196 books match the query 'Activism & Social Justice' and 17 start with a

cover of A Bright Light of Hope: The Elizabeth Peratrovich Story

A Bright Light of Hope

The Elizabeth Peratrovich Story

Annie Boochever

University of Alaska Press, 2026

No one expected the girl from a small town in Alaska to make history, but Elizabeth Peratrovich saw discrimination and refused to stay silent. Fairness became the driving force of her life. She helped change Alaska so everyone, no matter what race, would be treated equally under the law. This is her story.

A Bright Light of Hope: The Elizabeth Peratrovich Story is the first picture biography for young people that tells the true story of the remarkable Alaska Native woman whose fight, alongside other Alaska leaders, guaranteed equal treatment under Alaska law, regardless of race. It was a right that took the rest of the country nearly twenty more years to realize with the US Civil Rights Act of 1964. Beautifully illustrated by Yup’ik artist Apay’uq Moore and adapted from Fighter in Velvet Gloves: Alaska Civil Rights Hero Elizabeth Peratrovich for grade school students, A Bright Light of Hope is just that—a light of hope. Published at a time when stories of Indigenous people are being actively suppressed by the federal government, the Elizabeth Peratrovich story brings hope to young people that they can make real change in their communities.

An accompanying study guide that features a scripted theatrical adaptation of the book intended for student performance as well as a variety of classroom activities is also available.

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cover of A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

A Nation Rising

Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika'ala Wright, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

A Nation Rising chronicles the political struggles and grassroots initiatives collectively known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers contribute essays that explore Native Hawaiian resistance and resurgence from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Photographs and vignettes about particular activists further bring Hawaiian social movements to life. The stories and analyses of efforts to protect land and natural resources, resist community dispossession, and advance claims for sovereignty and self-determination reveal the diverse objectives and strategies, as well as the inevitable tensions, of the broad-tent sovereignty movement. The collection explores the Hawaiian political ethic of ea, which both includes and exceeds dominant notions of state-based sovereignty. A Nation Rising raises issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago, issues such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization.

Contributors. Noa Emmett Aluli, Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Kekuni Blaisdell, Joan Conrow, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Edward W. Greevy, Ulla Hasager, Pauahi Ho'okano, Micky Huihui, Ikaika Hussey, Manu Ka‘iama, Le‘a Malia Kanehe, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Keala Kelly, Jacqueline Lasky, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Nalani Minton, Kalamaoka'aina Niheu, Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Leon No'eau Peralto, Kekailoa Perry, Puhipau, Noenoe K. Silva, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat, Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Kuhio Vogeler, Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright
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cover of A People's History of the New Boston

A People's History of the New Boston

Jim Vrabel

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

Although Boston today is a vibrant and thriving city, it was anything but that in the years following World War II. By 1950 it had lost a quarter of its tax base over the previous twenty-five years, and during the 1950s it would lose residents faster than any other major city in the country.

Credit for the city's turnaround since that time is often given to a select group of people, all of them men, all of them white, and most of them well off. In fact, a large group of community activists, many of them women, people of color, and not very well off, were also responsible for creating the Boston so many enjoy today. This book provides a grassroots perspective on the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when residents of the city's neighborhoods engaged in an era of activism and protest unprecedented in Boston since the American Revolution.

Using interviews with many of those activists, contemporary news accounts, and historical sources, Jim Vrabel describes the demonstrations, sit-ins, picket lines, boycotts, and contentious negotiations through which residents exerted their influence on the city that was being rebuilt around them. He includes case histories of the fights against urban renewal, highway construction, and airport expansion; for civil rights, school desegregation, and welfare reform; and over Vietnam and busing. He also profiles a diverse group of activists from all over the city, including Ruth Batson, Anna DeFronzo, Moe Gillen, Mel King, Henry Lee, and Paula Oyola. Vrabel tallies the wins and losses of these neighborhood Davids as they took on the Goliaths of the time, including Boston's mayors. He shows how much of the legacy of that activism remains in Boston today.
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cover of A Thousand Cuts: Digital Repression and Pro-Democracy Movements in Thailand

A Thousand Cuts

Digital Repression and Pro-Democracy Movements in Thailand

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri

University of Wisconsin Press, 2027

In response to the 2020–21 youth-led protests throughout Thailand, which were largely fueled by discourse on digital platforms, the government launched a sweeping program of technological suppression. Smear campaigns were orchestrated to discredit young activists, laws were weaponized to criminalize their activities, and surveillance technologies were deployed to keep tabs on them.

