NEW YORK — Judges for the annual National Book Awards picked history over current events Wednesday and awarded the 2004 nonfiction prize to Ohio State University professor Kevin Boyle's "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age."
Boyle's book, published by Henry Holt & Co., is about the 1920s trial of a black Detroit doctor accused of killing a member of a white mob gathered outside his house. It won over four other finalists, including the federal government's best-selling "The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States" (Norton), a narrative of the panel's investigation into the 2001 attacks.
The fiction award went to Lily Tuck's "The News from Paraguay" (HarperCollins), one of five relatively unknown finalists from New York whose selection over literary icons Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates elicited outrage among some critics -- a reaction that drew the five women into a close if sudden friendship.
"I want to acknowledge my fellow 'unknown' finalists," Tuck said, speaking to 700 people at the $1,000-a-plate banquet in a hotel ballroom near Times Square. "How allied we are, and how supportive we feel toward each other."
Jean Valentine's "Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003" (Wesleyan University Press) won the poetry award, and Pete Hautman's "Godless" (Simon & Schuster) won the young people's literature award.
Winners received $10,000 and a statue. Finalists received $1,000 and a medal.
Boyle's book explores Dr. Ossian and Gladys Sweet's fateful 1925 choice to buy a house in a white Detroit neighborhood at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was a potential political force nationally.
Outraged white neighbors formed an unruly mob in the street outside the house one night shortly after the Sweets moved in. The couple were inside with about 10 friends and relatives, one of whom fired shots into the mob, killing one man and wounding another. Murder charges against Sweet, who was defended by Clarence Darrow, were dropped after the trial ended in a hung jury.
Boyle says the book explores the roots of current segregation.
"There was a moment in time when segregation happened ... in the 1910s and the 1920s. It was a deliberate process," Boyle said after the ceremony. "We think segregation is gone because we don't have separate drinking fountains, but we have continual segregation in American cities."
