The Southern Regional Council Announces the Lillian Smith Book Award Recipients for 2014

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

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.

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.

Randal Maurice Jelks Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2013

South Carolina has a sterling record of Human Rights activity.  Penn Center where Martin Luther King and his lieutenants met and planned, The Progressive Club on Johns Island where Ben Mack, Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Bill Saunders and others met and taught come to mind. Today we celebrate the fine biography of one of South Carolina’s sons, Benjamin Elijah Mays: Schoolmaster of the Movement by Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks. Randal M. Jelks, Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Kansas,  has explored an aspect of African American history in African Americans in the Furniture City:  The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids.

In his biography of Benjamin Elijah Mays, he treats the making of history at its core—the band of courageous, unrelenting heroes who made it happen through strength of character, influence and insight into the significance of their and others’ actions.  Mays held to his beliefs as he waded through the morass of the hate and social discord of a segregated South and figured out the best way forward to a better time.  Incorporating the roles of church, religion and secular education, Mays undertook the massive task of changing the South and the Country. Dr. Jelks places him where he belongs as a pillar of strength, commitment and resolute action so that he may be properly understood and appreciated.  The celebration of such a paragon is a work well within the mission of the Lillian Smith Book Awards.  In the course of accepting his 2013 award, Dr. Jelks remarked as follows:

I would like to thank the Lillian Smith award committee to for bestowing this prestigious award to Benjamin E. Mays Schoolmaster to the Movement a Biography. I would be remiss if I did not thank the University of North Carolina Press and my editor David Perry, who recruited this book, for believing in the project and promoting it. I am deeply gratified to be receiving this award in this city where Mays’ bones rest on the campus of Morehouse College. Mays believed that faith and purposefulness and academic achievement and the practice of democracy in all endeavors were essential to living a wise and prosperous life. For twenty-seven years he eloquently expounded these ideas to young men who attended Morehouse College.

The list of students who sat at Mays’ feet reads like a Who’s Who of American history.  I continue to marvel at his determination to escape the confines of his meager existence in Epworth, South Carolina. As the child of ex slaves and tenant farmers to rise as an esteemed churchman worldwide and educator internationally. My fellow historian and Mays biographer Jack Roper entitled his book The Magnificent Mays.  And indeed I believe that Benjamin Mays was all that and more.

I wish to thank my family who endured research trips, evenings of writing and rewriting and constantly discussing a man my children never met but whom they now know as a member of the family.

Finally, I want to thank someone who is now long gone, a mentor by the name of Arthur Hughes. In 1969, I came to Atlanta as part of a trip of the YMCA, something that Mays had participated in a great deal. Mr. Hughes worked for the Dryades Street YMCA in New Orleans and organized two busloads of boys to come to Atlanta to the initial grave site of Martin Luther King, Jr. Hughes never knew that he sparked my imagination to write and explore the multiple stories of the South, civil rights, and American history. So I want to thank Mr. Hughes who is now long gone and thank you for this award.

Francoise Hamlin Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2013

Francoise N. Hamlin is the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Brown University. She earned her Ph.D. at Yale, a Master’s Degree at the University of London, and a Bachelor’s Degree at Essex University. She is the recipient of a C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize along with two other notable prizes for her graduate research and is the 2012 recipient of the Berkshire Conference Best Book Prize. 

 Dr. Hamline’s book is entitled Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II.  She begins her introduction with a quote from civil rights leader Aaron Henry, who said in 1963: “Ours is one hell of a story, but freedom is worth every adversity.” Dr. Hamline tells Henry’s story alongside that of a very different kind of activist. Vera Mae Piggy’s work as a beautician gave her both the economic independence and the opportunity to organize. “Two kinds of work were occurring,” Dr. Hamline writes: “the work of creating beauty, and the work of creating a movement.” Dr. Hamline weaves together themes of race, gender and class that flow through a compelling and illuminating narrative. She concludes her book with a personal and very moving epilog that brings Clarksdale’s history up to the present.

