Professor Martha Davis Honored with 2008 Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award

12.04.08 – Professor Martha Davis’ Bringing Human Rights Home is one of 10 recently published books honored by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America (http://www.myerscenter.org/). As part of national anniversary celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the United Nationals Human Rights Declaration, the Myers Center announced its 24th annual Outstanding Book Awards, selecting the 10 winners from a pool of 400 nominations. The books honored span decades, challenging public memories as well as public cynicism. Their format varies: history, fiction, memoir, contemporary non-fiction, public policy implementation and biography.

The three-volume Bringing Human Rights Home (Praeger/Greenwood Publishing Group 2008) chronicles the history of human rights in the United States from the perspective of domestic social justice. “Our goal in developing this work was to demonstrate that the concept of human rights is not 'foreign,' but is an important part of our nation’s heritage that demands attention,” said Davis, a faculty director of the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy. She is also a former vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.

With coeditors Cynthia Soohoo and Catherine Albisa, Davis examines the political forces and historic events that resulted in the US’ failure to embrace human rights principles at home while actively (albeit selectively) championing and promoting human rights abroad. It then considers the current explosion of human rights activism around issues within the United States and the way human rights is transforming domestic social justice work. The set also chronicles current domestic human rights work, and covers everything from globalization to terrorism and the erosion of civil rights protections that led to a renewed interest in human rights; human rights versus civil rights strategies; and the different ways human rights can support social activism.

“The election of President-Elect Obama was sparked by new hopes, revitalized energies, multiplicities,” said Loretta J. Williams, director of the Myers Center, in announcing this year’s winners. Yet, she adds “maybe not so new,” recalling the late Congresswoman Bella Abzug (subject of one of the winning books) saying over a decade ago that “if we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century — and the economy — around.”

Other 2008 Myers Outstanding Book Awards winners:

Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Doubleday (2008)

Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching. Amistad/HarperCollins (2008)

Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name: A Novel. W.W. Norton & Company (2007)

David Ngaruri Kenney and Philip G. Schrag, Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America. University of California Press (2008)

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me. Public Affairs (2008)

Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim crow and Joe McCarthy Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers. Farrar, Straus, Giroux (2007)

Mica Pollock, Ed., Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race In School. The New Press (2008)

Kai Wright, Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Beacon Press (2008)

Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir. Coffee House Press (2008)