Sept. 26, 2025 — The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis has selected the following finalists for the 2024 Hooks National Book Award:
- “Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America” by Aaron Robertson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- “From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle” by Françoise Hamlin and Charles McKinney, Jr. (Vanderbilt University Press)
- “Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America” by Joy-Ann Reid (Mariner Books)
- “Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- “John Lewis: A Life” by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)
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, through scholarly research, best furthers understanding of the American civil rights movement and its legacy.
Finalists were chosen from 47 books that were nominated for the 2024 award.
“The finalists for the Hooks National Book Award are an eclectic, formidable group filled with stories that span the 19th century into the first quarter of the 21st century,” said Dr. Terrence Tucker, Hooks Book Award Chair. “The nominees cast new light on familiar stories such as the impact of civil rights icons Medgar and Myrlie Evers during the Civil Rights Movement while tracing the career of John Lewis before, during and after the movement. These works push audiences to view the Civil Rights Movement as part of a continuum in the fight for emancipation and view this crucial period as part of an ongoing project that directly impacts our present and remains crucial to shaping our future.
The finalists also demonstrate the multiple forms that the struggle for freedom and equality has taken for African Americans. Whether focusing on police violence, liberation theology or utopias, the nominees chart the extensive, varied attempts to create spaces for black survival, prosperity, and resistance. Our finalists treat history as a collaborative endeavor with innovative, informative, and accessible prose and make clear that the unfinished mission can, and must, be accomplished by ordinary citizens performing the extraordinary work of shaping the course of human history. In the search for the beloved community, these finalists cover a gamut of experiences from the founding of all-Black towns to the individual stories of survival in the face of assassination and racism to the contemporary attempts to maintain or recover the gains of the Civil Rights Movement into end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.”
The award winner will be chosen this fall by a panel of judges representing various disciplines and academic institutions in Memphis. The book award winner will speak at a presentation hosted by the Hooks Institute.
Hooks National Book Award Committee
The Hooks Institute extends its gratitude to the 2024 Hooks National Book Award committee. In addition to Tucker, chair of the English Department at the University of Memphis, the committee includes Dr. Daryl Anderson, assistant professor of English at LeMoyne-Owen College; Dr. Brian Kwoba, associate professor of History at the University of Memphis; Dr. Ladrica Menson-Furr, assistant dean of the UofM College of Arts and Sciences and associate professor of English and Dr. Shatavia Wynn, assistant professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at Rhodes College.
For more information, visit memphis.edu/benhooks/programs/book-award.php.
About the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change
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. Contributory support for the Hooks Institute, including funding from individuals, corporations and foundations, is administered through the University of Memphis Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization.
Amy Ruggaber
Assistant Director, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute of Social Change
University of Memphis
901.678.3655
