Tomiko Brown-Nagin Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2012

In 1966 Julian Bond, in the face of blistering criticism for his opposition to the Vietnam War, said “I hope that throughout my life I shall always have the courage to dissent." It is from this statement that Tomiko Brown-Nagin takes the title of her Lillian Smith award-winning book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a professor of law and history at Harvard University, and she previously held appointments at the University of Virginia and Washington University. Dr. Brown-Nagin earned her Ph.D in history from Duke, a law degree from Yale (where she served as editor of the Law Review), and a Bachelor’s Degree from Furman.

 

Tomiko Brown-Nagin has written a remarkable and highly praised book in Courage to Dissent. It is a bottom-up narrative, illuminating the parts played by local activists and attorneys. These were people whose courage to dissent applied, not only to the white establishment, but also to the traditional black leadership of Atlanta, the national civil rights movement, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s high-profile attorneys.  Their dissention, Dr. Brown-Nagin argues, created an intra-racial tension that helped to energize the movement in Atlanta.

 

In a review of Courage to Dissent, Kathryn Naistrom writes that the book succeeds brilliantly, both as narrative history and legal analysis.  For Lillian Smith Book Award winner Ariela Gross, Brown-Nagin’s work heralds a new kind of constitutional history – that it’s a book that tells the stories of the good fight waged by ordinary people who, whether or not they actually won, had their day in court and became agents of change.

 

In March 2012 Columbia University announced that Courage to Dissent would receive the 2012 Bancroft Prize.  In accepting the Lillian Smith Book Award, Professor Brown-Nagin shared the following observations:

The book is subtitled Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, which means that it hopes to complicate the narrative of the civil rights movement that we have grown accustomed to – a narrative that centers on the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund and the heroics of the Warren Court. When I started this work many years ago a lot of people were resistant to the thrust of the work. They said: Brown v. Board of Education was American’s finest hour; Why would you want to tell a story in which that case is not central to the story? But I think it takes nothing away from the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the heroics of the court to talk about people on the left and the right who thought in terms of something more complicated than integration when they thought about equality, people like Julian Bond, Lonnie King, Lynn Holt, and Ethel Mae Matthews.  It’s important to realize the agency that they had and how they, along with these national institutions helped to form a more perfect union. 

Although I eventually came around to thinking of all of the wonderful people in this book as dissenters, when I first started this book I was just as beholden to the traditional narrative as anyone else. I went to law school because of Thurgood Marshall.  I am a child of Brown v. Board of Education. And so the process of writing this book was a conscious effort on my part to be fair to all of the characters in my book, despite their many perspectives, some of which I originally couldn’t understand and didn’t necessarily like.

Len Holt, a lawyer with the Lawyers Guild, an organization that was tainted as a Communist organization, hasn’t received his due.

 

Ethel May Matthews was a warrior for civil rights whom I interviewed in the housing projects of Atlanta, who taught me more than virtually anyone about the struggle against Jim Crow and the class dynamic.

One person in the book who symbolized my professional struggle was A.T. Walden. The son of slaves and one of the South’s first African America lawyers, Walden had been understood as a conservative, a foil of the students and progressives.  He was called an Uncle Tom and, when I first came to this work, I frankly understood why he would have been called those names.  He was skeptical, and he never embraced school desegregation or direct action. 

 

But as I wrote the book, as I went to the archives and did a lot of digging, I learned his history: that he was a complicated man who had been moved to go to law school after seeing the lynched body of a black man in his home town.  I learned that he was a student of W.E.B. DuBois, a man whom he considered a prophet and a seer. I came to understand that his critique of the struggle for integration as only being about integration and school desegregation was in many ways similar to Dubois’ critique.  Over time, I came to understand that, in order to write a nuanced narrative of the civil rights movement, it is important to appreciate how much history is biography.

Judicial Diversity Aids Legitimacy



Judges on UGA panel agree that public confidence is enhanced when courts reflect the faces of the public.

[Reprinted from the Daily Report, March 4, 2013]

 

By Greg Land

 

DeKalb County State Court Judge Dax Lopez said that, even as a Latino who spent most of his life in Georgia, he was surprised to learn just how dismissive some of his fellow jurists could be toward minorities and immigrants.

 

"Coming to the bench as a really young judge - I was 34 - my first judges' meeting was a real eye-opening experience," said Lopez. As he listened to judges from some of the state's rural circuits discuss their courtroom practices, he was struck by attitudes that ranged from indifference to hostility toward such defendants.

