
I stand before you as one who like many of you can remember a time
when a gathering such as this – where people of many races come together in the
same social space – was highly improbable.
Our region once labored under a brutal system of racial apartheid
which carried with it its own sense of permanence and inevitability.
The idea that things in the South could ever change – or that
they even should change – was an idea that found very few voices.
One of those voices was that of Lillian Smith, whose writings
during that period expressed impatience with those who thought of themselves as
progressive and caused them to envision a very different South – a South which truly
embraced the worth of all of its citizens.
Following her death the Southern Regional Council established
an annual award in her name – to recognize authors whose work carries on the tradition
of Lillian Smith, work of outstanding moral vision and literary merit and which
honestly portrays the South, its people, its problems and its promise.
For the last several years this award has been presented as a
partnership between the Southern Regional Council (which established the award) the University of Georgia
Libraries (which house the Lillian Smith Papers) and the Georgia Center for the
Book (which sponsors the Decatur Book Festival).
There are many people who work to bring this event to you
every year, but I want to take this opportunity to give special recognition to
our jurors who worked their way through the thirty nine books that were nominated
this year.
Mary Twining Baird, Decatur, Georgia
James Taylor, Atlanta, Georgia
Constance Curry, Atlanta, Georgia
Merryl Penson, Athens, Georgia
Marcy Johnson, Hilton Head, South Carolina
This year's award recipients are We Shall Not be Moved: the Jackson Woolworth Sit-In and the Movement it Inspired by M.J. O'Brien and In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma by Bernard Lafayette.
We value these works of history not just for the sake of
history itself but also for the lessons that history provides for the world in which
we live today.
For all of those who thought we had overcome, the recent
events in Sanford, in Staten Island, and in Ferguson should serve as a wake-up
call.
So when Al Sharpton called on the people of Ferguson not to have
a fit but, instead, to create a movement, there are probably some in this day
and age who may have wondered what he was talking about.
Fortunately, there are places to which they can turn to learn
what a movement is, what it takes to make a movement successful, and to learn
about those things that can stand in the way of success.
If the Black community of Ferguson is disrespected, even
though it comprises a majority of
the City’s population, it might have something to do with the
under-representation that that community has itself created by not taking advantage of
the voting rights that were secured on the streets of Selma.
The authors that we honor today have provided a valuable
service not just by telling great stories and telling them well, but also by
providing lessons that are highly relevant to us as we face the challenges of
today’s ever-changing world.
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