Lillian Smith Book Award

Past honorees

1968 winner

• George B. Tindall for The Emergence of the New South: 1913-1945, Louisiana State University Press.

1969 winner

• Dan T. Carter for Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, Louisiana State University Press.

1970 winner

• Paul M. Gaston for The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, Alfred A. Knopf.

1971 winner

• Anthony Dunbar for Our Land, Too, Pantheon Books.

1972 winner

• Robert Coles for Children of Crisis, Vol. II: Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, and Volume III: The South Goes North, Little, Brown and Company.

1973 winners

• Harold Martin for Ralph McGill, Reporter, Little Brown and Company.
• Alice Walker for Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1974 winners

• C. Vann Woodward for The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Oxford University Press.
• Albert Murray for Train Whistle Guitar, McGraw-Hill.

1976 winners

• James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis for Mississippi: Conflict and Change, Pantheon Books.
• Reynolds Price for The Surface of Earth, Atheneum.

1977 winners

• Alex Haley for Roots, Doubleday.
• Richard Kluger for Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Alfred A. Knopf.

1978 winners

• Will D. Campbell for Brother to a Dragonfly, The Seabury Press.
• Garrett Epps for The Shad Treatment, Putnam.

1979 winners

• Marion Wright and Arnold Shankman for Human Rights Odyssey, Moore Publishing.
• Ernest J. Gaines for In My Father's House, Alfred A. Knopf.

1980 winners

• Jacquelyn Dowd Hall for Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, Columbia University Press.
• Cormac McCarthy for Suttree, Random House.

1981 winners

• John Gaventa for Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, University of Illinois Press.
• Pat Conroy for The Lords of Discipline, Houghton Mifflin.

1982 winners

• Harry S. Ashmore for Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan, McGraw-Hill.
• John Ehle for The Winter People, Harper & Row.

1983 winners

• Fred Hobson for South-Watching: Selected Essays by Gerald W. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press.
• Roy Hoffman for Almost Family, Dial Press.

1984 winners

• John Egerton for Generations: An American Family, University of Kentucky Press.
• Alice Walker for In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Eudora Welty - Special Lifetime Award.

1985 winners

• James Farmer for Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, Arbor House.
• Peter Taylor for The Old Forest and Other Stories, Dial Press.

1986 winner

• A. G. Mojtabai for Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas, Houghton Mifflin.

1987 winners

• Thomas L. Johnson, and Phillip C. Dunn for A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936, Algonquin Books.
• Pauli Murray for Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, Harper & Row.
• Mary Hood for And Venus is Blue: Stories, Ticknor & Fields.

1988 winners

• Melton A. McLaurin for Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South, University of Georgia Press.
• C. Eric Lincoln for The Avenue: Clayton City, Morrow.

1989 winners

• Melany Neilson for Even Mississippi, University of Alabama Press.
• Madison Smartt Bell for Soldier's Joy, Ticknor & Fields.
• Gloria Naylor for Mama Day, Ticknor & Fields.

1990 winners

• 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.
• Mary Ward Brown for Tongues of Flame, E.P. Dutton.

1992 winners

• Marian Wright Edelman for The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours, Beacon Press.
• Melissa Fay Greene for Praying for Sheetrock, Addison-Wesley.
• Denise Giardina for The Unquiet Earth, W. W. Norton & Company.

1993 winners

• Charles W. Eagles for Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, University of North Carolina Press.
• William Baldwin for The Hard To Catch Mercy, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
• Margaret Rose Gladney for How Am I To Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, University of North Carolina Press.

1994 winners

• John Gregory Brown for Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. for Colored People, Alfred A. Knopf.
• John Dittmer for Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, University of Illinois Press.

1995 winners

• Charles M. Payne for I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, University of California Press.
• Adam Fairclough for Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972, University of Georgia Press.
• Mary Lee Settle for Choices, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

1996 winners

• Michael D'Orso for Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood, Grosset/Putnam.
• Constance W. Curry for Silver Rights, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
• Anthony Grooms for Trouble No More, La Questa.

1997 winners

• John M. Barry for The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, Simon & Schuster.
• Charles Frazier for Cold Mountain, Atlantic Monthly Press.

1998 winners

• John Lewis for Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, with Michael D'Orso, Simon & Schuster.
• Elizabeth Cox for Night Talk, Graywolf Press.

1999 winners

• 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.
• Pam Durban for So Far Back, Picador USA.
• Robert P. "Bob" Moses, Charles E. Cobb Jr. for Radical Equations, Beacon Press.
• Natasha Trethewey for Domestic Work, Graywolf Press.

2002 winners

• Anthony Grooms for Bombingham, Free 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.
• Frank X. Walker for Buffalo Dance, The Journey of York, The University Press of Kentucky.

2005 winners

• Stephanie Camp for Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, University of North Carolina Press.
• Frye Gaillard for Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America, University of Alabama Press.
• Tayari Jones for The Untelling: A Novel, Time Warner Book Group.

2006 winners

• Heather A. Williams for Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, University of North Carolina Press.
• W. Fitzhugh Brundage for The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

2007 winners

• Natasha Trethewey for Native Guard, Houghton Mifflin Co.
• Matthew D. Lassiter for The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics In the Sunbelt South Princeton University Press.

2008 winners

• Joseph Crespino for In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution Princeton University Press.
• Wesley C. Hogan for Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America University of North Carolina Press.

2009 winners

• Areila Gross for What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America Harvard 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

2017 winners

• Patricia Bell-Scott, for The Firebrand and the First Lady, Alfred A. Knopf
• Risa Goluboff, for Vagrant Nation, Oxford University Press

2018 winners

• James Forman Jr., for Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Nancy MacLean, for Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, Viking/Penguin Books

2019 winners

• 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
• Jocelyn Nicole Johnson for My Monticello, Henry Holt & Co.

2023 winners

• Linda Villarosa for Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, Penguin Random House
• Tomiko Brown-Nagin for Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, Pantheon Books