 

"There was zero sympathy," said Lopez, and some judges boasted that they actively sought to ensure the harshest outcome possible,

 

"It was like, 'I'm going to affirmatively hurt this person,'" recalled Lopez, appointed to the bench in 2011.

 

Lopez spoke at a panel Thursday at the University of Georgia School of Law. Diversity on the bench was the topic for the panel, which also included Georgia Supreme Court Justice Harold Melton, state Court of Appeals Judge Anne Elizabeth Barnes, Athens-Clarke County Chief Magistrate Judge Patricia Barron and moderator Robin Frazer Clark, president of the State Bar of Georgia.

 

Teeing up the issue, Clark cited a column that former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote for the Daily Report last year decrying the lack of diversity on the bench. Of 464 judgeships statewide, wrote Sears, about 100 were occupied by women, 53 by African-Americans, and—at that time—one was Asian and one Hispanic. (Governor Nathan Deal has since appointed an Asian-American woman, Carla Wong McMillian, to the Court of Appeals.)

 

Do the varied life experiences offered by one's race or sex really matter when it comes to fulfilling one's duties as a judge, asked Clark, and is a diverse bench necessarily a good thing?

 

Barron, whose circuit's bench is evenly divided between male and female judges, noted that she is the only African-American judge serving the Athens-Clarke County community at present. Diversity on the bench, she said, is more than a "good and desired" goal: "it has to do with the ability of the court to represent the population."

 

"I think the public's confidence in any court is enhanced by the ability to reflect the community," agreed Lopez. Among DeKalb's judges, he said, "we have seven judges who speak five different languages, one of only two Asian judges in the state, and the only Hispanic."

 

"I think it gives us a lot of credibility as a court," said Lopez.

 

Melton said that while the appellate courts are, in Clark's words, "some steps removed" from the general public, it is equally important that they, too, reflect the faces of that public. "Sometimes," he said, "the only evidence they have is looking at the snapshot of that court."

 

Melton also addressed complaints that, under the current and past administrations, minority appointments to the bench have been few and far between.

 

The justice, who served as executive counsel to Governor Sonny Perdue before being appointed to the state's high court, agreed that Georgia's first Republican governors since Reconstruction have appointed fewer African-Americans to the bench than their Democratic predecessors.

 

"One thing we need to talk about is party diversity," said Melton. "I know there's a lot of conversation about that. One conversation is, 'What's the governor going to do?' We need to ask, What are ???we going to do?'"

 

"There's a lot of discouragement in the African-American community about working with Republicans. I saw that in the governor's office first-hand," Melton said. The only time the governor heard from African-American lawyers or bar associations was when a judgeship came open, he said; meanwhile, other lawyers and organizations had been working to make contacts and establish relationships with the administration.

 

"So others have been working diligently, and you're at a disadvantage if you take a hands-off approach."

 

"I'm not saying we should compromise our views," said Melton, "but we should be more involved."

 

Barnes, too, said a lack of diversity on the bench could shadow the courts' legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

 

"It's not just that the fact that judges are fair and impartial," Barnes said. "When we see a panel of people that don't look like us, and they all look like each other, it affects the perception of the public. If they see someone on the bench and say, 'Hey, she looks like me,' I think it enhances the perception of justice."

 

Clark recalled the furor stirred up during the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor when senators read the text of a speech she gave in 2001.

 

"Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see," said Sotomayor in the speech. "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

 

"Many called those words provocative, and I would agree," said Clark. But, she asked, "if we agree that it is diversity we desire," will a judge's background and experiences shade what a judge "chooses to see"?

 

Nodding vigorously, Barron noted that her magistrate duties frequently placed her in a position of hearing cases over simple assaults involving low-income, African-American women fighting, often over a man.

 

"My experiences as an African-American woman help me understand that behavior," said Barron. "Were I not there, those women would probably not have been listened to, maybe not even represented in court, and the outcome may have been different."

 

"Everyone is responsible for their actions, of course," she said, but "in the 12 years I've been on the bench, I think there's been a transition because of my background."

 

Barnes said she didn't find Sotomayor's comments controversial, because she thought they had been misconstrued.

 

"I focus on the word 'wisely,'" she said. Barnes recalled her history as the first woman to win statewide election to the bench without having first been appointed. While some of her friends were very supportive, she recalled, others dismissed her chances; when her first bid came up short, she said, she tried again and won.

