2025 Lillian Smith Book Awards

Join us to celebrate the 2025 Lillian Smith Book Award winners! This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

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The 2025 winners are:

Robert Cohen, Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and the University of Georgia in the Twentieth Century

Crystal R. Sanders, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs

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About the Lillian Smith Book Award:

The Southern Regional Council established the Lillian Smith award shortly after Smith's death in 1966. Internationally acclaimed as author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith was one of most liberal and outspoken of white, mid-twentieth century Southern writers on issues of social and racial injustice. When other Southern liberals were charting a cautious course on racial change, Smith boldly and persistently called for an end to segregation. For such boldness, she was often scorned by more moderate southerners, threatened by arsonists, and denied the critical attention she deserved as a writer. Yet she continued to write and speak for improved human relations and social justice throughout her life.

In 2004, the Southern Regional Council entered into a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries to administer the award in partnership with the Dekalb County Public Library’s Georgia Center for the Book.

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About the Books:

Since the onset of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, America has grappled with its racial history, leading to the removal of statues and other markers commemorating pro-slavery sympathizers and segregationists from public spaces. Some of these white supremacist statues had stood on or near college and university campuses since the Jim Crow era, symbolizing the reluctance of American higher education to confront its racist past. In Confronting Jim Crow, Robert Cohen explores the University of Georgia’s long history of racism and the struggle to overcome it, shedding light on white Georgia’s historical amnesia concerning the university’s role in sustaining the Jim Crow system. By extending the historical analysis beyond the desegregation crisis of 1961, Cohen unveils UGA’s deep-rooted anti-Black stance preceding formal desegregation efforts. Through the lens of Black and white student, faculty, and administration perspectives, this book exposes the enduring impact of Jim Crow and its lingering effects on campus integration.

A Forgotten Migration tells the little-known story of “segregation scholarships” awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education era. Under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, decades earlier, southern states could provide graduate opportunities for African Americans by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. Most did neither and instead paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education. Crystal R. Sanders examines Black graduate students who relocated to the North, Midwest, and West to continue their education with segregation scholarships, revealing the many challenges they faced along the way. Students that entered out-of-state programs endured long and tedious travel, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation, and homesickness. With the passage of Brown in 1954, segregation scholarships began to wane, but the integration of graduate programs at southern public universities was slow. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.