Let My People Go

From the New York Times bestselling author of the groundbreaking The New Jim Crow comes a tender, thought-provoking memoir about the pursuit of justice and meaning, challenging each of us to find our own truth and set it free.

Michelle Alexander was born in an America that wasn’t ready for what her parents represented. Theirs was an interracial marriage that left them estranged from their families and excommunicated from their church. The Alexanders fled Chicago for the Illinois cornfields to build their own multiracial community—a commune fueled by spirituality and love. Instead, they found barriers at every turn, suffering through evictions and homelessness as they moved out West in pursuit of a better life for Michelle and her sister. Surely the American dream was just over the horizon.

Michelle saw a way out through higher education, but from the culture shock of pledging a white sorority at Vanderbilt to the checkbox diversity of Stanford Law School, she thrived academically despite shriveling away mentally and physically. She earned the honor of clerking at the Supreme Court, but her tenure was cut short by her father's untimely death at age fifty-two. Michelle joined a corporate firm to keep her family out of dire poverty.

After starting her own family, Michelle sought more fulfilling legal work, but she was let down by her peers, whose American dream included getting ahead at the expense of the voiceless. She was spiraling through anger and disillusionment until she had a pair of seemingly fated meetings—one with a wrongfully convicted man and another with legendary activist Vincent Harding, whose visionary guidance would help Michelle finally unburden her spirit.

By turns devastating and triumphant, but always soul-baring and profound, Let My People Go is an intimate look at Michelle Alexander’s pursuit of meaning and a testament to the power of defining success on our own terms. In her exquisite storytelling, Alexander shows us a spirit called to action, challenging each of us to advocate for each other and for ourselves—to find our own truth and set it free.

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar and the bestselling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which helped to transform the national debate on racial and criminal justice. The book won numerous honors including an NAACP Image Award. Alexander has been featured in media outlets like MSNBC, NPR, CNN, The Colbert Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Democracy Now!. She has taught at Stanford Law School and The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. Currently, she is a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary.

• Publisher: One World
• Published: May 5, 2026
  
• ISBN: 9780525512233, 0525512233
  
• Binding: Hardcover
  
• BISAC: Biography & Autobiography / Memoirs