Fugitivism: Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820–1860 by S. Charles Bolton has won the 2020 Booker Worthen Literary Prize.
Like enslaved people all over the South, those in the Lower Mississippi Valley left home at night for clandestine parties or religious meetings, sometimes “laying out” nearby for a few days or weeks. Some of them fled to New Orleans and other southern cities where they could find refuge in the subculture of slaves and free blacks living there, and a few attempted to live permanently free in the swamps and forests of the surrounding area. Fugitives also tried to return to eastern slave states to rejoin families from whom they had been separated. Some sought freedom on the northern side of the Ohio River; others fled to Mexico for the same purpose.
Fugitivism provides a wealth of new information taken from advertisements, newspaper accounts, and court records. It explains how escapees made use of steamboat transportation, how urban runaways differed from their rural counterparts, how enslaved people were victimized by slave stealers, how conflicts between black fugitives and the white people who tried to capture them encouraged a culture of violence in the South, and how runaway slaves from the Lower Mississippi Valley influenced the abolitionist movement in the North.
The Booker Worthen Literary Prize is awarded each year to the best work, fiction or non-fiction, by an author living in Arkansas. The Prize was established in 1999 in the memory of William Booker Worthen, who was a member of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) Board of Trustees for twenty-two years, as well as part of the Worthen Bank empire. The award is funded in part by interest from an endowment for the award donated by the Worthen family.
S. Charles Bolton also won the Booker Worthen Prize in 1999 for Arkansas, 1800–1860: Remote and Restless.
Other University of Arkansas Press books that have won the award are:
The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804 by Morris S. Arnold
Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 by Grif Stockley
Promises Kept by Sidney McMath
Turn away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation by Elizabeth Jacoway
Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present by Grif Stockley
Fiat Flux: The Writings of Wilson R. Bachelor, Nineteenth-Century Country Doctor and Philosopher by William D. Lindsey
Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy by Kenneth C. Barnes
Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819–1970 by Mildred Diane Gleason
Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926–1963 by James L. Moses