In A Thousand Cuts, Janjira Sombatpoonsiri traces the historical development of repression in Thailand, detailing how “traditional” methods of repression have been merged with digital tools to maintain the status quo since 2005, when mass mobilization started to move online. By examining the adverse effects of digital repression on individual activists—their mental health, private lives, and socioeconomic resources—Sombatpoonsiri also offers one of the first systematic analyses of the “reception” side of repression, shedding light on its detrimental consequences for activists and mass movements as a whole.

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cover of A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

A Thousand Paper Cuts

US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

Anjali Nath

Duke University Press, 2025

In A Thousand Paper Cuts, Anjali Nath considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism. From the slogans of anti-Communist Cold Warriors against a spectral “Paper Curtain” to the scuttled efforts of activists who sought to document America’s surveillance regime amidst the US war on Vietnam, Nath offers a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. Nath shows how declassified documents tell the story of American counterinsurgency at home and abroad, revealing the imperial grammar beneath the abundant redactions of contemporary visual culture. Tracing the liberal political rhetoric that inspired the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s, through to the Bush-era’s exuberant secrecy to the contemporary artists who subversively repurpose redacted documents in collage and critique, Nath maps the formation of the security state, its bureaucratic regimes of surveillance, and the racial logic of transparency.
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cover of A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe

A Vital Frontier

Water Insurgencies in Europe

Andrea Muehlebach

Duke University Press, 2023

In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda, barricades in the streets, huge demonstrations, the burning of utility bills, and legal disputes over transparency and contracts. As Muehlebach documents, Europe’s water activists articulate their own values of democracy and just price, raising far-reaching political questions about private versus common property and financing, liberal democracy, sovereignty, legality, and collective infrastructural responsibility in the face of financialization and commodification. Muehlebach shows that water-rights activists can successfully resist financial markets by exposing the commodification of water as the theft of life itself.
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cover of Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War

Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War

James Brewer Stewart

University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

Before the Civil War, slaveholders made themselves into the most powerful, most deeply rooted, and best organized private interest group within the United States. Not only did slavery represent the national economy's second largest capital investment, exceeded only by investment in real estate, but guarantees of its perpetuation were studded throughout the U.S. Constitution. The vast majority of white Americans, in North and South, accepted the institution, and pro-slavery presidents and congressmen consistently promoted its interests. 

In Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War, James Brewer Stewart explains how a small group of radical activists, the abolitionist movement, played a pivotal role in turning American politics against this formidable system. He examines what influence the movement had in creating the political crises that led to civil war and evaluates the extent to which a small number of zealous reformers made a truly significant political difference when demanding that their nation face up to its most excruciating moral problem. In making these assessments, Stewart addresses a series of more specific questions: What were the abolitionists actually up against when seeking the overthrow of slavery and white supremacy? What motivated and sustained them during their long and difficult struggles? What larger historical contexts (religious, social, economic, cultural, and political) influenced their choices and determined their behavior? What roles did extraordinary leaders play in shaping the movement, and what were the contributions of abolitionism's unheralded “foot soldiers”? What factors ultimately determined, for better or worse, the abolitionists' impact on American politics and the realization of their equalitarian goals?

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cover of Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities: Engaged Ethnography

Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities

Engaged Ethnography

Kristin E. Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan

University of Arizona Press, 2024

This collection brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.”

Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities.

This volume is ideal for scholars, students, immigrant activists, instructors, and those interested in social justice work.

