Resources for Clergy

Liberatory Theologies

1. Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted
2. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
3. Stephen Ray, Do No Harm: Social Sin and Christian Responsibility
4. James Cone, God of the Oppressed
5. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree
6. Kelly Brown Douglass, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
7. Kelly Brown Douglass, What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies and Christian Souls
8. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being
9. Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil
10. Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
11. Willie Jennings, “Overcoming Racial Faith”
12. Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians, for those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation
13. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance
14. Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Releasing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity

Mass Incarceration

1. Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America
2. Rima Vesley-Flad, Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice
3. T. Richard Snyder, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment
4. Nikia Robert, “Penitence, Plantation, and the Penitentiary: A Liberation Theology for Lockdown America”
5. James Logan, Good Punishment: Christian Moral Practice and US Imprisonment
6. Dominique Gilliard, Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores
7. Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
8. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
9. Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics
10. Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prisons
11. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness
12. Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
13. Douglass Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
14. Vincent Lloyd and Joshua Dubler, “Mass Incarceration is Religious (and so is Abolition): A Provocation”
15. Monique Q. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
16. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
17. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
18. James Foreman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
19. Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State
20. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Abolition

1. Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture
2. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
3. Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
4. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Are Prisons Necessary: Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind”
5. Summer Heat (Mariam Kaba, 2015)
6. What Does Abolition Mean? (Dereka Purnell, 2017)
7. Robin DG Kelly, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
8. Angela Davis, The Challenge of Prison Abolition
9. Kim Kelly, “No More Cop Unions”
10. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter
11. Vincent Lloyd and Joshua Dubler, Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons
12. Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
13. Alex Vitale, The End of Policing

Film/Documentaries

1. A Soldier’s Story
2. I am Not Your Negro
3. 13th
4. When They See Us
5. Geographies of Racial Capitalism w/ Ruth Wilson Gilmore (16” dir. Kenton Card, 2020)
6. Slavery By Another Name
7. Dead Presidents
8. Just Mercy
9. 3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets
10. Bastards of the Party

United States Histories

1. Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented the Christian Right
2. Dianne Savage, Your Spirit Walks Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion Social Movements
3. Iris Katz Nelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History to Inequality in the United States
4. Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism
5. Raphael Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness
6. Ian Hanley Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
7. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
8. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Justice, Power, and Politics)
9. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
10. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
11. Gary Dorien, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr and the Black Social Gospel
12. Gary Dorien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition
13. Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration
14. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
15. Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second reconstruction and beyond in Black America, 1945-2006
16. Stephen P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

Social Movements

1. Brian D. Behnken, Civil Rights and Beyond: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States
2. Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed An Era. Justice, Power, and Politics
3. Christopher P. Lehman, Power, Politics, and the Decline of the Civil Rights Movement: A Fragile Coalition, 1967-1973
4. Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan
5. Danielle L. McGuire, At The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance; A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
6. Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity
7. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
8. Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain

Racial Formation

1. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
2. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
3. Ta Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
4. Cornel West, Race Matters
5. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900
6. W.E.B. Dubois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
7. How to be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X Kendi
8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
9. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems of Race, Political Economy, and Society
10. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
11. George M. Friedrickson, Racism: A Very Short Introduction
12. Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
13. Khalil G. Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
14. Richard Iton, Solidarity Blues: Race Culture, and the American Left
15. Sylvester Johnson, African-American Religions, 1500-2000
16. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People To Talk About Racism
17. S. Oboler and A. Dzidzienyo, Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos