Overview
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 1, 2023
Inspired by OAH President Darlene Clark Hine’s call in her 2002 OAH presidential address for more research on the origins of the civil rights movement in the period before 1954, the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award is given annually by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best book by a historian on the civil rights struggle from the beginnings of the nation to the present.
Each entry must be published during the period January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2023.
One copy of each entry, clearly labeled “2024 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award Entry,” must be mailed directly to the committee members listed below. Each committee member must receive all submissions postmarked by October 1, 2023.
Bound page proofs may be used for books to be published after October 1, 2023 and before January 1, 2024. If a bound page proof is submitted, a bound copy of the book must be received by each committee member and postmarked no later than January 7, 2024.
Please mail submissions to the committee members listed below:
Max Krochmal, Chair
Department of History
Liberal Arts, Room 135
University of New Orleans
2000 Lakeshore Drive
New Orleans LA, 70148
Email to provide title(s) you will submit for consideration so the committee can verify that all books have been received: [email protected]
Felipe Hinojosa
Baylor University
Tidwell 205
One Bear Place #97306
Waco TX 76798
Mia Bay
University of Pennsylvania
Department of History
College Hall 209C
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6379
2023
Christina Greene, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment
2022
Mia Bay, University of Pennsylvania, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
2021
Johanna Fernández, Baruch College of the City University of New York, The Young Lords: A Radical History (The University of North Carolina Press)
Honorable Mention: Quito J. Swan, University of Massachusetts Boston, Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida)
2020
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership (The University of North Carolina Press)
2019
Martha S. Jones, The Johns Hopkins University, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press)
2018
Ula Yvette Taylor, University of California, Berkeley, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press)
2017
Russell Rickford, Cornell University, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination(Oxford University Press)
Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Hinton, Harvard University, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press)
2016
Tanisha C. Ford, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul(University of North Carolina Press)
2015
N. D. B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (The University of Chicago Press)
2014
Susan D. Carle, American University, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880–1915 (Oxford University Press)
2013
Andrew W. Kahrl, Marquette University, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (Harvard University Press)
2012
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, University of Virginia, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press)
2011
Chad L. Williams, Hamilton College, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (University of North Carolina Press)
2010
Beryl Satter, Rutgers University at Newark, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America(Metropolitan Books)
2009
Chris Myers Asch, U.S. Public Service Academy, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (The New Press)
2008
Michael Honey, University of Washington, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (W.W. Norton & Company)
Finalist
Kent Germany, University of South Carolina, New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for a Great Society(University of Georgia Press)
Finalist
Laurie Green, University of Texas, Austin, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press)
2007
Thomas F. Jackson, University of North Carolina Greensboro, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press)
2006
Matthew J. Countryman, University of Michigan, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Honorable Mention: Emilye Crosby, State University of New York, Geneseo, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (University of North Carolina Press)
2005
Nikhil Pal Singh, University of Washington, Seattle, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press)
2004
Robert Rodgers Korstad, Duke University, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-twentieth Century South (University of North Carolina Press)
Barbara Ransby, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision(University of North Carolina Press)
2003
J. Mills Thornton III, University of Michigan, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (University of Alabama Press)
Finalists for the inaugural year (2003) of the award are:
Greta De Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (University of North Carolina Press)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City Lights)
Barbara Mills, “Got My Mind Set on Freedom” Maryland’s Story of Black and White Activism, 1663–2000 (Heritage Books, Inc.)
Jerald E. Podair, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (Yale University Press)
Mark Robert Schneider, “We Return Fighting”: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age (Northeastern University Press)
John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Belnkap Press of Harvard University Press)