These are books we recommend to help ground our collective thinking on the "Stop Cop City" movement here in Atlanta and on the larger movements to end prisons and policing and fight environmental racism.
Click here to read Charis' statement about Cop City and the Forest Defenders.
Read Color of Change's report on Police Foundations including the Atlanta Police Foundation here.
An instant national best seller
A persuasive primer on police abolition from two veteran organizers
"One of the world's most prominent advocates, organizers and political educators of the abolitionist] framework." --NBCNews.com on Mariame Kaba
"Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you're going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to."
The companion text to one of the most popular toolkits for ending interpersonal violence.
A riveting primer on the growing trend of surveillance, monitoring, and control that is extending our prison system beyond physical walls and into a dark future--by the prize-winning author of Understanding Mass Incarceration
If police are the problem, what’s the solution?
From New York Times Bestselling Author Mariame Kaba, a poignant, beautifully illustrated story of a little girl's worries when her Mama goes to jail, and the love that bridges the distance between them.
Even though I'm away,
My love is always here to stay.
See you soon, Queenie.
Love, Mama
Bookstagang Best Books of the Year, Bookstagang
Best Social Justice, Black Kidlit AwardsThe first children's book to feature material from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, this beautiful picture book will engage hearts and minds as it introduces children to the guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Collaboration playfully explores the various ways we work and play with one another and the world around us. Dancing between poetry and narrative, the story rhythmically demonstrates how collaboration shapes our lives.
A political vision for a future ripe with alternatives to imprisonment and punishment.
An accessible guide for activists, educators, and all who are interested in understanding how the prison system oppresses communities and harms individuals.
A groundbreaking new vision for public safety that overturns more than 200 years of fear-based discrimination, othering, and punishment
Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.
An incisive examination of how growth-at-all-costs planning and policy have exacerbated inequality and racial division in Atlanta.
Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance.
The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration
One of the New York Times' 6 New Paperbacks to Read
Now in paperback and with new material, a 2021 Kirkus Best Book of the year in both Nonfiction and Current Events, the book Naomi Klein called: “a triumph of political imagination and a tremendous gift to all movements struggling towards liberation.”
A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.
The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism
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“The age of transnational humanities has arrived.” According to Steven Salaita, the seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian Studses and American Indian studies have more in common than one may think.
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How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming “Water is life”
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century.
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From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.
New evidence has come to light proving how far the FBI monitored its citizens throughout the Cold War and beyond.
When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged.
An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change
Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families.
Property will cost us the earth
A critically acclaimed analysis of anti-Muslim racism from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in a fully revised and expanded second edition
Over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1981 nearly two dozen children were unspeakably murdered in Atlanta despite national attention and outcry; they were all Black. James Baldwin investigated these murders, the Black administration in Atlanta, and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes.
In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice.
For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 197
In the age of decentralization, instant communications, and the subordination of locality to the demands of a globalizing market, contemporary cities have taken on place-less or a-geographic characters. They have become phantasmagorical landscapes. Atlanta, argues Charles Rutheiser, is in many ways paradigmatic of this generic urbanism.
In "There's Something In The Water", Ingrid R. G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities.
This damning account of the forces that have hijacked progress on climate change shares a bold vision of what it will take, politically and economically, to face the existential threat of global warming head-on.
It has become impossible to deny that the planet is warming, and that governments must act.
It is beyond debate that human beings are the primary cause of climate change. Many think of climate change as primarily a scientific, economic, or political problem, and those perspectives inform Kevin O'Brien's analysis. But O'Brien argues that we should respond to climate change first and foremost as a case of systematic and structural violence.
Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do about It (Paperback)
Like a sequel to the prescient warnings of urbanist Jane Jacobs, Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove reveals the disturbing effects of decades of insensitive urban renewal projects on communities of color. For those whose homes and neighborhoods were bulldozed, the urban modernization projects that swept America starting in 1949 were nothing short of an assault.
Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene
This book presents a timely perspective that puts working-class people at the forefront of achieving sustainability.
A crucial indictment of widely embraced alternatives to incarceration that exposes how many of these new approaches actually widen the net of punishment and surveillance
But what does it mean--really--to celebrate reforms that convert your home into your prison?
--Michelle Alexander, from the foreword
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the prison industrial complex. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics for a new understanding of how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity.
Let's begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.
One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. This volume collects the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The stories and statistical information in each comic book is thoroughly researched and documented.
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L.
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From broken-window policing in Detroit to prison-building in Appalachia, exploring the expansion of the carceral state and its oppressive social relations into everyday life
Prison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life.
The world around us is a wreck. When there's so much conflict around the country and around the corner, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, powerless, and helpless. What can one person do to make a difference?
A brilliant overview of America's defining human rights crisis and a "much-needed introduction to the racial, political, and economic dimensions of mass incarceration" (Michelle Alexander)
Explores the reality of US police violence against Black, Brown and Indigenous communities.
Finalist for the 2018 National Council on Crime & Delinquency's Media for a Just Society Awards
Nominated for the 49th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction) A 2017 Washington Post Notable Book A Kirkus Best Book of 2017