Social Justice Books

Critically reviewed selection of multicultural and social justice books for children, young adults, and educators.

We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility

Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: Marc Lamont Hill’s newest book is small and urgent. Focused on the racist roots of the 2020 pandemic and uprising, it is a book about right now, written right now. Hill writes, “It’s not enough just to recount the things that have happened in this crazy year of 2020. […]

Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice

Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: This essential handbook offers a cornucopia of stories, strategies, campaigns, and lessons for making Black lives matter at school. Denisha Jones, early childhood educator and Sarah Lawrence College professor, and Seattle teacher and Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian are not distant editors picking and choosing readings from afar. They […]

Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson

Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: Paul Robeson was a towering figure in the 20th century. A brilliant scholar, athlete, singer, stage and film actor, activist, and revolutionary — and almost entirely erased from the curriculum, with a perfunctory sentence or two in U.S. history textbooks. This new graphic novel about Robeson’s life should be […]

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks: Young Readers Edition

Review Source: Zinn Education Project Book Author: Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress performed a single act that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and birthed the modern Civil Rights Movement, Jeanne Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks’ politics and decades of activism. She shows readers how […]

No Voice Too Small: Fourteen Young Americans Making History

Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: Now it is our time. Our new generation will not give up this sacred struggle. It is for our lives, for all of our relations. These ending lines from the poem “Jasilyn Charger: Water Protector” by Joseph Bruchac in No Voice Too Small offer a glimpse into the rich simplicity of […]