Activism is a skill set, as well as a vocation. It is something you learn from people who tried things, failed, tried differently, and figured out what worked. These twelve books about activism are a good place to start.

I love how Andrew Boyd’s Beautiful Trouble basically turns protesting into this crafty, hands-on art form — super creative, actually useful, and more than a little cheeky. Boyd’s the mastermind behind Billionaires for Bush, the brilliant satirical crew who used to dress up as absurdly rich plutocrats just to rub everyone’s nose in how ridiculous economic inequality had gotten.

He teamed up with organizers worldwide to make a kind of recipe book for shaking things up. It’s packed with short sections on tactics like “make the invisible visible,” with real examples. There’s this great bit from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution where activists made these massive puppets of the corrupt politicians and literally dragged people out into the streets with puppet strings attached. So good. Pick up the book when you’re done just yelling at the TV, and actually want to do something effective.

Randy Shaw’s The Activist’s Handbook is more blunt, less whimsical. Shaw’s got this housing clinic going in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, so he literally argues with city hall suits before he’s even had coffee. He’ll straight-up tell you how to make politicians sweat for real, how to hold your nose and team up with people you can’t stand if it gets the job done, and when to kill your darling ballot measure because it’s doomed no matter how much you love it. Shaw dissects what Occupy Wall Street achieved and what collapsed under its weight. His audience isn’t people who want to feel radical, but people who are ready to put in the work to get the win.

L.A. Kauffman’s Direct Action takes you on a journey through protest tactics, from the 1970s affinity groups to the energy behind Black Lives Matter. She dives into ACT UP’s die-ins that forced the US to face HIV when the government wouldn’t. You’ll see how Seattle activists pioneered the black bloc and how Occupy’s leaderless vibe caught fire. Kauffman gets the strategy, but also the grit of being in the trenches planning it all. Put Boyd, Shaw, and Kauffman together and you get creativity, smarts, and a clear view of what works.

The Verso Book of Dissent is three thousand years of people telling power it doesn’t get the last word. The book just jumps all over history: one minute you’re with Socrates pissing off Athens, next it’s enslaved Arabs rising up in the Ottoman Empire, then some wild Chinese peasant songs that basically lit the fuse for the Taiping Rebellion.

You’ll flip from Spartacus straight into Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth into Malcolm X, and suddenly you’re like…wait, it’s the same playbook every time. People in charge claim everything is stable. People being crushed refuse to agree.

Rita Omokha’s Resist is all about these young Black organizers who basically started from nothing and built real movements. Omokha will hit you with Ella Baker in the ’60s straight-up schooling the Freedom Riders on how to keep it together and actually win, then bam—she jumps to those Ferguson kids, literal teenagers, who turned the whole place upside down after Michael Brown got killed in 2014. And she folds in her own life, as a Nigerian girl fresh in America trying to figure out what the hell is going on after 9/11.

Maureen Johnson’s How I Resist gathers essays, stories, and reflections from writers like Jason Reynolds (award-winning author of Long Way Down) and Jacqueline Woodson (National Book Award winner and former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature) alongside accounts of organizers who turned a tweet into a rally and then into a piece of legislation. The book’s central argument: there is no single correct way to resist. Marching, writing, mutual aid, art — all of it counts.

Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook tracks anti-fascist resistance from Italian dockworkers battling Mussolini’s squads to activists confronting white supremacist groups today. Bray, who teaches at Rutgers and organized with Occupy Wall Street, interviewed activists in seventeen countries. His argument is provocative: liberal democracies alone cannot stop fascist movements from gaining ground. You need people in the streets. Whether you agree fully or not, the book gives essential context for understanding how these movements operate.

Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist flips the whole conversation: instead of obsessing over whether you’re a “good person” deep down, he’s like, nope, let’s look at the actual policies and systems you’re supporting (or not fighting hard enough against).

Kendi argues racism is structured through policies, not just personal bias. Redlining, wealth extraction, school funding: the architecture of inequity is built in law. He’s candid about the harmful ideas he once internalized before developing his framework. His test is simple: racist policies create inequity; antiracist policies produce equity. Good intentions are irrelevant if outcomes reinforce harm.

Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism highlights the issues mainstream feminism forgets, such as food insecurity, housing instability, neighborhood violence, and school inequality. Kendall writes about dodging bullets in her childhood Chicago neighborhood and demands that feminism center the women who face these conditions daily. Her message cuts through the noise: if feminism does not prioritize the survival of marginalized women, it has abandoned its purpose.

Burnout has been romanticized into a badge of honor, but Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance rejects that completely. Hersey — known as the Nap Bishop — frames rest as abolition work. In her Chicago workshops, people lie on mats as sirens wail outside. It might look like Instagram-friendly self-care, but she’s making a deeper point: grind culture descends directly from slavery’s denial of rest. You cannot build liberation with the logic of the systems you’re trying to dismantle.

Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid builds structure around care. Spade argues that charity reinforces hierarchy, while mutual aid redistributes power. He pulls examples from pandemic food networks in Seattle, trans-led funds protecting migrants, and collective decision-making models that don’t require a boss. The networks we build now, he says, determine how prepared we’ll be for the next crisis.

Written by organizers Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, the book explores how people can confront injustice without losing hope or burning out. They trace how pandemic potlucks turned into bail funds and how abolitionists held space for mourning while still pursuing systemic change. Their message is firm: movements cannot survive on exhaustion. Organizing must be sustainable, repeatable, and rooted in reciprocal care.

These twelve books are a diverse framework for driving change.They offer ideas, tools, and a fresh lens to see what’s missing in your community, and how to fix them. What you do next? You decide.