"Just Mercy" attorney faces racism (audio)

Host Terry Gross (Fresh Air, MLK Jr. Day, 1/20/20), Harvard attorney Bryan A. Stevenson (Equal Justice Initiative), TED Talk 2012; Crystal Quintero, Seth Auberon, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Just Mercy attorney asks U.S. to reckon with our racist past and present

Bryan Stevenson is the author of the memoir Just Mercy, which was recently adapted into a film starring Michael B. Jordan.

The third Monday of every January is a U.S. federal holiday honoring the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. But two Southern states — Alabama and Mississippi — also use the day to celebrate General Robert E. Lee, commander of the pro-slavery Confederate forces during the Civil War.

Attorney Bryan A. Stevenson

Public interest lawyer NY School of Law Professor Bryan A. Stevenson (CBS interview) lives in Alabama and is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to combat injustice in the U.S. legal system.

The new movie Just Mercy is an adaptation of his 2014 memoir of the same name. He says that the fact that his state honors Gen. Lee at all — let alone on the same day as Rev. King — is a sign that America has not acknowledged the evils of its past.

• Author Interview: One lawyer's fight for "Just Mercy"

White + KKK = racist USA (iStock.com)

"In the American South, where I live, the landscape is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy," Stevenson says. "We actually celebrate the architects and defenders of enslavement. For me, that has to change if we're going to get to the kind of healthy place I think we need to get to."

Stevenson has traveled the world, observing how other cultures address the injustices of the past. He notes that Johannesburg, South Africa, has a museum and monuments that "talk about the wrongfulness of apartheid."

Just Mercy movie poster

In Berlin, he says, "You can't go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones placed next to the homes of Jewish families that were abducted during the Holocaust."

"But in this country," he says, "we don't have institutions that are dedicated and focused to making sure a new generation of Americans appreciates the wrongfulness of what we did when we allowed lynching to prevail and persist, what we did when we created racial apartheid through segregation."

In 2018 Stevenson and his organization opened the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, both dedicated to the legacy of

• slavery,
• lynching,
• segregation, and
• mass incarceration in the U.S.

We're human! Treat us as human beings!

For Stevenson, the museum and the monument are an effort to address the past — and to change the future.

"I just felt like we had to introduce a narrative about American history that wasn't [being] clearly articulated," he says. "We need to create institutions in this country that motivate more people to say 'Never again' to racial bias and bigotry." More

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