Crossroads at Clarksdale is excellent scholarship. It is important work. But it’s also beautifully written and really a great read and we recommend it to everyone. 
In receiving a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2013, Dr. Hamlin remarked as follows:   

I was a British high school exchange student in Clarkdale Mississippi - not the place that I had chosen to be, but the place where the organizers of the exchange program thought I would feel at home. I was the first and perhaps the last black exchange student to come to Clarksdale from England, and it’s clear that the American based exchange company didn’t know what to do with me. So rather than place me in a home in a city similar to London, where I grew up, I ended up in the Mississippi delta and lived with an amazing black woman who worked as a domestic worker her entire life.  That experience changed my life.

Upon my return to England, I forfeited a guaranteed spot to read law at the University of London and instead took up U.S. Studies in an effort to understand what I had seen, what I had experienced, and what I felt. That first degree led to a couple more, and this book is a culmination of that experience. It narrates the black mass movement in Clarksdale from the founding of the local NAACP branch following the rape of two young black women to the turn of this century when President Bill Clinton toured Clarksdale as part of his New Markets Initiative.

That year as an exchange student taught me about race, how it was a social construct, and how I was an anomaly in the U.S. racial system. I also realized that the history taught in the schools didn’t reflect the history that I knew to be true just by living there, and from the U.S. History that I had learned in the British classroom.  Moreover, my peers had no clue about the extraordinary activities of the people in their own community.  No sense of outrage existed in what I could see then as inequality of opportunity.  Lee Academy, the private school created soon after the public schools desegregated in 1970, was literally up the road and we would pass it every day on the school bus, and I seemed to be the only one who was horrified by the irony.

We had to study Mississippi History, as it was a requirement for all Seniors, and I remember my confusion at the insufficient treatment of slavery, particularly the fact that slave labor had cleared the Delta land which the County occupied.  Rather than focusing on the founding of Coahoma County, our studies pretty much focused on the leading white families.  As the curriculum moved into the 20^th Century, the history of the Civil Rights Movement focused, albeit too briefly for my liking, on Dr. Martin Luther King.  The students, including myself, had no clue that a vibrant movement had happened in Clarksdale and that all of the organizers of that movement were still alive. In fact Dr. King came to Clarksdale only a handful of times during his activist career, and he never stayed overnight. 

None of it sat well with me, even then when I really didn’t know very much.  I always felt uncomfortable with the over attention I received from the teachers and even the local press, but at the same time I really fell in love with the place. Mississippi is a beautiful state with all its ugly scars and wounds that still fester. I love it so much that I now take students there every Spring Break, so that I can share with them what I learned about the U.S. and Mississippi and then guide them through their own self-discovery. Mississippi transformed me and, for that, I am forever grateful.

This project on the Civil Rights Movement kind of snuck up on me. The experience during my exchange year made me want to learned more about race in the U.S., but I thought I was finished with Mississippi. It was only in graduate school that an oral history project brought me back to the Delta. It was only then that I started reading more about the movement in Mississippi and realized that very little scholarship existed about Clarksdale and that the local story varied from the SNCC-centered narrative that I had read. I the late 1990s there was already a huge amount of movement scholarship so, as a graduate student I was very hesitant to add more. But the story kept coming back, and the oral history project developed because I started talking to people in Clarksdale. From there I learned about Aaron Henry and Ms. Vera Piggy.  So I would like to believe that the story chose me to be its narrator.

This book started as a dissertation and I made one decision straightaway. Even though I was writing it for a committee that demanded a certain academic sophistication in language, I wanted to make sure that the people I wrote about would be able to understand it, accept it, see themselves in this book, and claim it as theirs.  Too often I’ve talked to movement participants and veterans - particularly African-Americans - who have complained about how their stories were distorted or that no one had ever talked to them about their own experiences.  We have this huge cache of movement scholarship and more keeps coming, but these veterans only endorse a small portion of the work. And I wanted mine to be accessible. I wanted my host mother, Ms. Corrine Bradley, who lived and died in the Delta with an eighth grade education and a Ph.D. in common sense, to be able to read it. She died in 2005 and never got to see the book.

