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Tags Share Timothy B. Tyson received the 2018 RFK Book Award for The Blood of Emmett Till. In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public…

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Tags Share Peter Edelman received the 2018 RFK Book Award for Not a Crime to Be Poor. As former staffer to Robert F. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws…

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Tags Share Matthew Desmond received the 2017 RFK Book Award for Evicted. In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding…

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Tags Share David Maraniss received the 2016 RFK Book Award for Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story. It’s 1963 and Detroit is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry Ford II; influential labor leader Walter Reuther; Motown’s founder Berry…

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Tags Share Andrew Maraniss received the 2015 RFK Book Award for Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South. This fast-paced, richly detailed biography, based on more than eighty interviews, digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated and profound story of sports pioneering than we’ve come…

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Tags Share Miriam Pawel received the 2015 RFK Book Award for The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, a biography of the United Farm Workers leader who transformed the landscape of labor rights in America and who forged a lasting partnership with Robert F. Kennedy. Miriam Pawel is an author, journalist and independent scholar who has spent…

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Tags Share Thomas Healy received the 2014 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for The Great Dissent, a history of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s landmark dissent in Abrams v. United States, which gave rise to the robust First Amendment that Americans know today. Thomas Healy is a professor of law at Seton Hall…

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Tags Share John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell received the 2014 RFK Book Award for March: Book One. Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to the halls of…

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Tags Share The 2013 RFK Book Award Winner is The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, by Joseph E. Stiglitz. Joseph E. Stiglitz is a University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Co-Chair of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Co-President of the…

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Tags Share The 2012 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Winner was presented to Kathryn Sikkink for The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, which forcefully makes the case for the necessity and efficacy of prosecuting international heads of state for human rights violations. Kathryn Sikkink is a Regents Professor and the…

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Tags Share The 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award was presented to Michael Lewis for The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, which describes the escalating U.S. housing bubble in the 2000s and subsequent financial crisis of 2007-8. Michael Lewis is an author and financial journalist. Lewis has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair…

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