Social Justice | Arlington Public Library

1) Evicted: poverty and profit in the American city

Author

Desmond, Matthew

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"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...

2) Invisible Americans: the tragic cost of child poverty

Author

Description

"By official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government...

3) Poisoned water: how the citizens of Flint, Michigan, fought for their lives and warned the nation

Author

Cooper, Candy J

Description

Flint, Michigan had been built up, then abandoned, by General Motors. In 2014, as part of a plan to save money, government officials decided that Flint would temporarily switch its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Within months, many residents broke out in rashes. Children stopped growing. Some people were hospitalized with mysterious illnesses; others died. Despite the murky, foul-smelling liquid pouring from the city's faucets, officials...

4) The undocumented Americans

Author

Cornejo Villavicencio, Karla

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.

“Karla’s book sheds light on people’s personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be heard.”—Selena Gomez
FINALIST FOR THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD...

5) What the eyes don't see: a story of crisis, resistance, and hope in an American city

Author

Hanna-Attisha, Mona

Description

"The dramatic story of the signature environmental disaster of our time and an inspiring tale of scientific resistance by a relentless physician who stood up to power. Flint was already a troubled city in 2014 when the state of Michigan--in the name of austerity--shifted the source of its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Soon after, citizens began complaining about the water that flowed from their taps--but officials rebuffed them,...

6) Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

Author

Hill, Marc Lamont

Description

Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the United States following the death of Michael Brown revealed something far deeper than a passionate display of age-old racial frustrations; they unveiled a public chasm that has been growing for years, as America has consistently and intentionally denied significant segments of its population access to full freedom and prosperity.

In Nobody, scholar and journalist Marc Lamont Hill presents a powerful

...

7) One person, no vote: how voter suppression is destroying our democracy

Author

Anderson, Carol

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

As featured in the documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy

Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
An NPR Politics Podcast Book Club Choice
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by:
Washington Post * Boston Globe * NPR* Bustle * BookRiot * New York Public Library

From...

8) stealing democracy the new politics of voter suppr

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9) Uncounted: the crisis of voter suppression in the United States

Author

Daniels, Gilda R

Description

"An answer to the assault on voting rights--crucial reading in advance of the 2020 presidential election. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is considered one of the most effective pieces of legislation the United States has ever passed. It enfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters, particularly in the American South, and drew attention to the problem of voter suppression. Yet in recent years there has been a continuous assault on access to the ballot...

10) Our time is now: power, purpose, and the fight for a fair America

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From New York Times bestselling author of Lead From The Outside and political leader Stacey Abrams, a blueprint to end voter suppression, empower our citizens, and take back our country.
"With each page, she inspires and empowers us to create systems that reflect a world in which all voices are heard and all people believe and feel that they matter." —Kerry Washington
A recognized expert on

...

11) One person, no vote: how not all voters are treated equally

Author

Anderson, Carol

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively...

12) Flesh & blood so cheap: the Triangle fire and its legacy

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Provides a detailed account of the disastrous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers in 1911, and examines the impact of this event on the nation's working conditions and labor laws.

13) Thanks to Frances Perkins: fighter for workers' rights

Author

Hopkinson, Deborah

Description

Sometimes, one moment changes a person's life. And that person goes on to change other lives. That's what happened to Frances Perkins. After she witnessed the 1911 catastrophic fire at the Triangle Waist Company, in which one hundred and forty-six people died, she devoted her life to improving conditions for workers. Frances became the first woman to serve in a president's cabinet. As Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped...

14) Strike!: the farm workers' fight for their rights

Author

Brimner, Larry Dane

Description

A history of Cesar Chavez and the farm workers movement.

15) The radium girls: the dark story of America's shining women

Author

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Description

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously...

16) White trash: the 400-year untold history of class in America

Author

Isenberg, Nancy

Formats:

Book, Audiobook on CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

"A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party,"--NoveList.

17) His truth is marching on: John Lewis and the power of hope

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Description

"John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson...

18) Voices from the Rust Belt

Description

"Where is America's Rust Belt? It's not quite a geographic region but a linguistic one, first introduced as a concept in 1984 by Walter Mondale. In the modern vernacular, it's closely associated with the "Post-Industrial Midwest," and includes Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, as well as parts of Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York. The region reflects the country's manufacturing center, which, over the past forty years, has been in decline. In the...

19) The black and the blue: a cop reveals the crimes, racism, and injustice in America's law enforcement

Author

Horace, Matthew

Description

Matthew Horace was an officer at the federal, state, and local level for 28 years working in every state in the country. Yet it was after seven years of service when Horace found himself face-down on the ground with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer, that he fully understood the racism seething within America's police departments. Using gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts garnered by interviews...

20) Chokehold: policing black men

Author

Description

"Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style,...