Most of us discovered politics as adults, so it can be hard to know where to begin with kids. Innosanto Nagara’s A is for Activist is perhaps the most famous and parodied political book for children, rattling off dozens of words that mean little to them (“A is for Activist. Advocate. Abolitionist. Ally.”) while appealing to their parents’ politics. As a children’s librarian, I try to work in a tradition that’s a little different: identifying books that truly speak to kids and reveal to them a political world in which they can see themselves participating.
The attempt to serve children in American libraries began with librarian Anne Carroll Moore in the late nineteenth century. Public libraries were new in America at this time; initially, they were private, subscription-based services only for adults, sometimes only for men. Moore had a Victorian, precious sensibility about the care and correct education of young people, but she spent her life arguing that children’s libraries were a good idea for the poor, for immigrants, for girls, and for people who spoke above a whisper. She hired Black librarians and acquired books in languages that immigrants in New York City spoke so that children could be proud of the places they came from. Early funding came from robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, who expected that their money would excise radical influence, bringing the working class in line with their own values. Still, librarians have long fought for their independent right to serve the needs of the public’s youngest and most curious members, and to present perspectives that allow them to see the possibility of a better world.
Children are our smallest comrades — they live within our victories and failures.
Augusta Braxton Baker, whose career began in the 1930s, was one of the first Black children’s librarians in New York City and compiled the first known list of picture books with positive Black representation in an era when blackface stereotypes abounded in white children’s literature. Pura Belpré built Spanish-language libraries for the Puerto Rican families of Harlem and held storytimes focused on traditional Puerto Rican folktales, which affirmed their traditions as literary and valuable. White librarian Emily Wheelock Reed refused to remove the picture book The Rabbits’ Wedding (featuring a black-white rabbit duo) from her library and encouraged patrons to check out a tract by Martin Luther King, Jr. She was fired from her Alabama workplace in the 1950s.
Conservatives long saw libraries as bastions against anarchy, but today, libraries are under attack from right-wingers who see danger in free education for proles. Not only that, but libraries, like bookstores, are flooded with IP properties and decades-old bestsellers. Not all these books are totally ersatz. Captain Underpants and Dog Man, longtime chart-toppers, have notable merits in terms of kid humor, vocabulary building, visual ease of comprehension, and philosophical questions ranging from the existence of free will to the morality of prison. But the reason these books are still read by children is that they are simply the bestselling products that their publishers ever invested in. When kids age out of these books, they have trouble finding a bridge. We need continued public funding for children’s art if we want to avoid this insistent, limited advertising scheme.
With this in mind, I’d like to make some recommendations to any adult who wants to help kids get good books (or to extremely precocious readers of Lux). There is good work out there, and it’s the job of children’s librarians to help you find it. Echoing the loss of liberal arts in higher education, less time in each primary school day goes to the pleasure reading that builds the skills needed for analysis; what kids do have access to becomes quite important to their thinking futures. Children are our smallest comrades — they live within our victories and failures.
Contra A is for Activist, most children need to know what is going on in order to understand why change is needed. Solid introductions to abolition in this vein include Mariame Kaba’s books about children with parents in jail, Missing Daddy and See You Soon. Our Little Kitchen by Jillian Tamaki, Harlem Grown by Tony Hillery, and Hilwa’s Gifts by Safa Suleiman are all about food sovereignty and respect for food, told compactly and lyrically.
For parents looking for articulations of organization and resistance, the apparently benign classics Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell and Click, Clack, Moo by Doreen Cronin both tell, bombastically, stories of animals either overthrowing or negotiating with bosses over working conditions. Jacob Kramer’s Noodlephant and Okapi Tale recount the theft of the means of noodle production by a small group of animals. To relate organizing to real life, it might be useful to read Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children by Jonah Winter, which dramatizes the Children’s Crusade in protest of child labor. Sweet Justice by Mara Rockliff is a useful antidote to individualist narratives of civil rights, in that it shows 一 in a way appropriate to six-year-olds 一 how essential wide cooperation, crowdfunding, mutual aid, and food were to the Montgomery bus boycott. Tourmaline’s biography of Marsha P. Johnson frames her life through the lens of helping others in a way that is immediately applicable.
Read Fry Bread for Indigenous food and resilience; We Are Water Protectors for Indigenous climate action; Berry Song for foraging knowledge and mutual respect between humans and the forest. More basic and essential, books like Don’t Hug Doug (He Doesn’t Like It) teach consent; From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea affirms that children bring unique, beautiful expression to the world and that the adults in their lives value them, no matter their gender or type of magical power.
As we encourage children to learn about the world, we also inevitably impart adult values. The best books specifically about the world’s problems and solutions offer support to adults who might be struggling with how to frame conversations with children — like The Breaking News by Sarah Lynne Reul, which locates a point of encounter with violence (the TV’s news coverage) and spins from there to talk about anxieties and answers (“find the people helping”).
Prose and story structure matter for even the youngest readers, who are just learning the rhythm of language and the reassuring pattern of a story. I recommend books that are cyclical, repetitive, and rhyming (Bee-bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park, City Shapes by Bryan Collier and Diana Murray, Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder), or authors who offer introductions to comics-style formatting and speech bubbles (Mo Willems, Cece Bell, Jan Thomas, Sean Taylor). What matters most for children is reading with someone invested in the process, who exclaims and asks questions and narrates what they see. The more children read — or pre-read, exploring books for pleasure — the more capable they are of interpreting information, of comparing art, of asking critical questions about what they see and/or hear.
Under socialism, I think every kind of children’s cultural production would be encouraged and resourced.
Picture books are a fairly democratic and intimate medium. Digital books have appeal too: Images on a tablet can be zoomed in on or shared on a video call (though supplier monopolies mean that libraries pay exorbitantly for e-books). For newcomers, I recommend the dramatic fantasy of Bruce Handy’s The Book from Far Away, the forest rainbow of Matthew Forsythe’s Pokko and the Drum, the cartoon minutiae of avoidable catastrophe of Andrea Tsurumi’s Accident!, the vivid urban neon of Kicks in the Sky by C. G. Esperanza, the mysterious and painterly works of Maurice Sendak and Brian Pinkney, the meticulous paper cutting of Oge Mora or Nikki McClure, the lively watercolors of Chris Raschka, or the absurd inky magic of Beatrice Alemagna.
Parents and caregivers can use tools like the Novelist database (available on the database page of many public libraries) or trade publications like Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly to look for reviews of books that might meet their needs. The Zinn Education Project recommends quality social justice-themed literature; Teaching While Muslim is doing good work filling gaps about Palestine in education. Many libraries compile their own lists of the year’s best books, regardless of whether they are being banned elsewhere.
After praising the critical importance of public libraries as a candidate, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed a $29 million reduction in library budgets. The reasons for this retreat from socialist principles are murky; the reasons for funding and fully supporting children’s libraries, however, are clear. Libraries invest in the future. Under socialism, I think every kind of children’s cultural production would be encouraged and resourced; we would support artists working on behalf of the young, as happened in the early USSR, when printmakers and illustrators were supported in avant-garde innovation (until publishers like Raduga were shut down by Stalinists in the 1930s). Every school should have a book club, a magazine of reviews — hell, a printing press for children to make their own books. A child with access to books will quickly begin to write their own ABCs of activism.
Hal Schrieve is a librarian, author, and comic artist. Hir book Out of Salem was long-listed for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2019, and hir book Vivian’s Ghostwon the Cartoonist Studio Prize in 2023. Hir novel Fawn’s Blood came out in fall 2025.
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