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A New York Public Library Best Book of 2025

An illustrated biography of groundbreaking civil rights activist Vel Phillips for young readers 

Fair housing advocate, civil rights champion, and civic leader Vel Phillips spent her life breaking barriers and fighting for justice for all people. As the first Black woman on the Milwaukee Common Council, Wisconsin’s first Black judge, and the first Black woman to win statewide office when she was elected secretary of state of Wisconsin, Phillips left a lasting legacy that has inspired generations to continue the fight for justice and equality.  

Valiant Vel depicts Phillips’s captivating story for young readers in middle and high school—from her childhood experiences facing racial discrimination, to achieving her dream of becoming a lawyer, to her long career in politics and civil rights. In the 1960s, Phillips spearheaded a campaign to advocate for fair housing in Milwaukee, joining forces with the NAACP Youth Council and marching alongside other activists in the face of violent opposition. In 1968, Phillips’s persistence paid off when the Milwaukee Common Council passed a fair housing ordinance. 

Beautifully illustrated with historic photographs and original artwork by Milwaukee artist Aaron Boyd, Valiant Vel makes an excellent addition to young readers’ bookshelves at school and at home. With an afterword by Phillips’s son, Michael, a glossary of terms, and sources for further research, this book provides a thorough look at an inspirational activist who dedicated her life to making the world a better place. 

Joseph Plaster traces the emergence and impact of Vanguard, a street-based activist organization forged in mid-1960s San Francisco by an unlikely coalition of sex workers, street queens, urban ministers, young adults, and War on Poverty reformers. Facing displacement, policing, and economic exclusion in the downtown “vice” district, organizers pooled food, housing, and medical aid while staging militant street theater and protests against a social order that treated street kids as disposable. Drawing on original oral histories and a newly assembled archive, Plaster follows Vanguard from all-night cafeterias to church basements to psychedelic shops. Its organizers developed drug-safety tools and published underground magazines while using federal antipoverty resources to establish experimental drop-in and employment centers. Vanguard’s irreverent tactics and uncompromising sexual and gender visibility drew national attention, helping catalyze gay liberation and trans organizing while laying the groundwork for harm reduction and LGBTQ shelter activism. In Vanguard, Plaster recovers an electrifying history of mutual aid in action, showing how those pushed to the margins remade care, kinship, and political struggle.

In contrast to past studies that focus narrowly on war and massacre, treat Native peoples as victims, and consign violence safely to the past, this interdisciplinary collection of essays opens up important new perspectives. While recognizing the long history of genocidal violence against Indigenous peoples, the contributors emphasize the agency of individuals and communities in genocide’s aftermath and provide historical and contemporary examples of activism, resistance, identity formation, historical memory, resilience, and healing. The collection also expands the scope of violence by examining the eyewitness testimony of women and children who survived violence, the role of Indigenous self-determination and governance in inciting violence against women, and settler colonialism’s promotion of cultural erasure and environmental destruction.

By including contributions on Indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, the Pacific, Greenland, Sápmi, and Latin America, the volume breaks down nation-state and European imperial boundaries to show the value of global Indigenous frameworks. Connecting the past to the present, this book confronts violence as an ongoing problem and identifies projects that mitigate and push back against it.