People for Change at ToCI continues to organize educational workshops in addition to spending time ourselves studying texts of interest to our members.

We recently completed discussions of Manning Marable's biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Our discussions were deep and informed by individual PFC's members' deep knowledge themselves of the life and political work of Malcolm X. His legacy is claimed by many and we talked a lot about whether Marable captured valuable aspects of his life that contribute to our knowledge of what it might take to achieve racial justice in this country. We also noted what  in Malcolm's life Marable highlights as moments of "reinvention" and discussed the meaning of that term.

Next week we will discuss some commentary on the book brought to us by member Kenneth Sharp.

We will then proceed to discuss the already classic text (only two years out from its date of publication in 2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. 

People for Change is also about to put out our second newsletter. The question to respond to for submissions was "If I had a second chance, what would I do with it?"  Inside and outside members contributed. Contact me at renee.heberle@utoledo.edu if you would like a copy.  Our next newsletter will respond to the question, "What does 'freedom' mean to me?"

These questions are always collectively arrived at through discussion in our group.

Dr. Morris Jenkins and myself will be reprising our inaugural class for the Inside/Out program titled "Law, Justice, and Mass Incarceration."  We will also be studying The New Jim Crow, embedded in many other historical and contemporary analyses of the question "why and how does the US incarcerate a greater proportion of its citizens, disproportionately citizens of color, than any other nation on earth?"

URLs for some publicity for our Inside/Out program

http://wordpress.utoledo.edu/provost/2012/06/05/prison-classroom-soars-free-with-shared-learning/

http://utnews.utoledo.edu/index.php/07_17_2012/ut-offers-integrated-course-with-incarcerated-students