Civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander to speak to Earlham community via Zoom

RICHMOND, Ind. — Michelle Alexander, a renowned civil rights attorney, author and legal scholar, will speak to the Earlham College community, according to a press release.

This Sunday, Jan. 14, Alexander will give a lecture via Zoom at 7 p.m. along with Indiana University East assistant professor of history Justina Licata as part of Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations in association with the Richmond chapter of the NAACP. The lecture will be "a reflection on King’s legacy in the context of the challenges we continue to face today."

In 2010, Alexander wrote the New York Times bestseller "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" and spent 250 weeks (or four years and nine months) on The Times' best-seller list. It also won five awards and started a national conversation on the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, leading to advocacy efforts.

She has written for publications such as the Washington Post, The Nation, Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post and has been on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, C-Span and "Democracy Now." She was also an opinion columnist for the New York Times from 2011 up until her most recent column in 2021.

From 1998 to 2005, Alexander was the director of the Racial Justice Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and was also a director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, where she earned her law degree. She earned her bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University, where she earned a Truman Scholarship.

In her law career, she clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun for a year, who served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1970 to 1994, and Chief Judge Abner Mikva, who served on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1991 to 1994.

In the educational realm, she has been an associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law and served a role in the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in 2005. From 2016 to 2021, she was a visiting professor for the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she co-taught the course “Spirit of Justice: Towards an Interfaith Theology of Liberation."

In 1995 at the age of 28, she was hired as an associate for Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, a civil and workers' rights firm where she specialized in class-action suits for plaintiffs alleging race and gender discrimination.

Alexander has three children with her husband of 22 years, Carter M. Stewart, a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio who served under the Barack Obama administration from 2009 to 2016.

To watch the lecture, go to https://iu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yTEqqCWYS_aRpT1a4n-uZA#/registration.

Evan Weaver is a news and sports reporter at The Palladium-Item. Contact him on X (@evan_weaver7) or email at eweaver@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Richmond Palladium-Item: Earlham College Zoom lecture for MLK Jr. Day features civil rights lawyer