Sublime

Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

Angela Davis (1943–present) spent the next four decades opposing the racial discriminators who learned to hide their intent, denouncing those who promoted end-of-racism fairytales while advocating bipartisan tough-on-crime policies and a prison-industrial complex that engineered the mass incarceration, beatings, and killings of Black people by law

As legal scholar Michelle Alexander outlines in The New Jim Crow, her bestselling account of the War on Drugs and its impact on the criminal justice system, more black men are currently under correctional control in the United States than were enslaved in 1850.

ideas argue that racist policies are the cause

Seemingly contradictory calls to lock up and to save Black people dueled in legislatures around the country but also in the minds of Americans. Black leaders joined with Republicans from Nixon to Reagan, and with Democrats from Johnson to Bill Clinton, in calling for and largely receiving more police officers, tougher and mandatory sentencing, and

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Those two books archive the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration.