Hooks National Book Award
Celebrating the Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy
The Hooks National Book Award is presented annually to a non-fiction book that best furthers understanding of the civil rights movement and its legacy.
2022 Hooks National Book Award Finalists
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis has selected the following finalists for the 2022 Hooks National Book Award:
- Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream by Tiffanie Drayton (Viking/Penguin Random House)
- Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming, Jr. (New York University Press)
- Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership by Dr. Sonya Y. Ramsey (University of Florida Press)
- Progressive Prosecution: Race and Reform in Criminal Justice by Kim Taylor-Thompson and Anthony C. Thompson (New York University Press)
- The Third Reconstruction by Dr. Peniel E Joseph (Basic Books)
- Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement by Thomas E. Ricks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
About the Hooks National Book Award
The Hooks Institute’s National Book Award is presented to a non-fiction book published
in the calendar year that best furthers understanding of the American civil rights
movement and its legacy.
Finalists were chosen from 45 books that were nominated for the 2022 award. The award winner will be chosen this summer by a panel of judges representing various disciplines and academic institutions in Memphis. The book award winner will speak at an event hosted by the Hooks Institute.
“The nominees for the Hooks National Book Award are an exciting group filled with individual and collective stories that capture the courage and sacrifice of well-known and newly recovered figures vital to the ongoing fight for equal rights,” said Dr. Terrence Tucker, Department Chair, University of Memphis Department of English and Hooks Book Award Chair. “These works push audiences to view the Civil Rights Movement as part of a continuum in the fight for emancipation and the dream of a multi-racial democracy that has appeared at certain points in the American experiment."
“Our finalists cover issues of leadership, democracy and criminal justice as central tenets of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th and 21st century. They treat history as a collaborative endeavor, and their works act as the opening of a conversation. The urgent, incisive and accessible prose makes clear that the unfinished mission can, and must, be accomplished by ordinary citizens performing the extraordinary work of shaping the course of human history.”
Hooks National Book Award Committee
- Dr. Terrence Tucker - department chair and associate professor, UofM Department of English
- Dr. Beverly Cross - Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Urban Education, UofM
- Dr. Aram Goudsouzian - UofM Bizot Family Professor of History
- Dr. Charles McKinney - associate professor of History, Rhodes College
- Dr. Ladrica Menson-Furr - assistant dean of the UofM College of Arts and Sciences, associate professor of English, and director of African and African American Studies
- Dr. Ladonna Young - educational consultant and former Hooks Institute board member.
About the Book Award Nomination and Award Process
A panel of judges representing various disciplines and academic institutions in Memphis
awards the annual prize to the book that best furthers understanding of the civil
rights movement and its legacy.- Books focusing on past or current civil rights or social justice issues, leaders, policies, etc. were eligible.
- An award of $1,000 will be made to the author(s).
- The winner of the 2022 Hooks National Book Award will present on their book at the University of Memphis in the 2023-24 Academic Year.
Contact
For questions or comments: Please contact Rorie Trammel, Associate Director of the Hooks Institute, at 901-678-3974 or via email at rtrammel@memphis.edu.
About the Hooks Institute
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute implements its mission of teaching, studying and promoting civil rights and social change through research, education and direct intervention programs. Institute programs include community outreach; funding faculty research initiatives on community issues; implementing community service projects; hosting conferences, symposiums and lectures; and promoting local and national scholarship on civil and human rights. The Hooks Institute is an interdisciplinary center at the University of Memphis. Contributed revenue for the Hooks Institute, including funding from individuals, corporations and foundations, is administered through the University of Memphis Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization.
Past National Book Award Recipients
2021 | Soul City: Race, Equality and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia
By Thomas Healy, Esq.
Metropolitan Books
In 1969, with America’s cities in turmoil and racial tensions high, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick announced an audacious plan: he would build a new city in rural North Carolina, open to all but intended primarily to benefit Black people. Named Soul City, the community secured funding from the Nixon administration, planning help from Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and endorsements from the New York Times and the Today show. Before long, the brand-new settlement – built on a former slave plantation – had roads, houses, a health care center, and an industrial plant. By the year 2000, projections said, Soul City would have fifty thousand residents.
But the utopian vision was not to be. Battered from the left and the right, Soul City was shut down after just a decade. Was it an impossible dream from the beginning? Or a brilliant idea thwarted by prejudice and ignorance? And how might America be different today if Soul City had been allowed to succeed?
