Love Rage? Readers share 100 books like Rage...

I knew Michelle when she was teaching at Stanford University before she wrote this book, but I didn’t know then how much of the work she’d done. Her book is so profound that when I first read it, I was in Vegas on vacation, and I couldn’t get out of the room because I was so deep into reading her book. I couldn’t get to the great food or the penny slots because she was putting together all the pieces I had read about or heard discussed in different places, and she built a picture of the system of oppression Black people live under in the United States.

She affirmed what I had suspected: that incarceration continues the enslavement of Black people. I called a colleague and said, this book will have more impact than I could making speeches to a thousand people at a time, a hundred times a… show more.

This book deals with the death penalty. The author covers several cases involving people who were on death row and were subsequently found to be innocent.

The book also covers related topics, such as mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, racial bias, prison overcrowding, cruel and unusual sentences for minors, the psychological impact of long-term solitary confinement, and a host of other crime and punishment issues.

I recommend Ginger’s book because it inspired so many college students to go into law as well as young lawyers interested in effecting societal change. In one chapter, Ginger interviews Fay Stender, a source I consulted in writing Stender’s biography. Ginger also interviewed Fay’s law partner Charles Garry about his representation with Stender of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton in the case I consider the trial of the century. Fay’s husband Marvin Stender was also interviewed about his progressive law practice. Ginger’s book, and my interviews of Ann Ginger herself, proved essential to my understanding of the circle of Movement lawyers in the Bay Area to which they all heavily contributed during an extraordinary period of activism from the ‘50s through the ‘70s.     

Charles Garry was a legendary Bay Area criminal defense lawyer from the 1940s through the 1980s, most famous for his aggressive courtroom tactics and for never losing a client to the death penalty. I was fascinated by Garry’s early cases that resulted in establishing a “diminished capacity” defense to murder in California. Garry’s reputation prompted the leadership of the Black Panther Party to reject calls for a black lawyer and instead turn to this white Lefty to represent their co-founder Huey Newton faced with execution for killing a white policeman. Streetfighter in the Courtroom proved a great source for me as I wrote two books on the Newton trial and the biography of Garry’s pioneering female co-counsel in the Newton trial, Fay Stender. 

This great book re-inspired me about Gandhi’s nonviolent and spiritually grounded approach to social justice and liberation.

I first read Gandhi when I was 16. The author digs into Gandhi’s three-level “iceberg” approach: first is “self-purification”—healing, self-care, transforming unwise views and attitudes, cultivating love and compassion; second is “the constructive program”—engaging in community improvement, new ways of doing things, restorative social practices; and only then could a person take part in “satyagraha”—the great marches and protests aimed at liberation from British colonial rule.

The author then applies the approach to current problems in our world. I loved Gandhi’s integration of social justice, healing, service, and spiritual practice and his faith in nonviolence as a way of life, not just a technique—it's a profound teaching.  

A classic, this book was one of the first to challenge prevailing white attitudes about the assimilation and acculturation of Africans and African Americans to life under slavery. Mullin describes how greater levels of assimilation translated into more effective means of protest.

Charles Mills was a giant in contemporary political theory and is perhaps best known for his book The Racial Contract. In his most recent book, Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills interrogates what he calls “racial liberalism” and the racist underpinnings of modern liberal theory. What I think is most remarkable about this book, though, is its further attempt to reconstruct a “radical liberalism” meant to address issues of racial justice. This book has been a major influence on me in the way I think about and imagine the limits and possibilities of liberalism as a tradition.

Black software, McIlwain writes, “refers to the programs we desire and design computers to run. It refers to who designs the program, for what purposes, and what or who becomes its object and data.” The book is a much needed examination of the role that Black entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and users contributed in building the internet.

I love this book because it provides a broad, philosophical backdrop for questions about policing.

We often hear policy recommendations regarding how to improve the plight of the urban poor, but Shelby argues that the central problem is more about the state’s failure to adhere to basic principles of justice. Rampant criminality in impoverished communities can thus be construed as a response to systematic injustice.

This book is a fascinating study of the ways that injustice can limit the range of rational life choices.

Although I love a book that takes you traveling to the past or to foreign lands, sometimes I want to jump into the shoes of a contemporary character and understand their world. This book does just that. 

Starr Carter is a black teenager who lives in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood but attends an elite, mostly white private school. Starr manages to code-switch between her two lives until her childhood friend is shot by the police. 

If you like books about social justice and characters who stand up for what they believe, this is a fantastic read.