Books about racial inequality in U.S. higher education are the 2025 recipients of the Lillian Smith Book Awards, administered by the University of Georgia Libraries to honor books dedicated to social justice issues.
This year’s honorees are: 
- A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, by Crystal R. Sanders, and
- Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and the University of Georgia in the Twentieth Century, by Robert Cohen.
Both books were published by The University of North Carolina Press and both explore how the deliberately slow integration of public school has contributed to ongoing racial inequality in American higher education.
Sanders, an associate professor at Emory University, and Cohen, a former faculty member at UGA who currently works at New York University, will be recognized during an award ceremony on Sept. 30 at the Georgia Center for the Book, hosted in partnership with the Southern Regional Council and UGA's Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The ceremony is free and open to the public.
In A Forgotten Migration, Sanders recounts the challenges Southern Black graduate students faced before the passage of Brown v. Board of Education. She details the journey to the North, Midwest, and West many students took to go to schools outside of the South, and the personal and financial hardships that arose along the way. Through these narratives, Sanders exposes the deliberately slow pace of school integration and the systematic underfunding of Black public colleges—both of which have contributed to persistent racial disparities in American higher education.
Sanders serves as associate professor of African American studies at Emory University, and she previously held the position of director of the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University, Alongside her accolades for several features in journal publications throughout the years, her first book, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle, received the 2017 Critics Choice Award and New Scholar’s Book Award from the American Educational Research Association.
Cohen, a former associate professor in the UGA’s departments of social science education and history, currently serves as history and social studies professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. His research primarily focuses on student protest, free speech, and the Black Freedom Movement in the 1960s. Cohen’s works have received accolades from Choice Magazine and The Los Angeles Times. “The Legacy of ‘All Deliberate Speed’” co-written with Pedro Noguera, was selected as one of the best educational commentaries in the past 25 years by Education Week.
In Confronting Jim Crow, Cohen analyzes Black and white student, faculty, and administration perspectives of the University of Georgia during its desegregation efforts, showcasing the anti-Black stance of the institution at the time. He goes beyond the surface-level narrative of the university’s 1961 integration, details the desegregation riot of the same year, and highlights the role of student activism to provide an exploration into the university’s involvement in campus integration, and its lasting influence on campus culture today.
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 so many others.
The Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library has administered the program since 2004 along with co-sponsor the Georgia Center for the Book.
For more information about the Lillian Smith Book Awards, visit www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/lilliansmith/.