 

"I think what Justice Sotomayor was driving at is that we all have experiences." The key, she said "is whether we gain wisdom from our experiences."

 

Failure to do so, Barnes said, may result in a legal judgment that doesn't reflect justice.

 

"It may be legally correct," she said, "but it won't be just."

Tennessee Law Requires Diverse Judicial Nominating Committee

17-4-102.　　Judicial nominating commission -- Establishment -- Membership -- Appointments -- Application for commission membership.

　　(a)　There is established as a part of the judicial branch of the state a judicial nominating commission, to be composed of seventeen (17) members as follows:

　　　(1)　Eight (8) members shall be appointed by the speaker of the senate;

　　　　　　(A)　Two (2) of the members shall be appointed from each of the state's three (3) grand divisions, and the remaining two (2) members shall be appointed at-large; and

　　　　　　(B)　At least five (5) of the members shall be attorneys;

　　　(2)　Eight (8) members shall be appointed by the speaker of the house of representatives;

　　　　　　(A)　Two (2) of the members shall be appointed from each of the state's three (3) grand divisions, and the remaining two (2) members shall be appointed at-large; and

　　　　　　(B)　At least five (5) of the members shall be attorneys;

　　　(3)　One (1) non-attorney member shall be appointed at-large by joint action of the speaker of the senate and the speaker of the house of representatives; and

　　　(4)　Not more than three (3) of the members appointed at-large may be residents of the same grand division.

(b)　　(1)　The entire membership of the judicial selection commission shall be vacated and shall be replaced by new appointments made to the judicial nominating commission pursuant to this section. In order to stagger the terms of the newly appointed commission members, initial appointments shall be made as follows:

　　　　　　(A)　Two (2) of the speaker of the senates's initial appointments shall be made for terms of two (2) years each;

　　　　　　(B)　Two (2) of the speaker of the house's initial appointments shall be made for terms of two (2) years each;

　　　　　　(C)　The speakers' joint appointment shall be made for a term of two (2) years;

　　　　　　(D)　Three (3) of the speaker of the senate's initial appointments shall be made for terms of four (4) years each;

　　　　　　(E)　Three (3) of the speaker of the house's initial appointments shall be made for terms of four (4) years each;

　　　　　　(F)　Three (3) of the speaker of the senate's initial appointments shall be made for terms of six (6) years each; and

　　　　　　(G)　Three (3) of the speaker of the house's initial appointments shall be made for terms of six (6) years each.

　　　(2)　Thereafter, the terms for all appointments shall comply with §§ 17-4-106 and 17-4-107(a).

(c)　In making the appointments to the judicial nominating commission, each speaker shall do so with a conscious intention of selecting a body that reflects diversity with respect to:

　　　(1)　Race, including the dominant ethnic minority population;

　　　(2)　Gender; and

　　　(3)　Representation of rural areas as well as urban centers.

(d)　The administrative office of the courts shall develop and post on its web site a downloadable information and application form for citizens who wish to be considered for appointment to the judicial nominating commission. The form shall indicate all qualifications required for appointment to the commission. To be considered for appointment, each applicant must complete, sign and submit the form. Appropriate deadlines for submission of the forms shall be established by the administrative office of the courts in advance of each scheduled vacancy and promptly after the occurrence of any unscheduled vacancy. Each time that deadlines are so established, in addition to notice posted on its web site, the administrative office of the courts shall take appropriate action to notify the general public and shall provide written notification to the speaker of the senate and the speaker of the house of representatives. Immediately following the occurrence of any such deadline, the administrative office of the courts shall post on its web site a summary report of all qualified applicants for the vacant position or positions. The summary report shall include at least the name, county of residence and occupation of each applicant. For a period of fourteen (14) days following the posting of the summary report, the administrative office of the courts shall receive public comments from interested persons and organizations. At the conclusion of the period for public comments, the application forms and corresponding public comments shall be forwarded to the appropriate speaker or speakers for consideration and action. Within fourteen (14) days following receipt of the information, the speaker or speakers shall make the required appointments from the pool of qualified applicants. However, for good cause, either speaker may fill a vacancy by appointing a qualified person not included within the pool of applicants if the speaker provides written notice to the administrative office of the courts stating the reasons for appointing a person not included within the pool of applicants.

HISTORY: Acts 2009, ch. 517, § 1.

