Hooks Institute's National Book Award
Celebrating the Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy
The Hooks Institute’s National Book Award is presented annually to a non-fiction book that best furthers understanding of the American Civil Rights Movement and its legacy.
2020 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 2020 Hooks National Book Award:
- Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. (Crown/Penguin Random House)
- The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les Payne & Tamara Payne (W.W. Norton & Company)
- Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, by Marcia Chatelain (Liveright Publishing Corp)
- Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life, by Troy Saxby (University of North Carolina Press)
- The Sword and the Shield, by Peniel Joseph (Basic Books)
Finalists were chosen from 28 books that were nominated for the 2020 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 Institute book award once again represented the vast array of approaches to understanding the civil rights movement and the continuing struggle for racial justice,” said Aram Goudsouzian, Bizot Family Professor of History at the University of Memphis and Hooks Book Award Committee Chair. “The books included academic histories, sociological analyses, personal memoirs and journalistic investigations. The five finalists, however, stood out from the pack. They all offered trenchant commentary on the nation’s struggle for racial justice, furthering our scholarly understanding of American democracy. Just as important, they were all written with fluid, engaging prose that can reach a wide audience. In an era when we are all grappling with enduring legacies of racism, these books are more important than ever.”
Hooks National Book Award Committee
The Hooks Institute extends its gratitude to the 2020 Hooks National Book Award committee
- Aram Goudsouzian, Book Award Chair, UofM Bizot Family Professor of History at the University of Memphis
- Beverly Cross, Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Urban Education at the UofM;
- Charles McKinney, associate professor of History at Rhodes College;
- Ladrica Menson-Furr, UofM associate professor of English and director of African and African American Studies;
- Sharon Stanley, UofM professor of Political Science;
- Terrence Tucker, UofM associate professor of English and coordinator of African American Literature.
About the Award
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 American
Civil Rights Movement and its legacy.
- An award of $1,000 will be made to the author(s).
- The recipient(s) of the award will receive an invitation to deliver an address at the University of Memphis as part of the Hooks Institute Lecture Series during the 2020-21 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
2019 | Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power
By Dr. Simon Balto
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
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.
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
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
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, 2014)
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 2013)
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 2013)
Press Release: On the Corner
2012 | The Black Revolution on Campus
by Martha Biondi (University of California Press 2012)
Press Release: The Black Revolution on Campus
2011 | Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
by Manning Marable (Viking 2011)
Press Release: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
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 2010)
Press Release: Hands on the Freedom Plow