Contributors
Carolina Alonso Bejarano
Anna Aziza Grewe
Alaska Burdette
Whitney L. Duncan
Carlos Escalante Villagran
Christina M. Getrich
Tobin Hansen
Lauren Heidbrink
Dan Heiman
Josiah Heyman
Sarah Horton
Nolan Kline
Alana M. W. LeBrón
Lupe López
William D. Lopez
Aida López Huinil
Mirian A. Mijangos García
Nicole L. Novak
Mariela Nuñez-Janes
Ana Ortez-Rivera
Juan Edwin Pacay Mendoza
Salvador Brandon Pacay Mendoza
María Engracia Robles Robles
Delmis Umanzor
Erika Vargas Reyes
Kristin E. Yarris

 

 

 

 

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cover of Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution

Adiós Muchachos

A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution

Sergio Ramírez

Duke University Press, 2012

Adiós Muchachos is a candid insider’s account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramírez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramírez served as vice-president under Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990, when the FSLN lost power in a national election. Disillusioned by his former comrades’ increasing intolerance of dissent and resistance to democratization, Ramírez defected from the Sandinistas in 1995 and founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In Adiós Muchachos, he describes the utopian aspirations for liberation and reform that motivated the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime, as well as the triumphs and shortcomings of the movement’s leadership as it struggled to turn an insurrection into a government, reconstruct a country beset by poverty and internal conflict, and defend the revolution against the Contras, an armed counterinsurgency supported by the United States. Adiós Muchachos was first published in 1999. Based on a later edition, this translation includes Ramírez’s thoughts on more recent developments, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006.
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cover of Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris

Aesthetic Citizenship

Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris

Emine Fisek

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Aesthetic Citizenship is an ethnographic study of the role of theatrical performance in questions regarding immigration, citizenship, and the formation of national identity. Focusing on Paris in the twenty-first century, Emine Fisek analyzes the use of theater by immigrant-rights organizations there and examines the relationship between aesthetic practices and the political personhoods they negotiate.

From neighborhood associations and humanitarian alliances to arts organizations both large and small, Fisek traces how theater has emerged as a practice with the perceived capacity to address questions regarding immigrant rights, integration, and experience. In Aesthetic Citizenship, she explores how the stage, one of France’s most evocative cultural spaces, has come to play a role in contemporary questions about immigration, citizenship and national identity. Yet Fişek’s insightful research also illuminates Paris’s broader historical, political, and cultural through-lines that continue to shape the relationship between theater and migration in France. 

By focusing on how French public discourses on immigration are not only rendered meaningful but also inhabited and modified in the context of activist and arts practice, Aesthetic Citizenship seeks to answer the fundamental question: is theater a representational act or can it also be a transformative one?
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cover of Affording Justice: How the Legal Profession Is Failing America's Middle Class and What to Do About It

Affording Justice

How the Legal Profession Is Failing America's Middle Class and What to Do About It

Sheldon Krantz

Duke University Press, 2027

Middle-class Americans know two things about legal practice: law is complicated, and lawyers are expensive. So expensive, in fact, that only large companies and the wealthy can generally afford to hire them—and yet US law is often so complex that ordinary people cannot hope to represent themselves successfully. Sheldon Krantz draws on his long and varied career as a lawyer and scholar to show how the legal system has denied the majority of Americans equal access to justice and offers productive, practical reforms to address the problem. Through case studies and a comprehensive overview of relevant legal policy and practices, Krantz charts the real impacts of the current system’s inadequacies and highlights creative solutions, some that are currently in use and others that should be implemented. Affording Justice is essential reading for anyone concerned about access to justice in today’s America.
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cover of American Occupation: Dispatches from Minnesota's Resistance to ICE

American Occupation

Dispatches from Minnesota's Resistance to ICE

Jonny Diamond

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A collection of intimate writings first published by Literary Hub in the Letters From Minnesota series that recounts the lived community experience of facing—and resisting—ICE violence during Operation Metro Surge

The history of America is a history of occupations. But what happens when an imperial nation, defined by endless expansion, runs out of frontier? It turns inward. It occupies itself.

American Occupation is an urgent compilation of reflections and accounts that emerged during the shocking, months-long ICE operation in Minnesota. In December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Metro Surge, and thousands of ICE and border patrol agents in paramilitary costumes descended on the Twin Cities. Their brutal, unconstitutional campaign resulted in the terrorization and disappearance of countless US citizens and immigrants, the murders of legal observers Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the mobilization of vast, intricate mutual aid networks, massive protests, and staggering acts of courage during one of the coldest Minnesota winters in a decade.

Two days after Alex Pretti was killed on January 24, 2026, Literary Hub published the first of forty-four Letters From Minnesota, an online rapid response series that invited novelists, journalists, poets, and memoirists to document their experiences under occupation. An immigrant mother makes a plan with her young children in case she’s detained by ICE. A Powderhorn Park resident witnesses the traumatic abduction of two neighbors at a bus stop. A professor chronicles the relentless federal violence throughout her family’s journey from Mexico to California to Minnesota, among other harrowing stories and accounts.

With twelve new contributions, American Occupation offers a mosaic of deeply personal and defiant testimonies detailing the creative solidarity and resolve of Minnesotans confronting fascist cruelty. Contextualized in the history of the US government’s abuse of power against its own civilians, American Occupation reveals the grim reality of yet another American administration in thrall to its own mythologies—and the long arc of resistance and compassion of ordinary people.

Contributors: Angela Ajayi, Anonymous, Charles Baxter, Victoria Blanco, Jennifer Eli Bowen, Katherine Packert Burke, Zeke Caligiuri, David Aiona Chang, Dana Chiueh, Heid E. Erdrich, Nick Estes, Nimo Farah, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Shannon Gibney, Dobby Gibson, Sarah Green, Molly Beth Griffin, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, Marian Hassan, Hedgiee, Laurie Hertzel, Carolyn Holbrook, Siri Hustvedt, Đenise Hạnh Huỳnh, Andrea Jenkins, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Ed Bok Lee, Josina Manu Maltzman, Will McGrath, Jim Moore, David Mura, Nia Navarro, Sahra Noor, Kara Olson, Peter Pearson, Angela Pelster, Bao Phi, Kaia Preus, Susan Raffo, Marcie Rendon, Kate Romero and Gustavo Romero, Sean Sherman, Sun Yung Shin, Gabriela Spears-Rico, Michael Torres, Kawai Strong Washburn, Sana Wazwaz, chaun webster, Diane Wilson, A. E. Wynter, Kao Kalia Yang, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, Michelle Zamanian.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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cover of An Epidemic among My People: Religion, Politics, and COVID-19 in the United States

An Epidemic among My People

Religion, Politics, and COVID-19 in the United States

Edited by Paul A. Djupe and Amanda Friesen

Temple University Press, 2023

The pandemic presented religion as a paradox: faith is often crucial for helping people weather life’s troubles and make difficult decisions, but how can religion continue to deliver these benefits and provide societal structure without social contact?  The topical volume, An Epidemic among My People explains how the COVID-19 pandemic stress tested American religious communities and created a new politics of religion centered on public health.

The editors and contributorsconsider how the virus and government policy affected religion in America. Chapters examine the link between the prosperity gospel and conspiracy theories, the increased purchase of firearms by evangelicals, the politics of challenging public health orders as religious freedom claims, and the reactions of Christian nationalists, racial groups, and female clergy to the pandemic (and pandemic politics). As sharp lines were drawn between people and their governments during this uncertain time, An Epidemic among My People provides a comprehensive portrait of religion in American public life.  

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cover of An Ojibwe Home in the City: White Earth Women and Community Organizing in Minneapolis

An Ojibwe Home in the City

White Earth Women and Community Organizing in Minneapolis

Sasha Maria Suarez

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

The story of generations of Ojibwe women who built a thriving Indigenous home in the urban heart of Minneapolis

Minneapolis became home to White Earth Ojibwe people not through a centralized movement but through generations of determined, behind-the-scenes work by Ojibwe women. These women were organizing not in the streets, but in sewing clubs, churches, classrooms, and kitchens to bring people together and form interconnected communities. Rooted in care, tradition, and persistence, their labor laid the foundation for a thriving urban Indigenous population that continues to shape the city today.

An Ojibwe Home in the City tells the histories of Louise and Emily Peake, Winnie Jourdain, Ignatia Broker, and other Ojibwe women who endeavored to make space for Native families in South Minneapolis. From the 1930s through the 1970s, these women built institutions, secured services, and fought for culturally grounded education—all while working inside systems never intended for them. Their efforts led to the creation of vital community hubs such as the Division of Indian Work and the Minneapolis American Indian Center and helped ensure that future generations would stay connected to their culture, even in an urban setting.

