The Most Important Work of Our Lives: A Conversation About Racial and Gender Justice

At the forefront of the work to end mass incarceration in Louisiana, Alanah Odoms Hebert RC’02, NLAW’08, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, will share her insights on the power and potential of collective action for civil rights and racial justice.

Hebert, a leading civil rights attorney, is the first African-American woman to be named executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. She is committed to reducing mass incarceration and furthering racial justice in Louisiana, as well as to expanding the ACLU’s collaboration with marginalized communities. Initiatives under her leadership include ending non-unanimous jury verdicts, a destructive legacy of Louisiana’s Jim Crow history, and a statewide assessment of Louisiana’s prolific pretrial detainee population.

This discussion will be moderated by Rebecca Mark, director at the Institute for Women’s Leadership and professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Rutgers. Mark is a scholar and professor whose research addresses women’s writing and cultural representations of trauma. Her books include The Dragon’s Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty’s Fiction (University Press of Mississippi, 1994) and Ersatz America: Hidden Traces, Graphic Texts, and the Mending of Democracy (University of Virginia Press, 2014).