Books like Affirmative Acts by June Jordan

Alice Walker's 1982 novel, The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, exploring the lives of black women in the South and their experiences of abuse and struggle for independence.

James Baldwin’s 1963 essay collection, written as two letters for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, confronts America’s racial injustices and urges both black and white citizens to confront the legacy of racism.

A powerful anthology of essays by Audre Lorde that traces her intellectual evolution, highlights her advocacy for minority women writers, and examines the intersections of sex, race, and class.

Newbery Honor Book National Book Award Finalist

Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic uncovers the invisible barriers that kept women confined to domestic roles, sparking a cultural awakening that reshaped ideas about equality and personal fulfillment in the United States.

The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston’s lyrical memoir of her Chinese‑American upbringing in California, juxtaposing her mother’s folk tales of fierce women with the everyday sexism she faces.

Carol Anderson’s nonfiction study uncovers the history of white backlash—‘white rage’—that follows gains in racial equality, tracing its roots from the Reconstruction era to today.

June Jordan’s Civil Wars interweaves essays, letters, and speeches to explore Black feminism, education, and poetry amid school inequities, police violence, and racial riots.

A comprehensive anthology of June Jordan’s poetry, spanning over six hundred pages of lyricism, elegiac verse, and vibrant vernacular, including unpublished “last poems” that showcase her powerful engagement with identity, activism, and human connection.

Randall Robinson argues that America owes a vast debt to Africans and African Americans for centuries of slavery and segregation, urging responsibility and reparations to rectify this historic injustice.

An evidence‑based look at five pivotal moments of white backlash that has followed African‑American advances toward equality in the United States, adapted for a teenage audience.

"Poet, activist, and essayist June Jordan is a prolific, significant American writer who pushed the limits of political vision and moral witness, traversing a career of over forty years. With poetry, prose, letters, and more, this reader is a key resource for understanding the scope, complexity, and novelty of this pioneering Black American writer. From "Poem about Police Violence": Tell me something what you think would happen if everytime they kill a black boy then we kill a cop everytime they kill a black man then we kill a cop you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?. I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rabid and repetitive affront as when they tell me 18 cops in order to subdue one man 18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn street was just a "justifiable accident" again (again) People been having accidents all over the globe so long like that I reckon that the only suitable insurance is a gun"--