Validation came from movement activists. Validation came from the academy and from professional organizations, and this has helped me to do my work and be very successful and I’m very grateful for that. But having movement activity confirm the stories, the tone, the general framework let me know that I was on to something. Ms. Vera Piggy’s daughter is a principal character in the Clarksdale story and she’s very reluctant to re-live that past buy she read the entire manuscript and called me when she was finished and told me to sit down while she read to me her scripted response about how much the research meant to her.  Charlie Cobb, a SNCC worker who is an author himself, read the book and has supported it. My work on this book took a while for many reasons, but first among them was the time it took to invest in people’s lives so that they could tell you their truths and trust you with their stories.

This prize means a lot to me too because it reflects the accessibility of the book beyond academic circles, and that was my goal. Oral history became the main way to understand Clarksdale. Archival documents might pinpoint dates, times, people, but voices and memory adds meat to these bones, and that was also the hardest part of the project.  These voices complicate movement history. They sometimes contradict long-held notions, like the notion that African-Americans desired the integration of schools, when in reality they desired equal funding, equal resources, equal respect, equal representation on the school boards. With the local history I cover many themes, like black leadership, particularly juxtaposing the leadership of Aaron Henry (a World War II veteran and pharmacist who spearheaded the formation of the local NAACP branch and went on to head the local state conference and moved into public office) and Vera Piggy (a beautician, a mother, secretary of the local branch and the state youth council advisor). That juxtaposition reveals the variety of leadership and the consequent strains and tensions.

Through Mrs. Piggy I also discussed “women’s work” – “activist mothering” - not a feminist model of women’s work, but a way in which some African American women activists extended notions of “mothering” to their civil rights work and exercised great leverage from within their gendered social status. I also And then at the end I considered notions of success: how is it that President Clinton stopped in Clarksdale – one of only five stops in a national tour of economically depressed areas?  After a rich story of activism and organizing that I was writing with these valleys of defeat and peaks of success. How do we define success? Can we define success?

  
As we are in the midst of 50-year anniversaries of many of the popularly-perceived landmarks of the movement - we have just crossed the 50^th Anniversary of the March on Washington and next summer is the 50^th Anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer – my book feels very timely, but perhaps that’s just coincidence. It celebrates, challenges, and complicates. There is definitely a lot more work to be done.

This project has brought many full-circle moments for me. The most important one is that I am able to explain what I saw in the 1990’s. I have some answers I have a lot more questions. I have something to give back to the community that gave me a home for a year. This award provides another full circle. The dissertation from which this book emerged is titled The Book Hasn’t Closed, the Story Isn’t finished, Continuing Histories of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a title I had used almost from the beginning because it said what I was trying to do: not a history that had a triumphant end, but an ongoing story of human interaction and conflict, failures and successes. At the end of my dissertation research, as I read more secondary sources to incorporate and enlarge the range of voices and opinion s in the South, I found a quotation which I incorporated into the original epilog as an epigraph: “I have not ended this story, for there is no end.”           

It was the perfect quote that supported the title that I already had. Lillian Smith wrote those words in 1964 in her book Our Faces, Our Words. The quote didn’t survive the re-write or make it into the book. Neither did the dissertation title.  But Lillian Smith’s her sentiment is definitely a part of it. Winning this award in her name brings me full circle.  

  

Carnes Sworn in as 11th Circuit Judge

R. Robin McDonald

Daily Report, August 5, 2014

Julie Carnes made her departure as the Northern District of Georgia's chief judge official last week when she was sworn in during a private ceremony as the newest circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, according to court executives.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. replaced Carnes as the district's chief judge, said District Court Executive James Hatten.

The judges and staff of the Northern District will bid a formal farewell to Carnes in an Aug. 14 ceremony. But Carnes will continue to preside over cases in the Northern District until mid-August by special designation, Hatten said.

On Monday, Carnes was on the district court bench in her old courtroom to sentence nearly a dozen former law enforcement officers who had pleaded guilty to charges that they acted as informants and provided security—often while wearing their uniforms and driving patrol cars—to local drug dealers.

