The Lillian Smith Book Awards' are an award which honors those authors who, through their outstanding writing about the American South, carry on Lillian Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding. The award is jointly presented by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries.
Since 1968, the awards have been presented annually, except for 2003 when the Southern Regional Council experienced funding shortfalls.[1] It is the South's oldest and best-known book award, and is presented in fiction and non-fiction categories.[2]
Wayne Flynt for Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites, University of Alabama Press.
Dori Sanders for Clover: A Novel, Algonquin Books.
1991 winners
J.L. Chestnut, Jr., and Julia Cass for Black in Selma : The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut, Jr.: Politics and Power in a Small American Town, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
J. Morgan Kousser for Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, University of North Carolina Press.
Leroy Davis for A Clashing of the Soul: John Hope and the Dilemma of African-American Leadership and Black Higher Education in the Early Twentieth Century, University of Georgia Press.
2000 winners
Lawrence N. Powell for Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press.
Andrew M. Manis for A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, University of Alabama Press.
Michael Keith Honey for Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism and the Freedom Struggle, University of California Press.
2001 winners
Hal Crowther for Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South, Louisiana State University Press.
Mark Newman for Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995, University of Alabama Press
Keith Wailoo for Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health, University of North Carolina Press.
William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad editors, with Paul Ortiz, Nicole Waligora-Davis, Robert Parrish, Jennifer Ritterhouse, Keisha Roberts, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, The New Press.
2004 winners
Barbara Ransby for Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; A Radical Democratic Vision, University of North Carolina Press.
Elizabeth R. Varon for Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy, Oxford University Press.
Bob Zellner with Constance W. Curry for The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement NewSouth Books, Inc.
2010 winners
Amy Louise Wood, for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, University of North Carolina Press
Charles W. Eagles, for The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss, University of North Carolina Press
2011 winners
Steve Lerner, for Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States, The MIT Press
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, Alfred A. Knopf
2012 winners
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, for Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Right Movement, Oxford University Press
John C. Inscoe, for Writing the South Through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography, University of Georgia Press
2013 winners
Randal Maurice Jelks, for Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: a Biography, University of North Carolina Press
Francoise N. Hamlin, for Crossroads at Clarkdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, University of North Carolina Press
2014 winners
Bernard Lafayette, Jr., for In Peace and Freedom, My Journey in Selma, University Press of Kentucky
M. J. O'Brien, for We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth's Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired, University Press of Mississippi
2015 winners
Lee W. Formwalt, for Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Southwest Georgia Freedom Struggle, 1814-2014, Albany Civil Rights Institute and Georgia Humanities Council
Andrew Maraniss, for Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, Vanderbilt University Press
2016 winners
Cheryl Knott, for Not Free, Not For All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, University of Massachusetts Press
Minion K. C. Morrison, for Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator, University of Arkansas Press
Rachel Devlin for A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools, Hachette Book Group
Vanessa Siddle Walker for The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools, The New Press
Virginia Eubanks for Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, St. Martin's Press
2020 winners
Jelani M. Favors, for Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism, University of North Carolina Press
Brandon K. Winford, for John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, University Press of Kentucky
2021 winners
William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, for From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century, University of North Carolina Press
Lawrence Goldstone, for On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of American Voting Rights, Counterpoint Press
2022 winners
Mia Bay for Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, Harvard University Press