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The New Jim Crow: Young Readers’ Edition: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

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Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander is a distinguished professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. Born on October 7, 1967, she is recognized for her expertise in criminal justice and civil rights. Alexander has authored numerous articles and books on the subject of mass incarceration in the United States and its effects on African American communities. more

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“On one side of the tracks was the commercial center: the college, city hall, businesses, white residential neighborhoods-carefully kept that way, first by deliberate redlining and later by Jim Crow... Through the sixties, the city of Commerce was known as a "sundown town"- any Black person found of the streets after dark was in danger of being lynched. The only place where Black citizens were safe from the threat of white violence was also the only place Black people were legally allowed to reside: Norris Community, known fondly by younger generations as "the Hole".”

RacismRacism In AmericaJim CrowRacism And CultureRedlining
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“I'm just as aware of the injustices done to the black man as anyone," the Dipper would explain years after. "I just don't believe that you help things by running around, saying how evil Whitey is. I figure I done my share - the restaurants I integrated in Kansas, the busloads of black kids I used to take to summer camp from Harlem, the contributions I make, in my name and money, to various black causes and programs. Just because I don't call a press conference every time I do something like that doesn't mean I am insensitive to the black man's plight.”

Helping OthersJim CrowBlack In AmericaIncognito
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“What you are about to read is the story of the first war on terror. No ... wait. This is actually the origin story of second-wave white supremacy known as "Jim Crow laws." This is a war narrative. This is a horror story, but it's also a suspense thriller that ends in triumph. It also ends in tragedy. It's a true story about a fantastic myth. This is a narrative, nonfiction account of the all-American fairy tale of liberty and justice for all. Behold, the untold story of the Great American Race War. Before we begin, we shall introduce our hero. The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black people. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure. Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die. Ever. This hero is long-suffering but unkillable. Bloody and unbowed. In this story—and in all the subsequent sequels, now and forever—this hero almost never wins. But we still get to be the heroes of all true American stories simply because we are indestructible. Try as they might, we will never be extinguished. Ever.”

RaceSurvivalRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksSurvivingSurvivorsJim Crow
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“And what was the cost of this Jim Crow? Not merely that the precious words "America" and "freedom" became suspect in the eyes of the world, but more than that. It cost us lives. Lives of white men, of Frenchmen, Russians and Chinese-because there were many battles in this war when replacements were needed. But the American rule of war was "No Negroes allowed on the front lines" until the 92d finally got there. I listened to the Axis radio. Tokyo Rose said, and she quoted American sources, that Negroes were good enough to serve in the American Army, but they weren't good enough to pitch in the American Big League baseball. And they broadcast this not only to our own troops but also to the billion and a half colored peoples of the earth.”

AmericaFreedomRacismSegregationWorld War 2Jim CrowWorld War TwoAxis
Book:Why I Left America and Other Essays
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“...Jim Crow was the American equivalent of South African apartheid and the racial laws passed in Germany under the Nazi regime of the 1930s. And these similarities are not merely coincidental. Historians have uncovered growing evidence showing that racist parties around the world, including in Nazi Germany, were inspired and guided by the example of American Jim Crow.”

Racism In AmericaNazi GermanyJim Crow
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“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region's actual history and that history's relation to social and political life today.”

HistoryWhite SupremacySegregationJim CrowPersonal Experience
Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“I have often pointed out to students that the Jim Crow order had a specific and relatively brief life span. It was not completely consolidated until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. All of my grandparents were fully sentient and aware of their social environments, if not full adults, before the order's features took definite shape and assumed the form of normal politics and everyday life. And during the roughly three decades or so between the regime's consolidation and its slow, painful unraveling, the system was placed under considerable strain and reorganized internally by the Great Migration of black people out of the South or to cities within it, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the emergence of the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the war. And in large and small ways, black people never stopped challenging its boundaries and constraints–from the struggle over its imposition to its eventual defeat.”

UnionsStabilityJim CrowNew DealGreat MigrationCioPolitical ResistanceInterracial Organizing
Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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