Changing the world — it’s a daunting concept. What can one person do? Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has found his path as a public interest attorney routinely challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. His organization works to eliminate unfair and excessive sentencing, helps exonerate innocent death row prisoners and brings to light the abuse of the incarcerated and mentally ill.
Stevenson has come to believe that the opposite of poverty is not wealth but justice. “We can’t judge how we’re doing by seeing how we treat the rich and powerful and those with privilege,” he says. “It’s revealed by how we treat the poor, incarcerated and despaired.” Stevenson is just one person, who through his work and creation of EJI, is making a difference. Here he shares what he’s learned about what it takes and where you can start.
1. Get proximate.
Stevenson encourages us put ourselves out into the world. It takes being close to figure out what change is needed and how you can help effect it. “When you get proximate, you can learn about your capacity to change the world,” he says.
Stevenson grew up in a poor rural community in southern Delaware. He was in second grade before his school was formally desegregated. He notes that his ability to attend the local high school is the result of the work of others and says, “I’m the product of someone else’s proximate.” He became the first member of his family to attend college and immersed himself in music and sports and majored in philosophy. “I loved college,” he says. “I wanted to go for the rest of my life.” Naturally, he applied to graduate school.
While studying law at Harvard, Stevenson found himself disillusioned that no one was discussing social injustice. It wasn’t until he “got proximate” in Georgia that he found his purpose. In Atlanta he interned with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (now Southern Center for Human Rights) and had his first opportunity to meet a death row inmate.
On his drive to Jackson to inform a condemned man that he wasn’t at risk of execution within the next year, Stevenson became convinced the inmate was going to be disappointed to see him — a mere student. He tells the story:
It took jailers 10 minutes to unchain the shackles on the man’s ankles and hands. The prisoner, Henry, said I was the first person he’d seen besides prisoners and guards in two years. When I delivered the news that he wasn’t at immediate risk, he asked me to repeat it three times. It turned out that we were the same age and we spent three hours talking (two more than allotted) until the guards burst in angrily and threw Henry against the wall. He said, “Don’t worry about this Bryan. You just come back over and over.”
Then Henry planted his feet, threw his head back and sang a hymn: “Lord plant my feet on higher ground.”
“Being proximate to that song helped me understand that I wanted to help death row inmates plant their feet on higher ground,” Stevenson says. “It changed me.”
2. Change the narrative that created the problem.
More than half of our jail and prison inmates are mentally ill and many are acutely mentally ill. Our system punishes their actions rather than treating the illness that likely led to those actions. Similarly, almost three-quarters of inmates reported symptoms in the year before their admission to jail that met substance dependence or abuse criteria. And still, the United States approaches drug addiction as a crime issue rather than a health issue. “Policy choice is the problem,” Stevenson says.
Stevenson also advocates changing the narrative we tell about race in America, believing that we won’t truly be free until we discuss the parts of our past we’re afraid to talk about. “We are a post-genocidal continent,” he says, and cites the killing of natives with famine, disease and war and the era of American slavery. “We haven’t done what we need to to move on. For decades, we burdened and beat people of color; we humiliated people. We still have a country that is largely segregated. A presumption of ‘dangerous or guilty’ follows us.”
Thirty-seven percent of male inmates on both a federal and state level are black though they only make up 12-13 percent of the American population. We jail a disproportionate number of black men with one in three expected to see the inside of a jail cell. Stevenson tells how at one court appearance, a judge sternly told him to “sit down,” assuming he was the accused.
3. Stay hopeful about what we can do.
Stevenson talks about how difficult it can be even now to live in a place like Montgomery, Alabama, and hear people talk about “the good ol’ days” of the 1940s and 1950s when segregation was the order of the day and white supremacy was openly accepted. He recounts an interaction with a prison guard still pining for those days.
“I pulled into the prison parking lot to find a large truck adorned with confederate flags and a bumper sticker that read ‘If I’d known it was gonna be like this, I would’ve picked my own cotton.’” Inside, Stevenson was greeted by a guard who refused to believe he was a lawyer, insisting he produce his bar card. The guard said, “Well, I’m still gonna give you a strip search,” a process generally reserved for prisoners, not attorneys. Then he made Stevenson come back out and sign in rather than doing it for him as was customary.
The prisoner he had come to assist, upon seeing Stevenson, immediately asked, “Did you bring me a chocolate milkshake?” A chocolate shake was all he could think about. It turns out the inmate was severely disabled — a bipolar schizophrenic drug addict — a factor that had never been mentioned in any of his records. The guard who treated Stevenson with such disdain sat through the prisoner’s hearing. Later, when Stevenson returned to the prison to visit his client, he once again saw the truck and debated turning around. But, he says, “I started hearing that song in my head, got my bar card and headed in.” It turns out the guard had changed his tune, saying, “Oh, I don’t need that. I’ve already signed you in.”
The guard’s hands were shaking so much he could barely fit the key in the lock as he said to Stevenson, “I listened to what you had to say in that courtroom. I came up in the foster care system too and had it really bad. It sounds like maybe your client had it even worse; I’ve been an angry man my whole life. I’m glad I’m seeing you so I can tell you to keep doing what you’re doing. I want to shake your hand. And I want you to know that on the trip back from the courthouse I bought your client a Wendy’s milkshake.”
People will surprise us if we have an open spirit. “I’ve come to realize that hopelessness is the enemy of justice,” Stevenson says. “We’ve got to stay hopeful — it’s what will get you to stand when others say sit down.”
4. Be willing to do uncomfortable things that are hard.
“I’ve looked for examples of where people changed the world without discomfort and couldn’t find any,” says Stevenson. In his years as a public interest attorney, Stevenson has witnessed horrific abuse and executions. There is no public defender system in Alabama and inmates have been executed before they could be defended. In the case of one such man suffering from intellectual disability, Stevenson argued he wasn’t fit to be executed. The court said it was too late. “Appeals, federal, all said ‘too late’ — courts seem to think that what’s more important than justice is finality,” he says.
The Supreme Court convened and made a decision one hour before the man’s scheduled execution and the motion for a stay was denied. “When I called the man to tell him, he said he wanted to tell me something important,” recalls Stevenson. “But he stuttered when upset and just couldn’t form words; the harder he tried, the more ripped apart I felt. The guards were rushing him and finally the man choked out, ‘I want to thank you for taking my case, for representing me. I love you for trying to save my life.’ They pulled him away, strapped him to a gurney and executed him.”
Stevenson says he increasingly finds himself representing broken people in a broken system. “Why am I doing this?” he asks. “Not because I’m trained or important or for justice or human rights — I’ve realized that I do what I do because I’m broken too. The truth is that if you get proximate, if you try to change the narrative and do uncomfortable things, you will become broken too; but that’s what teaches us the way compassion works, the way justice works.”
Stevenson urges us not to measure our worth or capacity to make a difference by our grades or income; they aren’t the metrics by which to measure how much good each of us can do on this earth.
Bryan Stevenson spoke for the Family Action Network (FAN) in Evanston in April. The event was not filmed. Don’t miss out on any more speakers — visit FAN’s site for a list of upcoming events.
Want More?
- Have 20 minutes? Watch Stevenson’s 2012 TED Talk.
- Have a few hours? Read Stevenson’s newly released book, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.”
- Learn more or donate to help fund Equal Justice Initiative’s work. (They recently won a historic ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional.)
FAN Annual Sponsors: Martin & Mary L. Boyer Foundation, Compass Health Center, Erikson Institute, Evanston Township High School, Make It Better, Mammal Foundation, New Trier Township High School, Pathways, Tina & Byron Trott
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