Back to School List: Government and Citizenship

Yesterday, I posted a list of back to school history books. Today, it’s government and citizenship. Rather than exploring a variety of governments, this list is centered on the system that exists in the United States and actions of citizens.  As a reminder, you’re going to

• request your library to purchase them.
• post about and share them on you socials.
• gift them to young people in your life.
• place them in free little libraries; leave them on trains or bus stops, or in coffee shops.
• hold a book group with the young people in your life. If you’re not comfortable discussing the books, hire a teacher, professor or librarian to do it for you.

We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson, Tonya Bolden. Bloomsbury, 2018.
History texts often teach that the United States has made a straight line of progress toward Black equality. The reality is more complex: milestones like the end of slavery, school integration, and equal voting rights have all been met with racist legal and political maneuverings meant to limit that progress. We Are Not Yet Equal examines five of these moments: The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with Jim Crow laws; the promise of new opportunities in the North during the Great Migration was limited when blacks were physically blocked from moving away from the South; the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to laws that disenfranchised millions of African American voters and a War on Drugs that disproportionally targeted blacks; and the election of President Obama led to an outburst of violence including the death of Black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri as well as the first election of Donald Trump. Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2019.

Just Mercy Adapted for Young Readers: A True Story of the Fight for Justice by Bryan Stevenson. Ember, 2019
Stevenson’s story is one of working to protect basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society–the poor, the wrongly convicted, and those whose lives have been marked by discrimination and marginalization. Through this adaptation, young people of today will find themselves called to action and compassion in the pursuit of justice.

We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba Edited by Tamara Nopper. Haymarket Books, 2021.
What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.

I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

Anarchy Explained to Children written by José Antonio Emmanuel; Illustrated by Fábrica de Estampas; Designed by Imprenta Rescate. Triangle Square, 18 Nov 2025 preorder
Here is a modern book for progressive readers of all ages that includes the prescient 1931 pamphlet, “Anarchy Explained to Children,” by José Antonio Emmanuel writing under the pseudonym Max Bembo, a teacher and anarchist philanthropist who advocated for, among other things, freeing the education of children from the power of the Catholic Church. In the essay he offers to the children of working-class families a simple explanation of liberatory principles and how to put them into practice.

The United States Constitution
In this Interactive Constitution from the National Constitution Center, learn about the text, history, and meaning of the U.S. Constitution from leading scholars of diverse legal and philosophical perspectives. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution

Be well and do good!

Filed under: Book List