March 24, 2025

Feed Drop: Build Through Belonging, w/ Essie Justice Group

1 hour 29 minutes

This week we are featuring a special presentation of a panel hosted by our friends at Essie Justice Group on February 27th in Oakland, California. This intimate conversation led by Michelle Alexander, Maurice Mitchell and Gina Clayton-Johnson talk criminalization, climate change, and organizing Black and brown working class communities in this political moment. Against the backdrop of the LA wildfires which have impacted Essie Justice Group’s members and Gina personally, and the mounting threats to democracy, this important discussion among strategic leaders delivers deep insights into today's most urgent fights.

Panelists

Michelle Alexander: Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — the bestselling book that helped to transform the national debate on racial and criminal justice in the United States. Michelle’s work has inspired a generation of racial justice activists motivated by her unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Maurice Mitchell: Maurice Mitchell is a nationally-recognized social movement strategist and visionary organizer for racial, social, and economic justice. Maurice helped build the Movement for Black Lives and was a key organizer of its 2015 convention in Cleveland. In 2018, Maurice took the helm of the Working Families Party as National Director where he is applying his passion and experience to make WFP the political home for a multi-racial working-class movement.

Gina Clayton-Johnson: Gina Clayton-Johnson is the Founder and Executive Director of Essie Justice Group, the nation’s leading advocacy organization of women with incarcerated loved ones. She is also a central architect of the BREATHE Act, the largest piece of proposed federal legislation delivered to Congress by a social movement. Gina has spent over 15 years advocating for Black communities as an organizer, attorney, activist, and woman with an incarcerated loved one. As a public defense attorney, she specialized in representing low-income women facing eviction as the result of a family member’s criminal matter. Currently, Gina is navigating the loss of her Altadena home from the recent LA wildfires.

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