The Ohio State University at Lima welcomes civil rights lawyer and advocate Michelle Alexander to campus for A Conversation with Michelle Alexander at 2:30 p.m., Wed., April 1, 2015, in the Martha W. Farmer Theatre for the Performing Arts in Reed Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New York Review of Books in March 2011 said of the book, “Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don’t know how to face. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is such a work. A former director of the Racial Justice Project at the Northern California ACLU, now a professor at the Ohio State University law school, Alexander considers the evidence and concludes that our prison system is a unique form of social control, much like slavery and Jim Crow, the systems it has replaced.”
Students in Ohio State Lima’s Honors program are reading The New Jim Crow for the Honors Book Seminar, which will be held 12:45-2:00 p.m., Wed., March 25, 2015, in Galvin Hall 450. All who have read the book are welcome to attend the seminar, which will be moderated by Brittany Collier-Gibson and Mike Huffman.
"Michelle Alexander’s work is radical in the sense that it gets at the root of social injustice in contemporary America," said David Adams, director of the Honors Program and associate professor of English. "Our hope is that her visit will begin a constructive dialogue across the campus and throughout the community."
Professor Alexander joined the OSU faculty in 2005. She holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Prior to joining the OSU faculty, she was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, where she served as Director of the Civil Rights Clinic.
Professor Alexander has significant experience in the field of civil rights advocacy and litigation. She has litigated civil rights cases in private practice as well as engaged in innovative litigation and advocacy efforts in the non-profit sector. For several years, Professor Alexander served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. While an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in plaintiff-side class action suits alleging race and gender discrimination.
Professor Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court, and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
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Editors’ Note: A Conversation with Michelle Alexander was originally scheduled to be held in Science 100. It has been moved to the Martha W. Farmer Theatre for the Performing Arts in Reed Hall.