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It is with much humility, a sense of sacred service and privilege, that The Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. (SDPC) publishes this study guide to support reading and discussion groups of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander.

With much faith, we release this guide as one more contribution to the tributaries of education, advocacy and activism to re-energize a national movement towards racial and class justice in the United States. We hope that the SDPC family, and all who use this study guide, will find power not just in the words on the pages, but in the creative and compelling conversations they will have with others.   And most of all, we hope by its very publication, those who are locked behind bars or trapped in the revolving cycle that is The New Jim Crow, will feel a little more love coming their way. 

This study guide is designed to accompany Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  Attorney Alexander masterfully describes an ugly reality that most of us see but don’t see. The reality she describes is encountered whenever we come across any group of Black high school graduates and observe the ratio difference between males to females. We see it when, a college class has 25 Black students, and there are only five Black men. We stumble across it daily as we witness police officers routinely “patting down” Black men, then driving them away in police cars and “paddy wagons.”