Bryan Stevenson: “Ignorance Makes You Vulnerable”

Winston Churchill offered a famous moral instruction: “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because it is the quality which guarantees all others.” It is plausible to argue that the lack of justice, the diminishment of ethics in politics, and the decline of civic virtue are also consequences of the failure of America’s leading institutions and, too often, leading figures to conduct themselves with courage.

When I spoke on the phone with Bryan Stevenson, the attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative who has emerged as the leading advocate for criminal justice reform and has, perhaps more than anyone, injected the spirit of the civil rights movement into contemporary political culture, earlier this month, he repeatedly used the word “courage.” The 66-year-old Harvard Law School graduate also demonstrated courage himself when, with little money, he took on the cases of death row inmates, fighting to free them from a cruel and sclerotic criminal justice system in Alabama, even in the face of threats against his own life. He documents those critical cases in his beautiful memoir, Just Mercy, which was adapted into a film starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

When I inquired about his emphasis on courage, he said, “It is an important word, because when you have power, one of the risks—one of the vulnerabilities of the powerful—is the belief that you don’t have to do hard things. Their power insulates them from having to do anything challenging. The truth is that even when you have power, you have to be courageous. You have to be willing to look at yourself and correct and address things that need to be corrected and addressed. Every business leader, every artist, and every scientist who has changed the world had the courage to reevaluate what they were doing at some point and acknowledge that what they were doing was wrong and that a better way forward was possible.” 

He added that “in America, we have not always shown courage in the way that we talk about our history. Historians have not been as courageous as they need to be in telling the story of America. In educational institutions, very few people—and certainly almost no one in my generation—received any education that helped them understand the horrors of slavery, the brutality and violence of lynching, and the degradation of Jim Crow and segregation. So, now we are vulnerable to misjudging these periods, and we are even vulnerable to replicating the problems of those eras.”

Aristotle called courage the “golden mean,” finding the balance between cowardice and “reckless confidence.” The triumphalist presentation of the United States as a comic-book superhero story, set against the myth of exceptionality, remains prevalent in national political debate, in public schools, and in much of pop culture. Donald Trump’s administration has assaulted the National Museum of African American History and Culture and other organizations that provide a balanced and nuanced narration of Black history, immigrant history, women’s history, and LGBTQ+ history, demonstrating “reckless confidence” in its attempt to eliminate any consideration of the darker parts of America’s past. As my colleague, Anne Kim of the Washington Monthly reported, the 250th “Great American Fair” in Washington, D.C. reduced the country to “Trump’s favored constituencies: billionaires, Christians, and whites.”

Stevenson tells a different American story. Crucial to his presentation is the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Legacy Sites” project. The Legacy Sites, a museum, memorial, and sculpture park in Montgomery, Alabama, according to EJI, “invite visitors to reckon with our history of racial injustice in places where that history was lived.” On formerly Indigenous land, the sites mark the forced displacement of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black people, and the revolutionary power of the civil rights movement. With the “Community Remembrance Project,” EJI also works with municipal governments and local organizations across the country to construct small monuments and markers at the sites of lynchings and racial terror violence that ended thousands of lives, caused a massive exodus of Black people to Northern cities, and defiled the rhetorical promises of democracy.

I asked Stevenson why he believes the Legacy Sites and the Remembrance Project are critical. “We have not done a very good job in acknowledging our history and the harms of our history. It is dangerous not to have the courage to evaluate the times when we made bad choices,” he said. “We believe in transitional justice. When a nation, community, or society violates others, we believe there needs to be a process of truth, reckoning, and repair. The State Department has a budget to help other countries around the world engage in transitional justice. We’ve seen this play out in South Africa after the collapse of apartheid. They committed to commemorating and educating people about the harms of apartheid.”

Stevenson cites Germany as an important example. “It was a nation that was the villain of the 20th Century, using the politics of fear and anger to oppress and try to eliminate a whole race of people. They’ve dared to acknowledge history and create a landscape that permanently reckons with it,” he explains. “It doesn’t mean that they are immune to bigotry, fascism, and the other problems that are implicit in the era of Nazism, but it does mean that they are better prepared to move forward. They’ve become a trusted ally.”