Georgia Should Codify its Pursuit of Judicial Diversity



[Reprinted from the Daily Report, October 4, 2012]



To the Editors:

We note with interest an article by Leah Ward Sears and Kimberly Bourroughs which appeared in the Sept. 24, 2012, issue of the Daily Report entitled "Raise the bar on judicial diversity." While we concur with the sentiments expressed in the article, we respectfully disagree that the recent gathering at the courthouse steps was an expression of "anger." Rather, it was a concerted effort by minority bar associations and community-based organizations to bring an important issue to the public's attention.

Moreover, we would add that judicial accountability requires that the courts be representative of the communities that they serve. Judicial diversity also promotes impartiality by ensuring that all viewpoints, perspectives and values are part of the decision-making process.

The recent article was particularly commendable in proposing steps that can be taken in pursuit of the goal of a more representative judiciary, especially in addressing the lack of diversity on Georgia's Judicial Nominating Commission ("JNC"). Not long ago, the Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys asked Governor Nathan Deal to diversify the JNC, but since then there has been no change in the diversity of its membership. The JNC still has only one African-American male, no African-American females, and no other persons of color among its 15 members. In 2012, this lack of representation does a disservice to the state's highly diverse populace.

Beyond the steps toward increasing judicial diversity which were suggested in the recent article, Georgia should also consider some of the more recent steps which other states have taken to pursue this goal. For example, Arizona has a constitutional provision requiring its judicial nominating commission to "consider the diversity of the state's population, however, the primary consideration shall be merit." Ariz. Const. Art.VI, § 36.

Maryland has an executive order which requires that its nominating commission "shall consider … the importance of having a diverse judiciary." Md. Exec. Order No. 01.01.2007.08.

In Missouri, the governing Supreme Court rules direct that "the Commission shall further take into consideration the desirability of the bench reflecting the racial and gender composition of the community." Mo. S. Ct. R. 10.32(f) (2008).

Several other states have laws that mandate diversity in the composition of their judicial nominating commissions. Florida, for example, requires that "the Governor shall seek to ensure that, to the extent possible, the membership of the Commission reflects the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, as well as the geographic distribution of the population within the territorial jurisdiction of the Court for which nominations will be considered." Fla. Stat. Ann. § 43.291(4) (2008).

Tennessee law requires the appointment of "persons who approximate the population of the state with respect to race, including the dominant ethnic minority population, and gender." Tenn. Code Ann. § 17-4-102(C) (2008) Rhode Island provides that "[t]he Governor and the nominating authorities hereunder shall exercise reasonable efforts to encourage racial, ethnic, and gender diversity within the Commission." R.I. Gen. Laws § 8-16.1-2(a)(3) (2006).

We do not wish to displace the recommendations advanced by Justice Sears and Ms. Bourroughs. However, we suspect that actually codifying the state's pursuit of judicial diversity, as these other states have done, might enhance the likelihood of producing positive results.

Suzanne Wynn Ockleberry, Past President, Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys
Charles S. Johnson, Past President, Gate City Bar Association

Tomiko Brown-Nagin Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2012

In 1966 Julian Bond, in the face of blistering criticism for his opposition to the Vietnam War, said “I hope that throughout my life I shall always have the courage to dissent. It is from this statement that Tomiko Brown-Nagin takes the title of her Lillian Smith award-winning book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a professor of law and history at Harvard University, and she previously held appointments at the University of Virginia and Washington University. Dr. Brown-Nagin earned her Ph.D in history from Duke, a law degree from Yale (where she served as editor of the Law Review), and a Bachelor’s Degree from Furman.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin has written a remarkable and highly praised book in Courage to Dissent. It is a bottom-up narrative, illuminating the parts played by local activists and attorneys. These were people whose courage to dissent applied, not only to the white establishment, but also to the traditional black leadership of Atlanta, the national civil rights movement, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s high-profile attorneys.  Their dissention, Dr. Brown-Nagin argues, created an intra-racial tension that helped to energize the movement in Atlanta.

In a review of Courage to Dissent, Kathryn Naistrom writes that the book succeeds brilliantly, both as narrative history and legal analysis.  For Lillian Smith Book Award winner Ariela Gross, Brown-Nagin’s work heralds a new kind of constitutional history – that it’s a book that tells the stories of the good fight waged by ordinary people who, whether or not they actually won, had their day in court and became agents of change.

In March 2012 Columbia University announced that Courage to Dissent would receive the 2012 Bancroft Prize.

In accepting a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2012, Professor Brown-Nagin remarked as follows:

 

 

"The book is subtitled Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, which means that it hopes to complicate the narrative of the civil rights movement that we have grown accustomed to – a narrative that centers on the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund and the heroics of the Warren Court. When I started this work many years ago a lot of people were resistant to the thrust of the work. They said: Brown v. Board of Education was American’s finest hour; Why would you want to tell a story in which that case is not central to the story? But I think it takes nothing away from the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the heroics of the court to talk about people on the left and the right who thought in terms of something more complicated than integration when they thought about equality, people like Julian Bond, Lonnie King, Lynn Holt, and Ethel Mae Matthews.  It’s important to realize the agency that they had how they, along with these national institutions helped to form a more perfect union.

"Although I eventually came around to thinking of all of the wonderful people in this book as dissenters, when I first started this book I was actually just as beholden to the traditional narrative as anyone else. I went to law school because of Thurgood Marshall.  I am a child of Brown v. Board of Education. And so the process of writing this book was a conscious effort on my part to be fair to all of the characters in my book, despite their many perspectives, some of which I originally couldn’t understand and didn’t necessarily like.

"Len Holt was a lawyer with the Lawyers Guild, which was tainted as a Communist organization, and who hasn’t received his due.

"Ethel May Matthews was a warrior for civil rights whom I interviewed in the housing projects of Atlanta, who taught me more than virtually anyone about the struggle against Jim Crow and the class dynamic.

"One person in the book who symbolized my professional struggle was A.T. Walden. The son of slaves and one of the South’s first African America lawyers, Walden had been understood as a conservative, a foil of the students and progressives.  He was called a conservative and an Uncle Tom and, when I first came to this work, I frankly understood why he would have been called those names.  He was skeptical, and he never embraced school desegregation or direct action. But as I wrote the book, as I went to the archives and did a lot of digging, I learned his history: that he was a complicated man who had been moved to go to law school after seeing the lynched body of a black man in his home town.  I learned that he was a student of W.E.B. DuBois, a man whom he considered a prophet and a seer. I came to understand that his critique of the struggle for integration as only being about integration and school desegregation was in many ways similar to DuBois’ critique.  Over time, I came to understand that in order to write a nuanced narrative of the civil rights movement, it is important to appreciate how much history is biography."

Supreme Court to Revisit Voting Rights Preclearance Requirement

Shelby County v. Holder

On November 9, 2012, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear a case brought by Shelby County, Alabama, challenging the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA).

Under section 5 of the VRA, changes in voting procedures in a “covered” jurisdiction cannot be made without preclearance by the federal court in the District of Columbia or the United States Attorney General. During the 1950s and '60s the federal government’s efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices with court cases were frustrated for many years. As soon as one discriminatory practice was proven to be unconstitutional, a new one would be substituted requiring round after round of lengthy and time consuming litigation. To put an end to this, the 1965 Act included special preclearance provisions targeted at states where the potential for discrimination was the greatest. Section 5 was extended for 25 years in 1982. In 2006 Section 5 was extended for 25 more years after Congress found that systemic, race-based voting abuses continued at very high levels.

Because Alabama is a covered jurisdiction, Shelby County was obligated to obtain clearance before it changed any election procedures. Instead of seeking preclearance, the County filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking a judgment that Section 5 of the VRA is unconstitutional. The County is relying on a 1997 case, City of Boerne v. Flores, in which the Supreme Court held legislation enacted under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment must be "congruent and proportional" to the harm it seeks to remedy. It claims the legislative record of the VRA's 2006 reauthorization lacks sufficient evidence of systematic voting discrimination in covered jurisdictions. If the Court accepts this argument, it would rule that Section 5 is unconstitutional because it is no longer "congruent and proportional" to the problem it seeks to cure.

Shelby County's suit was prompted by the 2009 decision in Nw. Austin Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. Mukasey (NAMUDO) in which Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion identified “serious questions” about Section 5’s continued constitutionality. Roberts' said the exceptional conditions in southern states justified the law in 1965, but the violence, intimidation, and subterfuges that justified Section 5 no longer exist. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a separate opinion in which he argued that Section 5 is no longer needed for essentially the same reasons.

The trial and appellate courts in the Shelby County case reviewed the record of evidence on which Congress relied when it reauthorized Section 5 in 2006. That evidence included thousands of pages of testimony, reports and data regarding racial disparities in voter registration, voter turnout, and electoral success; the nature and number of Section 5 objections; judicial preclearance suits and Section 5 enforcement actions. The record also contains data concerning successful Section 2 litigation; the testimony of federal election observers; evidence of racially polarized voting.

The Congressional record contains numerous examples of modern, "second generation" instances of systemic racial discrimination in voting and many examples of overt hostility to black voting power. The record also shows that between 1982 and 2005, minority plaintiffs obtained favorable outcomes in 653 Section 2 suits filed in covered jurisdictions, providing relief from discriminatory voting practices in at least 825 counties.

Given the sheer magnitude of the evidence, a decision to strike down Section 5 would ordinarily be unlikely. The Court would have to ignore the mountain of evidence in the record and set aside Congress' factual determination concerning systemic discrimination in covered jurisdictions. However, the doubts expressed in the NAMUDO opinions prompted a number of challenges to the Constitutionality of the VRA. The predilections of the Court's conservative majority make the outcome in Shelby County difficult to predict. The case could end with the Court striking down Section 5.

If that unfortunate and unwarranted outcome happens it would not invalidate the VRA in its entirety. Cases still could be brought under Section 2 which applies nationwide to any voting practice that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. Section 2 is permanent and has no expiration date.

About the Author

 

Leland Ware, a member of the Board of the Southern Regional Council, is Louis B. Redding Chair and Professor for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware.He is the author of numerous publications, and he served as co-editor of the recently-published volume, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience.

Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony 2012

Atlanta - Two exceptional books were recognized with the 2012 Lillian Smith Book Awards. These awards were established in 1968 by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) 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 Forty-Fourth Anniversary Awards Ceremony was a partnership between SRC, the University of Georgia Libraries, and the Georgia Center for the Book. It was presented in connection with the Decatur Book Festival at the DeKalb County Public Library in Decatur, Georgia on Sunday, September 2, 2012.

 

The 2012 Award Recipients were:

Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

By Tomiko Brown-Nagin

"In this sweeping history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta–the South’s largest and most economically important city–from the 1940s through 1980, Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows that the movement featured a vast array of activists and many sophisticated approaches to activism. Long before 'black power' emerged and gave black dissent from the mainstream civil rights agenda a new name, African Americans in Atlanta debated the meaning of equality and the steps necessary to obtain social and economic justice.

"This groundbreaking book uncovers the activism of visionaries–both well-known legal figures and unsung citizens–from across the ideological spectrum who sought something different from, or more complicated than, 'integration.' Local activists often played leading roles in carrying out the integrationist agenda of the NAACP, but some also pursued goals that differed markedly from those of the venerable civil rights organization. Brown-Nagin discusses debates over politics, housing, public accommodations, and schools. She documents how the bruising battle over school desegregation in the 1970s, which featured opposing camps of African Americans, had its roots in the years before Brown v. Board of Education.

"Exploring the complex interplay between the local and national, between lawyers and communities, between elites and grassroots, and between middle-class and working-class African Americans, Courage to Dissent tells gripping stories about the long struggle for equality that speak to the nation’s current urban crisis. This remarkable book will transform our understanding of the Civil Rights era."

Writing the South Through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography

By John C. Inscoe

"Drawing on two decades of teaching a college-level course on southern history as viewed through autobiography and memoir, John C. Inscoe has crafted a series of essays exploring the southern experience as reflected in the life stories of those who lived it. Constantly attuned to the pedagogical value of these narratives, Inscoe argues that they offer exceptional means of teaching young people because the authors focus so fully on their confrontations—as children, adolescents, and young adults—with aspects of southern life that they found to be troublesome, perplexing, or challenging.

"Maya Angelou, Rick Bragg, Jimmy Carter, Bessie and Sadie Delany, Willie Morris, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, and Thomas Wolfe are among the more prominent of the many writers, both famous and obscure, upon whom Inscoe draws to construct a composite portrait of the South at its most complex and diverse. The power of place; struggles with racial, ethnic, and class identities; the strength and strains of family; educational opportunities both embraced and thwarted—all are themes that infuse the works in this most intimate and humanistic of historical genres.

"Full of powerful and poignant stories, anecdotes, and testimonials, Writing the South through the Self explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of what it has meant to be southern and offers us new ways of understanding the forces that have shaped southern identity in such multifaceted ways."

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 2011 winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award were Steve Lerner for Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States and 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.