400 Year of Racism: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Folio presents a new series of book discussions exploring the history of racism in the United States through a collection fiction, nonfiction and poetry, curated and led by Folio librarian Lillian Dabney.

This month we discuss The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. 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. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.

About the Author

Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — the bestselling book that helped to transform the national debate on racial and criminal justice in the United States. Since The New Jim Crow was first published in 2010, it has spent nearly 250 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has been cited in judicial decisions and adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads, and has inspired a generation of racial justice activists motivated by Alexander’s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”  The book has won numerous awards, including the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction.  Alexander has been featured in national radio and television media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, CNN, Bill Moyers Journal, The Colbert Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, Tavis Smiley, Democracy Now!, and C-SPAN.

Books in this series

• Open Season by Ben Crump
• So You Want To Talk About Race by Oluo Ijeoma
• The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X.Kendi
• The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward
• Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Citizen by Claudia Rankine
• A More Perfect Reunion by Calvin Baker
• What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson
• Don't Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith
• Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates