December is Universal Human Rights Month, a time for people around the world to join together and stand up for the rights and dignity of all individuals.

Human Rights Day is observed every year on December 10 — the day the United Nations General Assembly adopted, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR proclaims the inalienable rights that everyone is entitled to as a human being regardless of race, color, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Find it in English here. Find it in over 500 other languages here.

Click on a title to find it in our catalog; and find many more titles at cobbcat.org.

Universal Human Rights Month Booklist with links

Children's Picture Books

All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold

Get Up, Stand Up by Cedella Marley

I Am Enough by Grace Byers

I Am Human: A Book of Empathy by Susan Verde

It’s Okay to be Different by Todd Parr

Mary Wears What She Wants by Keith Negley

Steamboat School by Deborah Hopkinson

We Wait for the Sun by Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Children's Nonfiction

Dreams of Freedom: In Words and Pictures

I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World by Malala Yousafzai

Lifting As We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box by Evette Dionne

Rainbow Revolutionaries: 50 LGBTQ+ People Who Made History by Sarah Prager

Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Family's Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh

Walking for Water: How One Boy Stood Up for Gender Equality by Susan Hughes

We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures by Amnesty International

Why We Live Where We Live by Kira Vermond

Children's and Preteen Chapter Books

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Equal by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

A Good Kind of Trouble by Lisa Moore Ramée

I Am Not a Number by Jenny Kay Dupuis

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

The Stars Beneath Our Feet by David Barclay Moore

Teen and Young Adult Fiction

A Girl in Three Parts by Suzanne Daniel

Golden Boy by Tara Sullivan

Loving vs. Virginia by Patricia Hruby Powell

March by John Lewis

Music From Another World by Robin Talley

Watch Us Rise by Renée Watson

Teen and Young Adult Nonfiction

#NotYourPrincess edited by Mary Beth Leatherdale

Jane Against the World: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Reproductive Rights by Karen Blumenthal

Making It Right: Building Peace, Settling Conflict by Marilee Peters

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum

We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

Adult Fiction

Death Rattle by Alex Gilly

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Adult Nonfiction

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof

Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez
Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality by Sarah McBride

Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran by Shīrīn ʻIbādī

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Peter Gourevitch