2020 | Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
By Marcia Chatelain
Liveright Publishing/W.W. Norton
“Franchise” investigates the untold history of the cooperation among fast-food companies, politicians, civil rights leaders and black entrepreneurs in the years following the 1960s civil rights movement. This untold history looks at how the prevalence of fast-food restaurants in Black communities today resulted from a push by these groups for what they saw as an economical solution to racial disparities in America's Black communities — the franchising of fast-food restaurants in black neighborhoods by Black people. “Franchise” illuminates the power of Black-owned franchises in a larger freedom struggle while also explaining how corporations such as McDonald's have deprived genuine wealth in Black urban communities.
2019 | Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power
By Dr. Simon Balto
University of North Carolina Press
Press Release: Occupied Territory
Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, is a powerful work of history that speaks directly to our current crisis over race and policing. Occupied Territory is meticulous and engaging with conclusions that are provocative and convincing. It informs a national conversation about the racist foundations of the criminal justice system. Balto chronicles how, since the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities such as Chicago, policing served as a brutal form of racial discipline. Despite the protests of Black Chicagoans, those practices continued over the course of the twentieth century.
2018 | An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden
By Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell
Oxford University Press
Press Release: An American Odyssey
An American Odyssey provides a telling biography of the artist Romare Bearden, whose iconic collages conveyed the richness and complexity of African American life in the civil rights era. As Campbell demonstrates, Bearden’s work transcended the visual stereotypes of African Americans. He situated his characters in a deep past, while employing a modernist style that was re-envisioning the black experience.
2017 | Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
By James Forman, Jr.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers
Press Release: Locking Up Our Own
In his remarkable book, Forman argues that the disproportionate impact of long prison sentences on African American communities was not shaped solely by whites, but in part by the exasperation of some African Americans who urgently demanded action to deescalate crime in their communities related to drugs. Forman encourages a candid examination of the forces that created draconian criminal sentences related to drugs to encourage honest and transformative reform of the criminal justice system.
2016 | We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination
By Russell Rickford
Oxford University Press
Press Release: We Are an African People
In the midst of the more well-studied educational changes of the school desegregation era, a handful of "Pan African nationalist" independent black schools emerged as an alternative mechanism for African-American uplift. We Are an African People examines the ideas and motivations behind these autonomous black institutions and places them within a broader discussion about how best to achieve liberation for the next generation of African Americans. Rickford's work expands upon the understanding of a very specific topic within the quest for the intellectual liberation of African-Americans and grapples with very broad questions about education, freedom and the diversity of viewpoints during the civil rights era.
2015 | Eye On the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press
By James McGrath Morris
Amistad/Harper Collins Publishers
Press Release: Eye On the Struggle
Morris' biography excavates the story of Ethel Payne, a journalist whose work for the Chicago Defender during her multi-decade career provided a lens to thousands of African-American readers into the action of the civil rights movement and beyond. Covering the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, interviewing black troops in Vietnam or quizzing multiple presidents during her years at the White House, Payne's career demonstrated the role journalists could play both in helping to build a movement by informing the public and in furthering that movement by putting pointed questions to those in power.
2014 | Stokely: A Life
By Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Civitas Books
Press Release: Stokely: A Life
In the 1960s, Civil Rights activist Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase "Black Power"
with the symbolic image of the raised black fist to embody it. A charismatic, forceful,
young and brilliant intellectual with civil rights rooted in non-violent tactics,
Carmichael became increasingly dissatisfied with racial inequality. This led him to
more militant approaches to achieve political self-determination for African Americans.
The book, Stokely: A Life, winner of the 2014 Benjamin L. Hooks Institute National Book Award, provides an
illuminating profile of Carmichael's journey of disappointments, conflict, and hope
for a more just nation and world.
2013 | How it Feels to be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement
by Ruth Feldstein
Oxford University Press
Press Release: How it Feels to be Free
2013 | On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis
by Daniel Matlin
Harvard University Press
Press Release: On the Corner
On the Corner revisits the volatile moment when African American intellectuals were thrust into the spotlight as indigenous interpreters of black urban life to white America, and examines how three figures--Kenneth B. Clark, Amiri Baraka, and Romare Bearden--wrestled with the opportunities and dilemmas their heightened public statures entailed. Daniel Matlin locates in the 1960s a new dynamic that has continued to shape African American intellectual practice to the present day, as black urban communities became the chief objects of black intellectuals' perceived social obligations.
2012 | The Black Revolution on Campus
by Martha Biondi
University of California Press
Press Release: The Black Revolution on Campus
The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge.
2011 | Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
by Manning Marable
Viking
Press Release: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Manning Marable's acclaimed biography of Malcolm X finally does justice to one of the most influential and controversial figures of twentieth-century American history. Filled with startling new information and shocking revelations, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism as followers of Marcus Garvey through his own work with the Nation of Islam and rise in the world of black nationalism, and culminates in the never-before-told true story of his assassination.
2010 | Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod, Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman
Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner University of Illinois Press
Press Release: Hands on the Freedom Plow
In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.