President Barack Obama signed Carnes' commission on Thursday, 10 days after the U.S. Senate confirmed her 94-0 for the post. Carnes was sworn in by Senior Circuit Judge J.L. Edmondson at the Eleventh Circuit on Thursday afternoon at a private ceremony attended by her husband and daughter, Circuit Executive Jim Gerstenlauer said Monday. A public investiture is planned but not yet scheduled, he said.

Obama nominated Carnes to the appeals court bench in December. Appointed to the district court by President George H.W. Bush, Carnes had been chief judge since 2009.

Hatten said that Thrash—who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997—inherited the chief's post as the judge on the Northern District bench with the most seniority who has not taken senior status.

Jill Pryor Poised for Senate Vote

R. Robin McDonald

Daily Report, August 1, 2014

 

The U.S. Senate voted late Thursday night to close debate on the nomination of Atlanta attorney Jill Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. But Pryor’s confirmation will likely remain on hold until the Senate—which closes down for its August break at the close of business Friday—reconvenes in September.

The 58-33 vote at 9:06 p.m. Thursday to invoke cloture paves the way for a vote by the full Senate to confirm Pryor, a partner at Atlanta’s Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, as a federal appellate judge. A cloture vote was required because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was unable to obtain unanimous consent to bring Pryor’s nomination to the floor for an up-or-down vote without first allowing time for debate.

According to the Senate Democrats’ website, the vote to close debate on Pryor’s nomination was the last vote the Senate will take until it reconvenes in September. The Senate was slated to adjourn Friday for an August break.

In calling for the cloture vote, Reid requested that if the Senate voted to close debate on Pryor’s nomination, that it proceed to a confirmation vote at 5:30 p.m., Monday Sept. 8, according to the Congressional Record.

In support of the cloture motion, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chastised his Senate colleagues, saying that for the fifth year in a row, more than a dozen qualified, consensus judicial nominees pending before the full Senate will remain on the Executive Calendar during the August recess.

“Each year, I have come before the Senate to remind my fellow senators that their refusal to take action on these nominations prior to the August recess is an unfortunate departure from Senate tradition and to urge them to stop their obstructive practices and delay tactics,” Leahy said. “Again, I am disappointed to see partisanship and senseless obstruction continue to keep the Senate from fulfilling its constitutional duty of advice and consent.”

And he added, “I am glad that we are voting to overcome the Republican filibuster of the nomination of Jill Pryor, and I thank the majority leader for taking action on her nomination. If the Senate were operating as it once did, without this partisan treatment of judicial nominations, she would have been confirmed weeks ago.”

Leahy also said that the Senate could have chosen to vote to confirm 13 federal judicial nominees whose nominations have been approved by his committee by a unanimous voice vote but are still awaiting a vote by the full Senate. Five of them, including Pryor, are from Georgia.

“Instead,” Leahy said, “we are voting to invoke cloture on only one nomination, that of Jill Pryor, to fill a judicial emergency vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She has received the American Bar Association's highest rating of unanimously “well qualified” and has the support of both of her Republican home state senators. She will no doubt be confirmed unanimously, or near unanimously, when we return in September. As the senior senator from Georgia, Mr. Chambliss, noted at her confirmation hearing, `Jill Pryor has been in private practice in Atlanta for nearly 25 years. During that time she has played a pivotal role in some of the largest and most complex cases in Georgia history.’ We have before us an outstanding candidate to serve on the federal bench. Yet her nomination is being filibustered by Senate Republicans who are delaying her vote for the sake of obstruction.”

“This year, Senate Republicans have proceeded to filibuster each and every judicial nominee,” Leahy continued. “After today, the Senate will have taken 62 cloture votes on judicial nominations so far this year, amounting to well over 400 wasted hours the Senate should have spent considering legislation to help the American people. Never before has the Senate seen the systematic filibuster of every judicial nominee, or such unfair treatment of qualified, consensus nominees.”