I love the Benjamin L. Hooks National Book Award. That certainly will not be a surprise to hear from a Professor of English intent on getting people to remember the benefits of reading as part of a full life and not just one’s career. I love the Hooks Book Award because so many of the works offer us a deeper, and often even more inspiring, understanding of the people and events that often get ignored when discussing mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement. Since 2010, the year of Hooks’s death, the Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change has selected one outstanding work of non-fiction as its Hooks National Book Award winner. The Book Award honors works that explore the moments, people, and happenings of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. The award winners offer a portrait of the movement that not only feature prominent leaders like Hooks himself in new and complex ways, but they often move beyond the major figures to the foot soldiers whose courage and dedication sustained the movement through victories and defeats.
Many of the award winners, such as Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, tell the stories of the unsung and unknown civil rights workers and activists. We see the struggle for civil rights occur just as often in small rural towns in the South as we do in well-known cities like Birmingham and Selma. The Hooks Book Award shines a light on the places and people who did hard work of fighting for social justice even after the cameras stopped rolling. Additionally, the award highlights the continuing importance of social justice and expands the sites where social justice work can take place and the methods by which social justice may be achieved. Award-winning books have chronicled the lives of African Americans seeking social justice through economic empowerment, rural settlements, and black theater performances in the Deep South.
The presentation of the Book Award, which also includes a lecture by the author, remains one of the most exciting and dynamic events at the University of Memphis. Its dynamism appears in the event itself, which looks different every time. Whether held at the lively Hattiloo Theater, the historic National Civil Rights Museum, or the University’s beautiful Student Center, the Book Award brings authors to Memphis to stimulate conversations about the national civil rights movement. When authors come in, we bear witness to a gathering of scholars and students exploring new perspectives and underappreciated figures in the fight for social justice. Perhaps most importantly, the event provides an opportunity for community involvement, outreach, and engagement. It encourages a well-informed, well-read public as part of our discussions and as part of our understanding of past and future social justice battles. The Book Award event, then, extends the Hooks Institute’s mission of drawing connections between the university and the community, between the scholarship in the Ivory Tower and the lived experiences of people in the city. As community members add the voices of Memphians, past and present, we remind others that stories in Birmingham and Jackson and Montgomery are also stories in Memphis. In these moments, both groups assess and memorialize the stories found in the book and each other. I celebrate these moments. Hearing the stories of community members who have stories of their own is inspiring. The stories echo forward into the present and remind us how close the past remains.
The echo of the stories we hear at the Book Award event shapes our present and has led to award winners that chronicle the years after the Civil Rights Movement. I am reminded of Hooks’s own words in 1977 that the movement was not yet over: “the Civil Rights Movement is not dead. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.” His belief in an ongoing civil rights movement informs the book award winners whose work covers the period after the traditional years of the Civil Rights Movement and that informs the social justice issues of the twenty-first century. They signal, as Hooks did, that the struggle for social justice did not end with voting rights or civil rights legislation. Nor did the obstacles.
So, some works chronicle the movement’s impact on our contemporary moment, such as Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Others pointedly detail the civil rights issues of our time, whether mass incarceration in Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America or educational inequality in post-Brown v. Board of Education. The books are often rooted in a recovery, interrogation, and celebration of the work that Hooks valued. Indeed, the winners reflect Hooks’s own varied career in his fight for social justice. Some works are consistent with his work in the SCLC and NAACP through non-violent marches and legal cases. Yet other works move beyond these traditional uses of activism to include his agitation for increasing minority owned businesses, or demanding equality in the entertainment industry.
The biographies of journalists Ethel Payne and artist Romare Bearden reveal the importance of news and art to inspire and inform in the face of violent oppression and structural inequity.. Their works, along with Julius Fleming’s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, suggest that there are many paths to social justice and that culture is often is just as important as legislation and elections.
The two best moments for me remain the moment all the submissions arrive in my office and the day the committee sits down to decide on the award winner. The last two years have seen a record number of submissions from first-time authors to Pulitzer Prize winners. They speak to the respect for Hooks’s legacy and the growing prestige of the award itself. This makes deciding a winner incredibly difficult. Thankfully, that task falls to a committee of scholars who read, debate, and celebrate the five finalists. They are lively discussions, combining intellect and emotion, experience with curiosity, and they leave us excited to hear how the public will respond to the choice we ultimately make.
In celebrating the legacy of Benjamin Hooks, especially now in the year he would have turned 100, we not only have a responsibility to honor the man and his legacy, but also the work he supported and that continues to be necessary. While the Institute is committed to intensive study of social justice issues from scholars at the university, the Book Award offers the opportunity to examine the past as a way to understand the present and prepare for the future.
Author Bio: Dr. Terrence T. Tucker is Professor of African American Literature and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock (University Press of Florida, 2018). His current research focuses on the African American middle and upper class in literature and film. He has also published essays on topics ranging from race and pedagogy to post-soul satire as well as the work of Ernest Gaines and Walter Mosley, The Boondocks, and African-American superheroes. He recently co-edited a special issue on journal on Afrofuturism in the College Language Association Journal (CLAJ).
