A Prominent Scholar-Activist Trades Law for the Seminary

When Michelle Alexander’s white Lutheran mother, Sandra, and black Methodist father, John, wanted to get married in Chicago in 1965, neither of their churches wanted to perform the service.

A Methodist pastor did reluctantly preside over the ceremony. Still, Sandra felt betrayed. “She raised us with a strong spiritual grounding,” recalls Ms. Alexander, “but with the understanding that you don’t necessarily find God and find spirituality in churches and that churches can often be on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of love.”

On its face, then, it’s strange that Ms. Alexander, author of the best-selling The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010), is “walking away from the law” and her recent law professorship at Ohio State University to take a five-year visiting professorship at Union Theological Seminary. What seems a radical career shift, however, is actually a natural evolution in her thinking on racial justice, say Ms. Alexander and those who have worked with her.

Her influential book asserts that mass incarceration has “emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” Even after being released from prison, African-Americans, many convicted of nonviolent drug offenses as part of the so-called War on Drugs, “are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence” that often devastates them, their families, and their communities.

Her argument has not been uncontroversial. Michael Fortner, of the City University of New York, has criticized it for omitting the enthusiasm of some African-Americans for New York’s 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, which in turn spurred harsher sentencing guidelines nationwide. James Forman Jr., of Yale Law School, has argued that Ms. Alexander’s “myopic focus on the War on Drugs diverts us from discussing violent crime.” Still, her book helped reframe America’s view of crime, leading to new coalitions, some of them bipartisan, in which even George Soros and the Koch brothers could find some common ground.

But as she toured the country promoting the book, Ms. Alexander says, “I began to worry that simply railing against the system and indicting it for being a human-rights nightmare, which it is, wasn’t enough.” If she wasn’t able to “somehow help inspire a movement that was morally and spiritually grounded … all that sound and fury really would be signifying nothing.”

In addition to teaching at Stanford and Ohio State Universities, Ms. Alexander has practiced antidiscrimination law at a private firm in Oakland and led an ACLU project in Northern California to expose and reform racial profiling of minority motorists. She well understands the importance of, and cares deeply about, litigation and policy reform.

But, she says, “I’m shifting my own focus from questions of law to questions of justice.” Those aren’t identical, she has found. “In my experience in policy roundtables, in legal conferences, even in law-school classrooms, it’s relatively rare to have deep, searching dialogues about the meaning of justice.” She has, however, found those searching dialogues in communities of faith and at Union, where she lectured and visited with students and faculty members in the spring of 2015.

The philosopher and activist Cornel West, who was on the faculty at Union, put the seminary on Ms. Alexander’s radar when he was working on an introduction to the 2011 paperback edition of her book. They talked further at a 2012 conference at Riverside Church in New York. She told Mr. West she was thinking about leaving her law-school position and attending seminary. “I said, my God, you’ve got to come teach at seminary,” he recalls. He mentioned the idea to the Rev. Serene Jones, Union’s president, who quickly followed up and began to recruit Ms. Alexander.

Mr. West calls The New Jim Crow a “contemporary classic.” “It’s very rare in American intellectual life that there be a text that is associated with a social movement,” he said, citing C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 The Strange Career of Jim Crow as a precursor because of its influence on the civil-rights movement. Ms. Alexander, he says, “has a spiritual sensibility, a humility, but also a courage and a vision that’s rare these days. So many of our academicians tend to be a bit too conformist.” Students also find her deeply engaging, he says.

No denomination? No problem, says Ms. Jones. About a third of Union’s 300 students don’t belong to a particular denomination. The seminarians come from the United States and nine other nations and from backgrounds that are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or of no formal faith at all. Ms. Jones says that Ms. Alexander will be a hybrid teacher-student, immersed in a critical study of theology, history, and ethics — essentially the same curriculum as for a master-of-divinity degree.

Starting in the fall of 2017, Ms. Alexander will co-teach a course tentatively titled “Spirit of Justice: Towards an Interfaith Theology of Liberation.” James Cone, an expert in black liberation theology who has taught at Union since 1968, says Ms. Alexander’s knowledge of that movement from her book research will help her quickly work “her way into the ethos of the school.”

Ms. Alexander says she’ll also be writing a book on her journey from being “a somewhat naïve civil-rights lawyer” who thought America could lobby and legislate its way to justice, to realizing the societal necessity of a “radical shift in consciousness … a moral awakening.” She’ll edit a corresponding volume of contributions from various thinkers, artists, victims of injustice, and others, and she’ll oversee a related podcast.

Her family will remain in Ohio, and as part of her position, endowed by the Ford Foundation and other sources, she’ll have airfare to commute and live in Union faculty housing. She says that she will contribute $250,000 recently awarded her by the Heinz Family Foundation to various organizations battling mass incarceration and mass deportation.

Ms. Alexander says she has long valued publicly accessible and relevant research and writing over academic careerism. She left Stanford’s law faculty because she wanted to work on The New Jim Crow. She says she had felt pressured to instead pursue a traditional scholarly path, to publish narrow, uncontroversial articles in journals, and to strive to become the school’s first tenured African-American woman, even though she wasn’t receiving any schedule flexibility to raise two young children. (She and her husband, Carter Stewart, a former federal prosecutor who recently became a managing director of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, now have three children, ages 9, 11, and 14.)

At the initial urging of her younger sister, Leslie Alexander, a historian in Ohio State’s department of African-American and African studies, Michelle moved there in 2005. Ohio State’s atmosphere was far more hospitable to the demands of her writing projects and family responsibilities, she says. But even there, in 2010, Ms. Alexander switched to a nontenure research track so that she could travel and discuss her book.

Ms. Alexander’s interest in theology is in keeping with the interdisciplinary growth of critical race theory, which got started in law schools in the 1990s. Richard Delgado of the University of Alabama, a founder of the field, said via email that since then it “has found secure niches in schools of education, departments of sociology, psychology, and English, and in a few schools of theology.” He says he’s sure that Ms. Alexander will “have plenty of company in her new home — and maybe even more support than she has been receiving in her home field. Law is, by and large, a conservative discipline.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a deputy managing editor of The Chronicle Review.