Social Justice Books

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

The Teachers March! How Selma’s Teachers Changed History

Reviewed by Jenice L. View Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: Overall, this book is very well researched and cited. It centers Black people, their strategic thinking, and their agency at a time when the national story of the Black freedom movement was being complicated by heightened white supremacist violence, rising resistance to the […]

Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Reviewed Source:  Zinn Education Project Book Author: Horace “Julian” Bond was an influential social justice activist, politician, and visionary who is best known as one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). For over two decades, he taught a popular class at the University of Virginia on the history of the Civil […]

Celebrate People’s History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution

Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: It’s easy to lose oneself in this rich collection of more than 100 posters edited by Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative member Josh MacPhee. The beautiful posters, representing a range of artists and events in U.S. and world history, were originally posted in public spaces to counter the “endless barrage of […]

Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race

Reviewed by Makai Kellogg Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race is the book we’ve been waiting for! The team (Megan Madison, Jessica Ralli, and Isabel Roxas) did an incredible thing: they explained race and racism to young children. Not only did they do it in a few […]

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 […]