Far broader than a local history, this book challenges what we think we know about Native activism in the twentieth century, shifting the focus from protest to perseverance and steady commitment. Intimate, compelling, and deeply grounded in community, An Ojibwe Home in the City is both a tribute and a revelation—an essential and personal account of how Indigenous women made a place for their people in a changing world.

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cover of Anticapitalist Technology Design: Equitable Futures for Technology in Rhetoric and Composition

Anticapitalist Technology Design

Equitable Futures for Technology in Rhetoric and Composition

Angela Glotfelter

Utah State University Press, 2026

Under capitalism, every key we press, search we conduct, and prompt we write implicates us within a global web of exploitation that has created vast economic disparities. How, then, are we to understand and use technologies to write, think, argue, and teach about equitable futures for our world?

In response to this question, Anticapitalist Technology Design explores technology usage in writing programs as a site for equity work within a political-economic frame. Using an approach that combines classical Marxist ideas about political economy with contemporary advances in social justice theory, this book presents an intersectional approach to conducting anticapitalist work in rhetoric and composition around technology use.

Angela Glotfelter explores this work through the lens of anticapitalist technology design, a method that considers how inequitable ideologies are rhetorically encoded into new technologies and perpetuated through their usage. She applies this method to the case study of prototyping an equity dashboard for a first-year composition program, demonstrating the potential of anticapitalist technology design in practice.

Anticapitalist Technology Design brings together work from across the Marxist tradition, critical race theory, user experience, and transnational feminism, and will resonate with any one who wants to navigate new technologies in economically and socially just ways.

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cover of Arijana Lekic-Fridrih: All Art Is a Political Statement / Svaka Umjetnost Je Politicka Izava

Arijana Lekic-Fridrih

All Art Is a Political Statement / Svaka Umjetnost Je Politicka Izava

Rebekah Modrak

Disobedience Press, 2024

Arijana Lekić-Fridrih: All Art is a Political Statement introduces audiences to the work of Croatian artist Arijana Lekić-Fridrih and, in particular, to her Silent Mass, a performance resisting the “Be Manly” movement, a series of mass prayer events held in Croatian public squares by a battalion of men who pray for the abolition of women’s rights, for women’s “chastity,” and for men’s “masculine authority.” All Art is a Political Statement links the erosion of women’s rights across intercontinental boundaries and offers Lekić-Fridrih’s multimedia art as a guide for activism against retrograde restrictions on the freedom of women.

Arijana Lekić-Fridrih: Svaka umjetnost je politička izjava upoznaje publiku s radom hrvatske umjetnice Arijane Lekić-Fridrih, a posebno s njezinom Tihom misom, performansom otpora pokretu “Budi muško”, nizu masovnih molitvenih događanja koje na hrvatskim javnim trgovima održava bataljun muškaraca moleći za ukidanje ženskih prava, za žensku “čednost”, a za muškarce “muški autoritet”. Svaka umjetnost je politička izjava spaja eroziju ženskih prava preko interkontinentalnih granica i nudi multimedijsku umjetnost Lekić-Fridrih kao vodič za aktivizam protiv nazadnih ograničenja slobode žena.

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cover of Athlete and Activist: 28 Sports Stars Who Changed the Game

Athlete and Activist

28 Sports Stars Who Changed the Game

Jules Boykoff, Alex C. Davis, and Amira Rose Davis Illustrations by Martin French

University of Illinois Press, 2026

Time and again, great athletes seem to do the impossible. Their skills amaze us. Their work ethic inspires awe. Their talent is next level. At the same time, an athlete’s fame gives them a platform to speak out on important issues. With words and actions, a basketball star or Olympic legend can reach millions of people with their message.

Athlete and Activist highlights sports figures who risked their popularity and even their careers to stand against injustice. Each profile takes readers inside the issues that motivated an athlete’s activism. Striking portraits by award-winning illustrator Martin French add a visual dimension to the dramatic stories. Throughout, the authors show athletes using different kinds of activism. Some spoke out. Others performed silent gestures. Still others let their success speak for itself.

A different kind of sports history, Athlete and Activist is an inspiring look at heroic acts beyond our favorite games.
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