Black History Month: "America's Mandela" brings in the celebration at the Carter Library
by Clara Nibbelink
Bryan Stevenson, a criminal rights lawyer and executive director (and founder) of the Equal Justice Initiative, was dubbed "America's Mandela" by Desmond Tutu, and boy, does the name fit.
Like his namesake, Stevenson works tirelessly for freedom and justice for all, refusing to accept that "that's just the way things are" when one hears that if current imprisonment trends continue, 1 in 3 black men will spend time in jail during their lifetime. Perhaps this is why Stevenson was seen as the perfect fit for President Obama's recently created Task Force on 21st Century Policing, of which Stevenson is a vital member.
We hosted Stevenson at the Carter Library last week. It was a Wednesday night, and the house was packed. I got in late and sat on the floor by the wall in the overflow seating room, watching Stevenson on a screen while he spoke, in person, to other members of my community right next door. The audience was no more white than it was black, no more black than it was white. And Stevenson was, even on a screen, riveting.
You may have heard of Stevenson before--he gave a Ted Talk in 2012, the first place many people heard his now oft-quoted maxim: "The opposite of poverty is not wealth--the opposite of poverty is justice." If you missed him then, you might have caught him on The Daily Show opposite Jon Stewart late last year just after his book premiered. His book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, is a memoir and call to action that chronicles his first case fighting for the exoneration of an innocent man on death row--the case of Walter McMillan, who, in 1988 in Monroeville, Alabama (the setting of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird), was sentenced to death by a judge named Robert E. Lee Key, Jr., for the murder of a white woman. Stevenson won the case. (It's for this reason that is also called "a modern day Atticus Finch.")
What makes Stevenson so captivating (and radical and effective), is that he doesn't allow his story to be dumbed down or misinterpreted. His message is very clear: The legal system is broken. The legal system is racist. The legal system must be changed. And the way to change it, Stevenson says, is through hope. Through changing America. Through changing the narrative that we have about African-Americans in America. The spookiest part of Stevenson's speech--and he mentions this in the Jon Stewart interview as well--was that he said, you go to Germany, you go to Bosnia, you go to South Africa, and you see people contending with the atrocities committed there. You see truth and reconciliation. While over there the message is "never forget," in America you see people trying to forget.
Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative are doing everything in their power to fight--not just legal battles--but battles of narrative. He published a calendar (a copy of which is now hanging in our shop) that puts a historical marker on each day with a racially-motivated crime that took place in our history. The calendar is chock full. Almost no day is clear. Stevenson is against the celebration of the Confederacy, of the sharing of Martin Luther King Day with Robert E. Lee Day in the deep South (where he lives). He says that where others see a celebration of a particular culture, he sees a whitewashed history of oppression which he has no wish to celebrate. He's not wrong.
Stevenson's points will make you squirm. "We're sending children to prison," he says. "Children." He brings mental illness to the forefront, noting that sending a mentally ill person to death row just gets easier and easier. Noting also that the mentally ill people locked up are disproportionately poor and black. That the system was against them from the beginning. "Our criminal justice system treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent." Again, he's not wrong.
But Stevenson's message--his prescription for change--is one of unrelenting hope. He says that the reason the system doesn't work is because those inside of it have become cynical, have given up, and are fighting for the wrong reasons. He says that to sustain justice and mercy and to find equality one must not shut themselves off to others but to be continually open to discomfort. To brokenness. Stevenson, in fact, ended the night saying that he fought for broken people because he was a broken person himself. That we all are. And we must take care of each other. He told an almost unbelievable story of hope, in which a white prison guard with a confederate flag on his car gave Stevenson nasty treatment before the trial of Stevenson's (also black) client. Afterwards, the guard apologized, saying that he had been through foster care himself (just as the client had) and he thought what Stevenson had done in defending him was a good thing. They shook hands, and a man who could never change, did. Just like that.
And that is Stevenson's moral: One must not close one's eyes to the bad shit. One must fight it with all they've got--with law, with narrative, with thunder. But one must always have one's arms open to hope.Â