CTS Selma Conference Partner Chicago Sunday Evening Club Hosts Keynote Speaker Michelle Alexander in Provocative Conversation on “Things Not Seen” Program

CHICAGO, April 20, 2015 – Award winning author Michelle Alexander was featured on the Chicago Sunday Evening Club (CSEC) radio program “Things Not Seen: Conversations about Culture and Faith,” in anticipation of her plenary address at “Selma at 50: Still Marching,” Chicago Theological Seminary’s spring 2015 Conference.

CSEC President and CEO David Dault interviewed Ms. Alexander for the program. “Michelle Alexander is a wonderful guest, and we covered a lot of ground in the conversation, including theological angles that she doesn’t normally get into,” Dault said. Their conversation explored Alexander’s argument, put forth in her 2010 book The New Jim Crow, that mass incarceration in America has been used as a tool to create a permanent, disenfranchised underclass, consisting primarily of persons of color. Listen to the complete interview at the Things Not Seen website (www.thingsnotseenradio.com).

Alexander, a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar, will address conference participants on Saturday, April 25 in a town hall style discussion. Onsite audience members and participants following CTS social media channels can interact with Alexander on topics exploring the intersection of racial justice, civil rights, and faith. Participants may offer questions and commentary via social media by following the hashtag #CTSSelma and “liking” CTS’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/CTSChicago?fref=ts).

“Selma at 50: Still Marching” is a two-day conference taking place on the CTS campus Friday, April 24th and Saturday, April 25th that will encourage attendees to examine the systemic causes of social issues, including the prison industrial complex and militarize policing, violence, racism, income inequality, and poverty to create actionable strategies leading to change. During the event, Chicago Sunday Evening Club will serve as a strategic storytelling and documentary partner. CSEC journalists, videographers, and film crews will be onsite to capture these important stories of activists and organizers collaborating to move critical human and civil rights issues of the day forward.

In 2005, Michelle Alexander won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of The New Jim Crow, and that same year, she accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. Prior to entering academia, Alexander served as the director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she coordinated the Project’s media advocacy, grassroots organizing, coalition building, and litigation. Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, Alexander clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

About Chicago Sunday Evening Club

For more than a century, the mission of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club (CSEC) has been to tell stories that inspire people to put their faith into action to make Chicago better. Examining vital civic and social issues through a lens of conscientious ethics, the Sunday Evening Club creates innovative, faith-centered engagement with important issues through live events, radio, television, and new media.