Michelle Alexander proved many skeptics wrong after she won The New York Times best-selling author title for her book, “A New Jim Crow.”

Alexander, a highly distinguished civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and best-selling author, was the latest speaker in the Distinguished Lecture Series put on by the Wisconsin Union, and gave a compelling lecture about her book and problems in the modern criminal justice system in front of a fully packed Varsity Hall at Union South.

“I’ve read and heard the stats she stated before, but just her delivery and her ability to move an entire crowd of people is incredible,” Jake Baudo, a senior studying social work at the University of Wisconsin, said.

Alexander said before she reached her current state of mind, a desire for change, she rejected the comparisons she now makes today between mass incarceration and slavery.

She also rejected comparing mass incarceration to Jim Crow.

“I believed that those claims were just gross exaggerations, they were distortions, hyperbole,” Alexander said.

Over time, however, she said her eyes were opened to what was going on in the world, and there is one event in particular that changed her outlook.

While directing the racial justice project for the American Civil Liberties Union in California, she was in charge of a racial profiling case against the police departments, and was looking for possible stories and information from the inner-city community to use against the police departments.

When a young African American man came in and gave her heavily-detailed notes describing all his interactions with officers, she thought he was the exact person she had been looking for, but when she found out he was a felon, she turned her shoulder to him and told him she couldn’t help him.

“He said to me, ‘you’re you, just no better than the police. The minute I tell you I’m a felon, you just stop listening,” Alexander said.

Eventually, a report came out about Oakland police officers that were planting drugs on suspects, and framing them with drug convictions, and an officer that this young man named for Alexander was named in the report.

Since then, Alexander has fought hard to stop the injustices of the system, she said.

She offered up harrowing statistic after statistic, compelling members of the audience.

“More than half of African American men in Chicago have a felony record,” Alexander said. “If you include prisoners as people in Chicago, since prisoners are not included as the general public, then you would see that 80 percent of African American men in Chicago have a felony record.”

She also highlighted how the war on drugs has heavily impacted the incarceration rates of African Americans, even though drug use rates do not correlate with the drug offenses by race.

She concluded her talk with a call to continue the fight of previous civil rights activists, like Martin Luther King.

“I hope we will commit ourselves to a human rights movement to end mass incarceration, a movement for education, for jobs, not jails and to end all forms of legal discrimination,” Alexander said.

Michael Billeaux, a UW graduate student, loved Alexander’s idea for building a mass multi-racial movement.

“Her call for economic justice and racial justice and having that be a multi-racial, multi-ethnic movement was inspiring, and really what I think came through from this was the well-being of everyone depends on this,” Billeaux said.