Books

• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson:  This transformative narrative follows Stevenson’s early career defending death-row inmates in the American South. He has a singular gift of weaving together history, story, and faith into a true must-read.
• The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby:  An acclaimed, timely narrative of how people of faith have historically– up to the present day– worked against racial justice.  And a call for urgent action by all Christians today in response.
• Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:  In his final, prophetic manuscript, Dr. King offers his hopes, plans, and dreams for America’s future that still resonates today.
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander:  In this seminal work, Alexander points a spotlight on the epidemic of mass incarceration in America and its tragic ripple effects across our cultural landscape.
• Beloved by Toni Morrison:  This classic novel looks at the searing evil of slavery through the lives of one family who, while able to escape life on a plantation, nevertheless remains haunted by the trauma they endured there.

Articles

• “A Letter Concerning the Death of George Floyd and So Many Others”:  This letter from a group of Bishops in the Anglican Church in North America offers a thoroughly biblical and grounded response to the ongoing racial strife in our country.
• “Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular”:  In this article for the Atlantic, MacArthur Fellow Ta-nehisi Coates offers a helpful, historical overview of civil-rights protests and their public reception (or lack thereof).

Videos

• The Color of Compromise Video Series (available for free on Prime Video):  Across 11 episodes, Jemar Tisby walks viewers through an overview of the historical narrative explored in his book. He calls the American church to repent of its complicity in racism across the centuries and to become a courageous Christianity that actively fights racism and builds a society resembling the Kingdom of God.
• “What is Systemic Racism?”: An 8-part video series produced by Race Forward that shows how racism shows up in our lives across institutions and society from the Wealth Gap, to Incarceration, to Infant Mortality.
• “We Need to Talk about an Injustice”: In this TED Talk, human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about the racial imbalances in America’s justice system.
• “Racism and Our Need for Repentance”:  In this sermon at the Together for the Gospel Conference, David Platt addresses the pressing topic of the church’s role in racial justice and reconciliation and exhorts Christians to pursue multi-ethnic communities of faith united together in Christ.

Movies

• Just Mercy:  Although not an adequate substitute for reading Bryan Stevenson’s book by the same title, this 2019 film adaptation grants a strong portrayal of one of the central stories of the book: the wrongful imprisonment of Walter McMillian and Stevenson’s fight to liberate him.
• 13th:  Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary offers an in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation’s history of racial inequality. (Available on Netflix)
• Emanuel:  A beautiful, painful documentary following the 2015 murder of 9 African American men and women in Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME Church and the complex conversations that emerged following the victim’s forgiveness of the murderer.
• 12 Years a Slave:  This Best Picture-winning film tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free man living living in the north who is kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and sold into slavery in the South, where he remains for over a decade.

• Seeing White Podcast:  a 14-part investigation of the historical origins and pervasive significance of “whiteness” (Required listening for all Repentance Project Board members).

• Pass the Mic:  a podcast hosted by Jemar Tisby (author of Color of Compromise which we recommend above) that dives into issues at the intersection of race and Reformed Christianity.

• The Disrupters:  a podcast produced by InterVarsity Press and hosted by Wheaton Professor Esau McCaulley that interviews authors, scholars, and activists whose Christianity is causing them to be “disrupters” in their fields.