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Society Awards Annual History Prizes
Aram Goudsouzian, above left, receives the McLemore Prize from committee member Robert Fleegler. The Dunbar Rowland Award went to Rosemary Taylor Williams, pictured below from left with 2014-15 MHS president Ann Simmons and MHS secretary/treasurer Elbert R. Hilliard.
The Mississippi Historical Society held its annual meeting March 5-7 in Corinth to honor its 2015 award winners and offer presentations on the meeting’s theme of north Mississippi’s role in the Civil War. Topics included the Battle of Corinth, Unionism, life on the homefront, and slavery.
Rosemary Taylor Williams of Corinth received the Dunbar Rowland Award for her lifelong contributions to the preservation, study, and interpretation of Mississippi history. Williams served on the board of directors of the Civil War Trust, a national organization that has led the way in protecting and preserving Civil War battlefields. As chair of the Siege and Battle of Corinth Commission since 1993, Williams led the way in establishing and funding the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center, a unit of the Shiloh National Military Park. She played a key role in the preservation of historic sites in the area, including the Civil War contraband camp, Oak Home, the Coliseum Civic Center, and many others. Williams served on the MDAH board of trustees for twenty years.
The society’s award for the best Mississippi history book of 2014 went to Aram Goudsouzian, University of Memphis, for his work Down to the Crossroads Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
“In graphic and masterful prose, Aram Goudsouzian depicts the watershed moments of the Meredith March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson in pursuit of black voters’ rights,” said Joyce L. Broussard, McLemore Prize committee chair. “He shines a new light on the heretofore little-told tale of the fitful transition in the Civil Rights Movement’s leadership and politics from an era of
relatively peaceful, non-resistant methods (as personified by the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.) to a more militant stance and posture within the crusade as epitomized by Stoke-ly Carmichael and the emerging Black Power movement. In essence, Down to the Crossroads is the genesis of that unfolding and fateful story.”
Michael Vinson Williams, dean of social sciences at Tougaloo College, received the Willie
D.	Halsell Prize for the best article in the Journal of Mississippi History for his submission “With Determination and Fortitude We Come to Vote: Black Organization and Resistance to Voter Suppression in Mississippi.”
The Elbert R. Hilliard Oral History Award was presented to the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Inc., for the exemplary oral history program involving individuals who were active in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.
Jane Sullivan, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College at Perkinston, received the inaugural William Edward “Bill” Atkinson Mississippi Civil War History Award for her research on the former residents of the Jefferson Davis Confederate Veterans Home who are buried in the Beauvoir Cemetery in Biloxi.
Awards of merit were presented to Thomas E. Parson of the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center and Steven H. Stubbs of Philadelphis. Organizations receiving Awards of Merit included the Alcorn County Genealogical Society, Brice’s Crossroads National Battlefield Commission, the Natchez Trace Parkway, Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors, City of Starkville, Unity Park Committee of Oktibbeha County, Preserve Marshall County & Holly Springs, Inc., Siege and Battle of Corinth Commission,
Tishomingo County Historical & Genealogical Society, Tippah County Historical & Genealogical Society, Tippah County
Development Foundation, and the Tippah County Board of Supervisors.