The MacArthur Fellow sees an unfortunate contrast. “When I look at the U.S., I don’t see many places that have dealt honestly with the legacy of slavery. Before we built our sites, I didn’t see hardly anything that acknowledged the horrible decades of racial terrorism and violence that caused millions of Black people to leave their homes and flee their land.”

“Because of that,” he says, “we’ve been quick to undermine the protections and compromise on the progress that we made during the civil rights era. I felt that we needed to begin an era of truth and justice, truth and restoration, truth and reconciliation. If we don’t commit to rejecting the misuse of the law to oppress and disenfranchise, we’ll be vulnerable to people who want to minimize the democratic participation of some groups.”

Witnessing the steady onslaught of catastrophe over the past decade, with one supposed nadir after another—the forced separation of children from their parents, the attempted insurrection of January 6, the murder of protestors on the streets of Minneapolis—many Americans have despaired over how such a recent and sharp decline in morality is possible. Perhaps, the cause of the degradation of American society is the consistent refusal to listen to the voices of those most familiar with its potential for terror and violence; the voices of the dead. It is not in the literal sense, but rather an ongoing failure to honor the dead, particularly the dead whose lives ended due to the enshrinement of hatred within public policy.

“It is vital that we know the story of those who came before us, even when that story is painful,” he said. “We’ve documented thousands of lynchings around this country: people who were lynched because they didn’t call a white person ‘sir,’ people lynched because they refused to move off a sidewalk, people lynched because they refused to take off their uniform after fighting in World War I or World War II. When we understand that, we can appreciate the character, power, and resilience of so many of those who did die under tragic circumstances.”

Of his own upbringing in Southern Delaware, Stevenson entangles the personal and the political: “Growing up in a racially segregated community that was only integrated when I got to the second grade, the intuition was not to talk about how, where you live, not everybody has running water. They use outhouses. You don’t want to advertise that because you think you’ll be judged harshly. You don’t talk about how no one in my community has a high school degree. You worry that it will diminish you.”

He adds: “Now, I feel the opposite. I feel that I am stronger, more powerful, and more capable because my enslaved great-grandparents had a hope of freedom so powerful that they refused to allow slavery to persuade them that their lives had no meaning or purpose. My great-grandfather learned to read when it was against the law for an enslaved person to read. So, yes, when we honor those who have died, we become better stewards and custodians of human rights, life, and dignity.”

Charles Darwin wrote that man bears the “indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” The American story is one of evolution, but by refusing to confront the country’s lowly origin, the governing institutions and dominant culture enabled racism, paranoia, and exclusion to adapt to its environment. As it appeared to weaken, it was mutating. The hateful populism that now determines many electoral outcomes and trajectories of discourse is yet another stamp of a lowly origin. We are living with a failure to honor the dead, and too often refusing to consider what they have to teach the living.

“If we are not prepared to be truthful about the dark parts of our history, we will repeat them,” Stevenson warned. “We’ll think it isn’t that big of a deal to think that some races of people are better than others, to think that some immigrant groups or religious groups are so despicable that we can limit their participation in society,” he said. The stakes, as Stevenson makes clear, could not be higher: “It is always possible to slide into the conditions that made it possible for a Holocaust in Europe, a genocide in Rwanda, and for mass incarceration in America that included putting young children in adult prisons, and for codified racial hierarchy that took the lives of so many Americans in the 20th Century.”

Rather than a campaign of guilt or shame, as conservatives often protest when leaders like Stevenson implore society to study history, his is actually a program akin to preventative medicine. (Although given the MAHA disdain for vaccines, this metaphor may be lost on some.) Stevenson explained, “Ignorance makes you vulnerable. It is just like if you are lactose intolerant, but you don’t know what that means, and you keep drinking milk; you are going to be sick all the time. With knowledge, you know how to change your behavior, so you are no longer dealing with pain and discomfort.”

One of the sources of discomfort for many American citizens, especially Blacks and Latinos, is mass incarceration. The same ethos that turned the power of the state against Black life is now at work in immigration policy. Thousands of undocumented immigrants and even legal residents are in detention centers facing abusive and filthy conditions. According to one human rights report, 52 inmates died in ICE custody during the first 500 days of the Trump administration.

