The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis has selected “Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America” by Joy-Ann Reid (Mariner Books)as the 2024 Hooks National Book Award winner. The book award will be presented in February of 2026.

“Joy-Ann Reid effectively explores Medgar and Myrlie Evers as partners in love and in civil rights activism. What makes this book so interesting is that it really explores the two of them together, the love story that they had and the impact of their love story in Medgar’s work, but also the work that Myrlie takes up after Medgar is assassinated. We see them working as co-leads in civil rights and that’s not something we normally see, and that’s what makes this such a compelling book,” says Dr. Terrence Tucker, chair and professor in the University of Memphis Department of English and chair of the Hooks National Book Award committee.

“In the push for civil rights, we usually think about it in terms of anger or outrage, but Reid’s book brings love into the center of the civil rights movement … the love for people in addition to the love Medgar and Myrlie had for each other and their family. The power of their love led Medgar and Myrlie Evers to work tirelessly to make our country better.”

Mariner Books, the publisher, described this groundbreaking book as follows: [A] triumphant work of biography that repositions slain Civil Rights pioneer Medgar Evers at the heart of America’s struggle for freedom and celebrates Myrlie Evers’s extraordinary activism after her husband’s assassination in the driveway of their Mississippi home.”

Evers was assassinated June 12, 1963 outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today,” the publisher’s description continued.

Reid is a journalist, author, documentary film producer and social and political commentator. She is the former host of The Reid Report, AM Joy, and “The ReidOut” on MSNBC (a two-time NAACP Award-winning and Emmy nominated nightly news analysis program). Her latest project: The Joy Reid Show, airs on Youtube and on all audio podcast platforms.

Reid has written four books, two of which were New York Times best sellers: “Medgar and Myrlie; the Love Story That Awakened America,” which also won the 2025 NAACP Image Award in the biography category; and “The Man Who Sold America.” Additionally, Reid authored, “Fracture: Barack Obama, The Clintons and the Racial Divide,” and the foreword to “Kamala Harris: Selections from the Official White House Photography.”

A 1991 Harvard graduate with a documentary film concentration, Reid has worked in talk radio for Radio One; was the managing editor of TheGrio.com; was a political operative for America Coming Together in 2004; and worked for the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign.

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 for the national book award were chosen from 47 books that were nominated for the 2024 award. In addition to “Medger & Myrlie” the award finalists were:

  • “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)
  • “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).