Creating an Era of Truth-Telling - Progressive.org Creating an Era of Truth-Telling
An interview with Bryan Stevenson. On November 9, 2024, Bryan Stevenson received a lifetime achievement award at the Muhammad Ali Center’s annual humanitarian awards ceremony. It was one in a string of well-deserved recognitions for a life of accomplishments that continue to grow and spread. In 1985, Stevenson graduated from Harvard Law School and began taking death penalty cases in the South. He has argued and won several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including a ruling banning mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children ages seventeen or younger. In 1989, Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. His 2014 memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, was turned into a film five years later. In 2018, he began opening a series of museums and memorials in Montgomery, Alabama. We spoke on a video call just days before his recent award was delivered. Q: Why did you choose criminal justice as your initial avenue to address racial inequality? Bryan Stevenson: I’m a product of Brown v. Board of Education, and it was a commitment to the rule of law on behalf of disfavored people that changed the course of my life. I started my education in a colored school. I lived in a county where there were no high schools for Black people when my dad was a teenager. So I grew up in a racially segregated poor area where most of the adults didn’t have high school diplomas—not because they weren’t smart or hardworking, but because there were literally no high schools for Black people. Then lawyers came into our community and enforced the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown and made them open up the public schools. The county was 80 percent white. If you had a vote on whether I could go to the public school, we would’ve lost. But these lawyers had the power to enforce the rule of law, and that changed everything for me. So I was interested in using that same power to help other people. I started law school in 1981, just as the United States prison population was growing exponentially. We had fewer than 300,000 people in jails and prisons in the early 1970s. By the end of the century, we had over two million people, and we still have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Q: The percentage of African Americans in prison in this country is much greater than the percentage of the population. What are the mechanisms that create that imbalance? Stevenson: There are multiple factors. We have a legal system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Wealth is often a determinant of what kind of outcome you get. And we have so many communities of color that are low-income and poor. But I also think we are still burdened by our history of racial injustice. I think the legacy of slavery, a century of terror, violence, and lynching, and decades of codified racial segregation and hierarchy have created a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to Black and brown people. In 2001, the Bureau of Justice Statistics projected that one in three Black male babies born in this country was expected to go to jail or prison. What was even more shocking is that we didn’t have a pandemic-like reaction to that reality. We just sort of accepted it as the way things are in America. We’ve developed a high tolerance of racial bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice in America. That has fed these continuing disparities that we see in so many aspects of our criminal legal system. Q: You have worked to create the National Memorial for Peace and Justice for victims of lynching. It’s rather amazing that it took this country more than 100 years to pass an anti-lynching bill, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. Can you tell us about the history of lynching and what brought you to create a memorial to its victims? Stevenson: About fifteen years ago, I began to fear we might not win Brown v. Board of Education today. It terrified me to imagine that our courts were no longer willing to do something as disruptive as Brown on behalf of a disfavored group. I think that’s largely because we haven’t engaged in the narrative work necessary to create a consistent commitment to eliminating inequality and racial injustice. So we set out in Montgomery, Alabama, to start doing narrative work. We began with slavery, because I live in Montgomery, home to fifty-nine markers and monuments to the Confederacy. But when I moved here in the 1980s, you couldn’t find the words “slave,” “slavery,” or “enslavement” anywhere in this city. Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday; Jefferson Davis’s birthday is a state holiday. We don’t have Martin Luther King Jr. Day; we have Martin Luther King Jr./Robert E. Lee Day. This consciousness of romanticizing the era of enslavement has really held us back, and burdened us, and fostered the continuation of so much bigotry. So we took on the challenge of engaging with how to change the narrative, how to create an era of truth-telling. The National Memorial seeks to identify the hundreds of counties where lynchings took place and provide the names of over 4,000 victims that we can document between 1877 and 1950. We have another monument that documents victims from the 1950s, such as Emmett Till. And we have a third now that identifies the victims between 1865 and 1877. But it’s tragic that most Americans can’t name a single Black victim of racial terror lynchings. That’s how little we have done to elevate our consciousness about this. Because we haven’t addressed this history, we are vulnerable to the kind of lawlessness that shaped that era returning today. Until we do, I don’t think we can be the great democracy that we want to be. We’re going to be vulnerable to narratives of fear and anger, to dog-whistling about race, to posturing about who’s worthy and who’s not, who’s American and who’s not, who’s safe and who’s not. These sites are constructed to provide context for the work we do in court and to invite Americans to engage in a new era of truth and justice, truth and repair, and truth and restoration, which I think is long overdue. Q: Talk about the artistry of the sculpture park, how you created that, and what people feel when they first experience it. Stevenson: We have three sites. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is dedicated to victims of lynchings, and it is a journey. It begins with sculptures by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, a Ghanaian sculptor, that depict the brutality of slavery, but also the humanity of the enslaved. Then you enter into a square where we have six-foot Corten steel monuments that name all of the counties and the victims of this violence. In the first quarter, they’re at eye level to create that human relationship that represents the lives of people. Then, in the second quarter, they begin to rise, because people need to understand that this terror wasn’t just directed at the thousands who were killed, it was directed at the millions who were intended to be silent, to be compliant. It victimized millions of people, including all of those who fled. By the time you get to the center of the memorial, all of that violence is hanging over you. The bodies of lynching victims were sometimes suspended for days because law enforcement and lawless mob members wouldn’t let families claim their loved one, because they wanted to taunt, terrorize, and torture other people in that community. The Legacy Museum tries to draw the connection between the transatlantic trade of people who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas, and the domestic trade, which is what populated the American South at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the collapse of commitment to law and Reconstruction, and that era of lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration, the moment that we are in now. We have art there and a huge reflection room that honors 400 people who have stood against these forces. It’s intended to be sobering, but also inspiring. The third site, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, uses art and sculpture to engage people in a more immersive way with the lives of enslaved people. It’s on a seventeen-acre site situated between the Alabama River, which was a portal for trafficking thousands of enslaved people to this region, and a rail line built by enslaved people. We use sculpture and art because it’s such a hard history that you sometimes need something beautiful and compelling to help you navigate the harm and the weight of it. We’ve got amazing sculptures from some of the best artists in the world to help dramatize these things. Then there’s a narrative as well. We use the writings of enslaved people to tell stories about this history. We want people to understand that the legacy of slavery isn’t just trauma, tragedy, abuse, and degradation. It’s also a legacy of survival, resistance, and resilience. Enslaved people—despite the agony of their circumstances—were committed to love and family. That’s a powerful story that also needs to be lifted up. I’m the descendant of enslaved people in this country, and I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t find the power to love in the midst of agony, and in the midst of suffering. So we tried to celebrate that aspect of this narrative with the creation of the National Monument to Freedom. It’s this large, forty-three-foot-tall, 170-foot-wide monument that presents the names of all four million formerly enslaved people who were emancipated after the Civil War. They adopted 122,000 family names. It was the first time that formerly enslaved people could be recognized by the U.S. government with the dignity of a surname. And these names are on that monument. Q: You talked about the Confederate statues you grew up around, many of which are now being taken down in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police. But today, we also have a backlash with attacks on the teaching of so-called critical race theory in the schools. Talk about the moment that we’re in now. Stevenson: We are in the middle of a narrative struggle. Abolitionists during the time of slavery faced a brutal backlash to their literature, and it was a crime to be in possession of abolitionist literature in many states in the South. Enslaved people could be executed if they were in possession of that; people who even used the word could be jailed or in prison. We saw the same thing during Reconstruction, when there was this powerful language in the Fourteenth [Amendment] about equal protection and the right to vote. The courts retreated from that, and instead a narrative emerged that Black people aren’t capable of those kinds of things. Then, in the 1950s, when courageous Black people started organizing to bring down the Jim Crow laws, white citizens’ councils formed and elected officials began using the rhetoric of “segregation forever.” So when so many people—Black and white, young and old—took to the streets in 2020 to acknowledge the continuing challenges of racial violence and racial injustice, it’s not a shock that there would be a counternarrative. And that’s what we’re seeing today. So that’s the moment we’re in. Just as the truth and power of abolition prevailed in the nineteenth century and chattel slavery ended, just as the truth in power of the unacceptability of lawlessness and lynching ultimately prevailed, I think we will prevail again. Q: You’ve had an illustrious four-decade career as an attorney, helping countless people. What’s next? Stevenson: We have to do even more to protect people in our jails and prisons who are unjustly treated, wrongly convicted, unfairly sentenced, and subjected to conditions that are torturous and violent. We have to do more to advance this narrative struggle, this era of truth and justice and truth and repair that I think our nation needs. We’ve started a whole new anti-poverty initiative at Equal Justice Initiative that I’m really excited about. We’re providing direct support to thousands of families that are dealing with food insecurity. We’re working with communities and families to provide them with the support they need in a way that affords them dignity and some control over how they recover from hardship. We’ve opened a health clinic, and we’re now providing free health care to people coming out of jails and prisons. I want us to be directly engaged in helping the most vulnerable people—the people who are most in need, the people who are hungry, the people who are struggling because they’ve been excluded from the pathways to success and profit. The best part with our hunger program is that we identify families in need, but we reserve a certain percentage of the slots for other people that they know. Allowing people who have needs to help someone else has been really powerful. They often talk about that being the most rewarding part of the program—being empowered to help someone else. Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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