The horrors of the Legacy Sites and Remembrance Project are echoed in contemporary mass incarceration and detention policies: “The language of criminality has been used to justify all kinds of horrific treatment. The supposed lower nature of Black and Brown people meant that they would do something menacing. As we made progress in tearing down the infrastructure of Jim Crow in the 1960s, that thinking persisted. So, in the 1970s, when we began giving in to the politics of fear and anger, we said that the people who are drug addicted are criminals who should be punished. Now, the people in power, if thinking about their own family members who were drug addicted, wouldn’t say they were criminals who should be punished. Still, in reference to other people, Black, brown, poor people, it was too tempting, based on our history, not to use that refrain. So, we went from a prison population of 300,000 in 1972 to over two million people by the end of the 20th Century.”

Violent policy toward Black and Latino people turns on the idea that it is necessary as a public safety measure. But the presumption of dangerousness is dangerous. As Stevenson said, “You cannot disconnect our tolerance of putting hundreds of thousands of people in prison, and you cannot disconnect our tolerance of executing people in the United States, even though the data shows that for every eight people we’ve executed, we’ve identified one innocent person on death row—a shocking rate of error—and yet we continue to do it. That can only be explained by looking at our larger history where we tolerated Jim Crow segregation, we tolerated mob violence and lynching, we tolerated the enslavement of Blacks, and we tolerated the displacement of Native people from their land, homes, and traditions.”

Stevenson’s horror at the American tolerance of the state premediating and planning the execution of its own citizens, something unique in the developed world, reminded me that, unlike most people, he knows how it feels to save the life of another human being. I asked if he could describe that feeling.

“It’s incredibly affirming to prevail,” Stevenson said. “To work with someone who is innocent and awaiting their execution, and to succeed in winning their freedom, is an unparalleled joy and fulfillment.” Intriguingly, he adds: “But I find great joy and meaning in standing with people even when it doesn’t work out. There is power in affirming the dignity and humanity of someone who is being unjustly mistreated. That power comes from harnessing the grace and mercy that comes when you can see someone’s full humanity and beauty, and you can share that with the world. It is always better when it results in freedom, but it is worthwhile even when the victory is yet to come.”

Stevenson said that criminal justice reform is in “worse shape” than it was 10 years ago, mainly due to the Trump administration, but that it is still in “better shape” than it was 25 years ago. The Equal Justice Initiative is working with state and local governments in the absence of cooperation from Washington, D.C.

From a broader perspective on American culture, it struck me during our conversation how rare it is to hear a political leader speak like Stevenson, articulating a political orientation that, rather than encouraging rage and resentment or remaining anodyne and ineffectual, actually indicates potential for inspiration with words like “grace,” “mercy,” and “beauty.” I asked how he believes the U.S. can restore a benevolent vision to our society.

Stevenson said that it is “important to stay rooted to what we believe,” describing the ethos as “Love is always better than hate. We cannot give in to hate. Hatred is a poison. You can’t ingest it without compromising your health and your ability to care for other people. Nonviolence is better than violence. You lose something when you hurt other people. It is important to believe in things we haven’t seen. I am a product of my grandparents who lived as though one day they would be free. They did not live as if their lives were destined to end in enslavement. They lived with hope and love, and a kind of passion for life that is inconsistent with bondage. We need to live in a politics that is rooted in the question, ‘What can be achieved?’”

As Americans have grown exhausted, stumbling through a miasma of shame and hostility, Stevenson locates hope in the redemptive possibilities that he has witnessed through his work: “For my clients, I believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. But I believe that for my opponents, the people who don’t like me, the people who make all kinds of ugly comments, even the people who threaten my life. I have to believe that they are more than that terrible thing they are saying and doing. And I want them to get to a place of peace so that they are not burdened with hatred. Our politics has become so polarized because too many of us genuinely want the other to suffer. That’s not a healthy way to think about our political environment. Human rights and dignity do not have a political party. Our vision of a nation that is equal and just in its celebration of liberty must transcend what divides us.”

It is impossible to doubt the need for what Stevenson describes, but the question remains: Does America have the courage?

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