Michelle Alexander Lecture: The New Jim Crow

Though Jim Crow laws have been abolished, once a person is labeled a felon, old forms of prejudice—employment and housing discrimination, exclusion from jury service, and the denial of the right to vote, of educational opportunity, and of public benefits such as food stamps— become legal.

[Prison Industrial System]

Michelle Alexander lectures Thursday on The New Jim Crow.

In today’s “post-racial” society, nearly half of the nation’s young Black men are behind bars, on parole, or on probation—more than the number of slaves in the U.S. in 1850.

Join Michelle Alexander at the Abyssinian Baptist Church to discuss how racial caste has not been eradicated, but simply redesigned instead. Though Jim Crow laws have been abolished, once a person is labeled a felon, old forms of prejudice—employment and housing discrimination, exclusion from jury service, and the denial of the right to vote, of educational opportunity, and of public benefits such as food stamps— become legal.

As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights than a Black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. Michelle Alexander’s moving call transcends the traditional dialogue of civil rights and race politics to focus on human rights in a way that Cornel West has called “a genuine resurrection of the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Already hailed as an instant classic, Michelle Alexander’s courageous new book The New Jim Crow is an expression of the spirit of our age, in all its complexity.

Lecture location:
Thursday, January 12, 2012,  Abyssinian Baptist Church.
132 Odell Clark Place, New York, New York
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Some praise for the book:
“Alexander deserves to be compared to Du Bois” —Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books

“The New Jim Crow is the bible of a social movement.” —San Francisco Chronicle

www.thenewpress.com 

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