Books On Slavery And Immigration Win Awards

Miami FL

01 April, 2021

8:44 AM

Description

A Miami Times Staff Report Mar 30, 2021 Books about slavery, immigration and drug treatment are among this year's winners of awards presented by the J. Anthony Lukas Project. Established in 1998, the awards recognize excellence in nonfiction that exemplifies the literary commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of the awards' Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake. Jessica Goudeau's "After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America" won the Lukas Book Prize, a $10,000 honor for a socially or politically themed work which demonstrates original reporting. The Mark Lynton History Prize, which also carries a $10,000 honorarium, was given to William G. Thomas III for "A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War." It is the story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history. For over 70 years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation's capital. The story pieces together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives. The award is named after the late Lynton, a business executive and author of "Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee's Memoir of World War II." Lynton was an avid proponent of the writing of history and the Lynton family has sponsored the Lukas Prize Project since its inception. Last week, the Lukas Project also announced two work-in-progress awards, each with a $25,000 prize to help with the book's completion: Emily Dufton, for "Addiction, Inc.: How the Corporate Takeover of America's Treatment Industry Created a Profitable Epidemic" and Casey Parks, for "Diary Of a Misfit." The Lukas Project, based at New York's Columbia University, is named for the late investigative reporter and author who died in 1997. He is probably best known for 1985's "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families." The book is a classic study of race relations, class conflict and school busing in Boston, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white and one working-class Black American. The Miami Times is the largest Black-owned newspaper in the south serving Miami's Black community since 1923. The award-winning weekly is frequently recognized as the best Black newspaper in the country by the National Newspaper Publishers Association.