Civil rights lawyer, professor and author Michelle Alexander will talk about what she describes as the “mass incarceration” of African Americans this coming Thursday, November 10 at the University of Louisville.
In “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,”—which also is the title of her 2010 book—Alexander argues that the high percentage of African Americans in prisons—especially through the war on drugs—has created a new racial underclass that brings to life traditionally old forms of discrimination.
The New Jim Crow was awarded the NAACP Image Award for outstanding nonfiction, as well as the American Political Science Association’s Michael Harrington Best Book Award for an academic book “with the potential to mobilize change on pressing social and political issues.”
Alexander, who has a joint appointment with The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, is the former director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford University Law School and director of the Racial Justice Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. At the ACLU, she helped lead a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement.
UofL’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research sponsors the lecture; both are named for a Louisvillian active in the civil rights movement for nearly six decades.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 6 p.m. in the auditorium of the Speed Art Museum, 2035 S. Third St. Doors will open at 5:30, and parking is available for $4 in the adjacent garage. For more information, contact Amber Duke at 852-6142.
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