100 books like Equality's Call

In May 1963, three thousand African American children allowed themselves to be arrested in Birmingham, Alabama to protest segregation. The youngest, Audrey Faye Hendricks, was an elementary school student. This picture book biography tells the story of how she came to march with a bunch of high schoolers and about the bravery she had to summon up for her stay in jail.

The First Step tells an important and lesser-known story about Sarah Roberts, a schoolgirl who was not allowed to attend school in Boston in 1847 because of her skin color. Sarah and her family persisted by fighting this injustice; they took the City of Boston to court! Roberts v. City of Boston was the first case to challenge the United States’ legal system to outlaw segregation in schools. The Roberts family lost the battle, but their case was the first step toward desegregating schools. It’s important for children to learn that even if you don’t win, it’s vital to speak up and fight against injustice and that every step forward counts!

A cheerful how-to book that prepares kids for what they’re likely to encounter when they participate in a public protest. The text is spare and good for reading aloud. It has very specific advice—“If you’re going to a march, you are going to want a sign. A recycled pizza box works well.” The book stays true to a kid’s point of view; when it describes the speeches that are likely to happen, it warns, “It’s possible this part will get boring.” The illustrations, which show four different families participating in a march, add another level to the narration. Kids can follow each family’s experience through close examination of the pictures.

“Mommy, do I have to sit by her?”

My kid can be a real jerk. He picks a genre of child and decides they’re terrible. He’s been horrified by the existence of girls, boys, toddlers, big kids, and human babies. It’s straight-up bigotry, and it’s not okay with me. I’ve preached and preached on sharing space and being nice. Each Kindness doesn’t preach. We stand in the main character’s shoes as she decides who deserves kindness and who doesn’t. We feel the consequences.

At the most basic level, this is a history book that describes the evolution of voting rights in the United States. But it also yields a deeper lesson—that democracy is not a static thing; it is a continually evolving set of practices that each generation of Americans has updated. The book is ultimately encouraging about the potential of American democracy to renew itself and reminds us that democracy is something we choose, not something we are given. This is not a page-turner but for those who think that the struggle over voting rights is a modern development, the layers of detail will help form a more nuanced and richer picture.

Dick J. Reavis was a white teenager from Texas when he joined the Civil Rights movement in 1965. If White Kids Die is his clear-eyed, unsentimental memoir of his experiences in Alabama for the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee. It’s a fascinating, grassroots view from a foot soldier of the movement, someone far removed for the glamorous leadership positions.

Following his stint with SNCC, Reavis later joined SDS and became a prominent anti-war protester in Austin. During his time in the Movement, Reavis endured beatings, jailings, denunciations, and poverty. All of that, as it turned out, was good preparation for his eventual career: a life in journalism. He has since become a legendary journalist in Texas, famed for his tough and daring reporting. He once told me: “I knew Spanish, knew how to live poor, knew how to lie to bosses."

This book, published first in 1965 and then revised and reissued, was required reading when I was in graduate school. With this intellectual history of women’s suffrage, Kraditor sparked my interest in how ideas spur and shape political and social movements. Arguments, tactics, and strategies originate in the ideas of participants, and these ideas have consequences for how and what is eventually achieved. My favorite chapter explained the two kinds of arguments suffragists used. The argument from “justice” asserted women’s equal humanity with men, while the argument from “expediency” affirmed the benefits of extending women’s domestic caretaking into politics. 

My takeaway was that movements need multiple arguments to convince different constituencies to join and support their cause. Kraditor refused to whitewash the women’s suffrage movement and recounted how white, middle-class, native-born women also used ethnocentric and racist arguments to claim access to the ballot. 

Alice Paul is nearly as obscure as Gandhi is famous, but not because she deserves to be. Paul led the American suffrage movement during its final decade, from 1910 to 1919, when the nineteenth amendment was finally passed. Claiming Power is the best biography out there about the underappreciated Paul.  Zahniser and Fry detail the life of this indefatigable activist, who changed the suffrage movement from an often “ladylike,” deferential campaign to an unapologetically confrontational crusade. My own book emerged from a desire to tell Paul’s story as an example of nonviolent activism at work, because she is rarely understood in this context.  But make no mistake about it, Paul was a nonviolent leader of the first order.   

All authors regretfully leave some things out of their books. If I had written a seventh chapter to mine, it would have focused on Indian feminists like Sarojini Naidu and Herabai and Mithan Tata who conducted a full-throttled campaign for the British Parliament to endorse women’s political rights in the 1919 Government of India Act. Fortunately, Mukherjee’s book tells this story in compelling detail. Based on research into previously ignored sources, this book follows Indian feminists’ battles as they pressed for women’s suffrage, initially within the constraints of the British empire and later, as anticolonial battles intensified, side-by-side with Gandhi and other nationalists fighting for Indian self-determination.

Goldsmith vividly recreates the life and times of Woodhull, a shrewd manipulator who traded on her physical beauty and her intellect to run a successful brokerage firm after the Civil War. Woodhull, along with her sister Tennessee Claflin, used some of her profits to publish a women’s rights newspaper that supported suffrage and other women’s rights causes. Stanton and Anthony, initially intrigued by her keen business sense and her suffrage commitment, soon shunned her for her radical views on sexuality. Woodhull pushed all sorts of boundaries designed to contain women, even political ones--she ran for president in 1872.