Her book, The New Jim Crow, focuses on status of African-American males since the Civil Rights Movement

Indiana University East invites the campus and community to a lecture by Michelle Alexander, a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, at 3:30 p.m. (EST), Tuesday, January 27, 2015.

Alexander’s talk will be streamed to all IU campuses live from IU Northwest, where she will be appearing in person — the pinnacle of the Northwest campus’s One Book…One Campus…One Community reading initiative, which encourages the campus and greater community to collectively examine issues explored in the chosen book.

Thanks to support from IU Bloomington’s Office of the Vice-President for Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs, the streamed lecture will be viewed at 3:30 p.m. in Springwood Hall Room 202C. Following the lecture, Alexander will invite questions and answers from the audience at IU Northwest until 5 p.m. (EST).

Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African-Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status — denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers and prisons nationwide.

Alexander currently holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.  Prior to joining the Kirwan Institute, Alexander was an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, where she directed the Civil Rights Clinics, designed to be an introduction to civil rights litigation and advocacy for students.

In 2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of The New Jim Crow. The book has received rave reviews and has been featured in national radio and television media outlets, including NPR, The Bill Moyers Journal, the Tavis Smiley Show, C-Span Washington Journal, among others.

For several years, Alexander served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, where she helped to lead a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. While an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in plaintiff-side class action lawsuits alleging race and gender discrimination.

Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University.

To learn more about the IU Northwest One Book…One Campus…One Community reading initiative, visit iun.edu/onebook.

For more information about the lecture, or to reserve your seat, contact Wazir Mohamed, associate professor of sociology at IU East, at (765) 973-8250 or email wmohamed@iue.edu.