Lillian Smith Book Award

For more information about the Lillian Smith Book award, click here.

2018
Locking up our own : crime and punishment in black America by James Forman Jr,
Democracy in chains : the deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America by Nancy MacLean

2017
The firebrand and the First Lady : portrait of a friendship : Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the struggle for social justice by Patricia Bell-Scott
Vagrant nation : police power, constitutional change, and the making of the 1960s by Risa Goluboff

2016
Not free, not for all : public libraries in the age of Jim Crow by Cheryl Knott
Aaron Henry of Mississippi : inside agitator by Minion K. C. Morrison

2015
Looking back, moving forward : the Southwest Georgia freedom struggle, 1814-2014 by Lee W. Formwalt
Strong inside : Perry Wallace and the collision of race and sports in the South by Andrew Maraniss

2014
In peace and freedom : my journey in Selma by Bernard Lafayette, Jr.
We shall not be moved : the Jackson Woolworth's sit-in and the movement it inspired by M.J. O'Brien

2013
Benjamin Elijah Mays, schoolmaster of the movement : a biography by Randal Maurice Jelks
Crossroads at Clarkdale : the black freedom struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II by Francoise N. Hamlin

2012
Courage to dissent : Atlanta and the long history of the civil rights movement by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Writing the South through the self : explorations in Southern autobiography by John C. Inscoe

2011
Sacrifice zones : the front lines of toxic chemical exposure in the United States by Steve Lerner
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 by Danielle L. McGuire

2010
Lynching and spectacle : witnessing racial violence in America, 1890-1940 by Amy Louise Wood
The price of defiance : James Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss by Charles W. Eagles

2009
What blood won't tell : a history of race on trial in America by Ariela J. Gross
The wrong side of Murder Creek : a White southerner in the freedom movement by Bob Zellner with Constance Curry

2008
In search of another country : Mississippi and the conservative counterrevolution by Joseph Crespino
Many minds, one heart : SNCC's dream for a new America by Wesley C. Hogan

2007
Native guard by Natasha D. Trethewey
The silent majority : suburban politics in the Sunbelt South by Matthew D. Lassiter

2006
Self-taught : African American education in slavery and freedom by Heather Andrea Williams
The Southern past : a clash of race and memory by W. Fitzhugh Brundage

2005
Closer to freedom : enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation South by Stepanie M. H. Camp
Cradle of freedom : Alabama and the movement that changed America by Frye Gaillard
The untelling : a novel by Tayari Jones

2004
Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement : a radical democratic vision by Barbara Ransby
Southern lady, Yankee spy : the true story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a union agent in the heart of the Confederacy by Elizabeth R. Varon
Buffalo dance : the journey of York by Frank X. Walker

2002
Bombingham : a novel by Anthony Grooms
Getting right with God : Southern Baptists and desegregation, 1945-1995 by Mark Newman
Dying in the city of the blues : sickle cell anemia and the politics of race and health by Keith Wailoo
Remembering Jim Crow : African Americans tell about life in the segregated South, edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins , and Robert Korstad, with Paul Ortiz, Robert Parrish, Jennifer Ritterhouse, Keisha Roberts

2001
Cathedrals of kudzu : a personal landscape of the South by Hal Crowther
So far back : a novel by Pam Durban
Radical equations : math literacy and civil rights by Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
Domestic work : poems by Natasha Trethewey

2000
Troubled memory : Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana by Lawrence N. Powell
A fire you can't put out : the civil rights life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth by Andrew M. Manis
Black workers remember : an oral history of segregation, unionism, and the freedom struggle by Michael Keith Honey

1999
Colorblind injustice : minority voting rights and the undoing of the Second Reconstruction by J. Morgan Kousser
A clashing of the soul : John Hope and the dilemma of African-American leadership and Black higher education in the early twentieth century by Leroy Davis

1998
Walking with the wind : a memoir of the movement by John Lewis, with Michael D'Orso
Night talk by Elizabeth Cox

1997
Rising tide : the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America by John M. Barry
Cold mountain by Charles Frazier

1996
Like judgment day : the ruin and redemption of a town called Rosewood by Michael D'Orso
Silver rights by Constance Curry
Trouble no more : stories by Anthony Grooms

1995
I've got the light of freedom : the organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle by Charles M. Payne
Race & democracy : the civil rights struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 by Adam Fairclough
Choices by Mary Lee Settle

1994
Decorations in a ruined cemetery by John Gregory Brown
Colored people : a memoir by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Local people : the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer

1993
Outside agitator : Jon Daniels and the civil rights movement in Alabama by Charles W. Eagles
The hard to catch mercy by William Baldwin
How am I to be heard? : letters of Lillian Smith by Margaret Rose Gladney

1992
The measure of our success : a letter to my children and yours by Marian Wright Edelman
Praying for sheetrock : a work of nonfiction by Melissa Fay Greene
The unquiet earth : a novel by Denise Giardina

1991
Black in Selma : the uncommon life of J.L. Chestnut Jr. by J.L. Chestnut, Jr., and Julia Cass
Tongues of flame by Mary Ward Brown

1990
Poor but proud : Alabama's poor whites by Wayne Flynt
Clover : a novel by Dori Sanders

1989
Even Mississippi by Melany Neilson
Soldier's joy by Madison Smartt Bell
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor

1988
Separate pasts : growing up white in the segregated South by Melton A. McLaurin
The Avenue, Clayton City by C. Eric Lincoln

1987
A true likeness : the black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936, edited by Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn
Song in a weary throat : an American pilgrimage by Pauli Murray
And Venus is blue : stories by Mary Hood

1986     Blessed assurance : at home with the bomb in Amarillo by A.J. Mojtabai

1985
Lay bare the heart : an autobiography of the civil rights movement by James Farmer
The old forest and other stories by Peter Taylor

1984
Generations : an American family by John Egerton
In search of our mother's gardens : womanist prose by Alice Walker
Eudora Welty, special lifetime award

1983
South-watching : selected essays by Gerald W. Johnson by Fred Hobson
Almost family by Roy Hoffman

1982
Hearts and minds : the anatomy of racism from Roosevelt to Reagan by Harry S. Ashmore
The winter people by John Ehle

1981
Power and powerlessness : quiescence and rebellion in an Appalachian valley by John Gaventa
The Lords of discipline by Pat Conroy

1980
Revolt against chivalry : Jessie Daniel Ames and the women's campaign against lynching by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

1979
Human rights odyssey by Marion Wright and Arnold Shankman
In my father's house by Ernest J. Gaines

1978
Brother to a dragonfly by Will D. Campbell
The shad treatment : a novel by Garrett Epps

1977
Roots by Alex Haley
Simple justice : the history of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's struggle for equality by Richard Kluger

1976
Mississippi : conflict and change by James Loewen and Charles Sallis
The surface of Earth by Reynolds Price

1974
The strange career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward
Train whistle guitar by Albert Murray

1973
Ralph McGill, reporter by Harold Martin
Revolutionary petunias & other poems by Alice Walker

1972
Children of crisis, vol. 2 : migrants, sharecroppers, and mountaineers , and vol. 3 : the South goes North by Robert Coles

1971     Our land, too by Anthony Dunbar

1970     The new South creed : a study in southern mythmaking by Paul M. Gaston

1969     Scottsboro : a tragedy of the American South by Dan T. Carter

1968     The emergence of the New south, 1913-1945 by George B. Tindall