Justice Book Group

2026–27 Justice Book Group Selections

Follen’s Justice Book Group meets once a month during the church year. Their past reads (and occasional movie views) are below. All are encouraged to attend—even if you haven’t finished the book! Email justicebookgroup@follen.org for more information.

Previous Selections

2025–26 Church Year

2024–25 Church Year

2023–24 Church Year

  • Selections from The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns, Dohra Agmad (Ed.) and Edwidge Danticat (foreword)
  • Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, by Gaia Vince
  • Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo
  • Jews Don’t Count, by David Baddiel
  • Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond
  • Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (video), Magda Teter
  • Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, by Heather Cox Richardson
  • The Cost of Inheritance (film), PBS
  • On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
  • Repairing the World: Stories from the Tree of Life (film), PBS

2022–23 Church Year

  • The Love Songs of WEB DuBois, by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
  • The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race, by Carlos A. Hoyt Jr.
  • Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, by Kate Clifford Larsen
  • “Monuments to the Unthinkable” (The Atlantic, Dec 2022), by Clint Smith
  • Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from My Daughter’s School, by Courtney E. Martin
  • Mistakes and Miracles: Congregations on the Road to Multiculturalism, by Nancy Palmer Jones and Karin Lin
  • What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, by Peggy Pascoe
  • The Making of Asian America: A History, by Erika Lee
  • Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid
  • The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama

2020–21 Church Year

  • How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
  • The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
  • Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
  • “Dark Girls” documentary by Chansin Berry and Bill Duke
  • Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad
  • How The South Won the Civil War By Heather Cox Richardson
  • Fools Crow by James Welch
  • The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
  • The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer
  • Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

2019–20 Church Year

  • The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward
  • The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptiste
  • Barracoon by Zora Neal Hurston
  • Harriet movie about Harriet Tubman
  • Kindred by Octavia Butler
  • The Second Founding by Eric Foner
  • Fruitvale Station by Ryan Coogler

2018–19 Church Year

  • PBS American Experience: The Abolitionists
  • Raising White Kids by Jennifer Harvey
  • White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
  • Black KKKlansmen movie by Spike Lee
  • The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
  • Boston Globe Spotlight Series: “The Valedictorians”
  • The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.Du Bois
  • Becoming by Michelle Obama
  • New England Bound by Wendy Warren
  • The Firebrand and the First Lady by Patricia Bell-Scott

2017–18 Church Year

  • Tears We Cannot Stop Michael Eric Dyson
  • The Children David Halberstam
  • We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Thurgood movie of play starring Laurence Fishburne
  • “Boston. Racism. Image. Reality.” Seven-part Boston Globe Spotlight series
  • Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
  • Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
  • Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon
  • Black Walden by Elise Lemire
  • Autobiography of Frederick Douglass

2016–17 Church Year

  • Common Ground by J. Anthony Lucas
  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • 13th documentary by Ava Du Vernay
  • Evicted by Matthew Desmond
  • Moonlight movie by Barry Jenkins and Tarell McRaney
  • Waking Up White by Debby Irving
  • Anything written by James Baldwin PLUS documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro
  • Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
  • Darkening the Doorways: Black Trailblazers and Missed Opportunities in Unitarian Universalism by Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed

2015–16 Church Year

  • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
  • Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander ( also TED talk by author )
  • Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North documentary by Katrina Browne
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
  • America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America by Jim Wallis
  • Fixing the System HBO Documentary about incarceration