Lecture on new era of ‘Jim Crow’ at Brown tonight

Author and civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander will be giving a lecture at Brown University tonight at 6 p.m. in the Martinos Auditorium on her new book.

The book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness,” is about the disproportionately high number of young black people who turn to crime and how society has failed to address this issue. According to the book’s website

:

“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.

“As the United States celebrates its ‘triumph over race’ with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of black men in major urban areas are under correctional control or saddled with criminal records for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights…”

According to Brown, “Alexander is widely know for her work advocating for civil rights. In recent years, she has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinics. In 2005, she was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship, and that same year she accepted 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.”

She’ll be signing her book after her lecture.