Books chronicling the suppression of Black literacy in the American South and highlighting the leadership of Black women in battling for human rights around the globe are the 2026 Lillian Smith Book Awards, recognizing the best writing on social justice in the United States.
The 2026 awards, administered by the University of Georgia Libraries, recognize:
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Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy (Yale University Press), by Derek W. Black
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Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton & Company), by Keisha N. Blain
Black and Blain, who are both university professors, will be honored at an award ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 3, as part of the annual Decatur Book Festival, hosted in partnership with the Southern Regional Council and the DeKalb County Public Library/Georgia Center for the Book. The ceremony is free and open to the public.
In Without Fear, Blain examines the pivotal contributions of Black women at the forefront of national and international movements for civil and human rights. She details the stories of well-known activists, like Ida B. Wells and Lena Horne, as well as the not-so-well-known activists, such as Pearl Sherrod and Marguerite Cartwright. Blain traces how historical experiences of oppression drove Black women toward action and how they emerged as influential, if often unacknowledged, leaders in global human rights movements.
Blain serves as a professor of history and Africana studies at Brown University and is an affiliated faculty member in American studies and in the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. She is the recipient of the 2018 First Book Award from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the 2019 Darlene Clarke Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians for her debut book, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Four Hundred Souls, which Blain co-edited, was shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction.
Dangerous Learning examines the long history of the resistance to Black literacy in the American South, spanning the pre-Civil War period, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Black outlines how literacy and education were viewed as sources of potential rebellion among enslaved people, leading to, at times, violent suppression of efforts to educate Black individuals. The book chronicles how schools for Black students went underground and educators were vilified, as Southern politicians used censorship as a tool to prevent anti-slavery literature from spreading in the South. The book narrates the persistent anti-Black literacy movement beyond Reconstruction and Jim Crow, revealing echoes of historic struggles in our current culture on public education and access to knowledge.
Black, a former Education Project staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, currently serves as the Carolina Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, where he directs the university’s Constitutional Law Center. His current research focuses on the intersection of constitutional law and public education, and his works have been featured in outlets like USA Today, Time, and The Washington Post. His second book, Schoolhouse Burning, sounded the alarm on the troubling trends in education policy, including declining public investment in schools and the rise of voucher and charter campaigns, arguing that these shifts pose a serious threat to democratic institutions.
The Lillian Smith Book Awards, named after the acclaimed author of the controversial 1944 novel “Strange Fruit”, recognize works that examine issues of race, social justice, civil and human rights, the education and socialization of young people, breaking silence among repressed groups and matters that are significant to the changing South. Established in 1968 by the Southern Regional Council after Smith’s death, the awards have recognized literary and academic works from activist John Lewis, novelists Tayari Jones and Eudora Welty, poet Natasha Trethewey, academic Henry Louis Gates Jr., and many more.
For more information about the Lillian Smith Book Awards, visit www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/lilliansmith/.