Reading List
ARM YOUR FRIENDS RECOMMENDED READING
The Reading List
Training starts with your hands. It also starts with your head.
You were told the civil rights movement was won by marching and singing. These books tell the rest of the story: the neighbors with rifles on the porch, the women who refused to be victims, and the thinkers who explained why the powerful want you defenseless. Read them with your crew. Then go train.
01 / START HERE
We Will Shoot Back
Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, 2013
The book our We Will Shoot Back collection is named after. Umoja shows that armed self defense was not a fringe idea in the Southern freedom struggle. It kept organizers alive and helped break the grip of terror in Mississippi.
FIND IT02
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, 1965
By any means necessary did not start as a slogan. It started as a life. Read it in his own words, not a movie's.
FIND IT03
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Charles E. Cobb Jr., 2014
Written by a former SNCC field secretary. The marches were nonviolent. The communities that sheltered the marchers at night often were not, and that is why many organizers made it home.
FIND IT04
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon, 1961
A psychiatrist's look at what colonial violence does to people, and what it takes to get free of it. Heavy, honest, and still argued about. Read it with someone and talk it through.
FIND IT05
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015
A letter from a father to his son about living in a Black body in America. Short enough to read in a weekend, and hard to forget.
FIND ITREAD IT. WEAR IT. TRAIN IT.
We Will Shoot Back Pt. 2 is our homage to the first book on this list. And if you are in Houston, the next step is a class.
TRAIN WITH USBook links go to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. Your local library has most of these too. Arm Your Friends earns nothing from these links.
SHOP BY COLLECTION
Every collection funds free guides and inclusive training. Wear what you believe.
WE WILL SHOOT BACK
HALLOWEEN 2026
MAKE RACISTS AFRAID AGAIN
LONG LIVE DOLLY
FOREVER
DENY. DEFEND. DEPOSE