Do you have a family?
My dad is still alive and I try to spend time with him when I can. I have two siblings, and my brother has two boys, my sister has two girls.
Oh, how about that!
Yeah, it’s been great. And I have always enjoyed spending time with them.
Do you live in the same city as them?
No, they live closer to where I grew up in Delaware. But they’ve been very tolerant of me when I’ve asked to spend some time with them. And they’re great. My nephew might come down for a while, or I go see my nieces. When they were young, I had the advantage of being the uncle who could return them back to their parents when they were worn out and fussy. [Laughs].
[Laughs].
For me it’s a lovely relationship.
Yeah. I want to talk about your family’s history of slavery and how you’ve personally come to terms with it. How it’s played a role in your own personal growth.
Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, and I’ve been thinking about this recently. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. My great grandfather was born in slavery in Virginia. And we grew up with segregation, I started my education in a coloured school. I couldn’t go to the public school when I started.
When you think about that now…
I know! It’s interesting that I never, ever talked about that in the first 35, 40 years of my life. Never.
What do you mean?
I just didn’t feel like it was something I wanted to assert, generally speaking. And then I got to the point where I realised there is power in this history. In the last 10 years I’ve been talking about it more and more, and now I want everybody to know that my great grandparents were enslaved, that my grandmother was raised by people who were formerly slaves, that she grew up during a time of lynching and was terrorised every day of her life. That my parents couldn’t go to high school ‘cause there was no high school for black kids. That they faced humiliation and the injuries of exclusion every day of their lives, that I started my education in a coloured school. Because it’s by giving voice to all of those things that I can push something, because people survived and overcame these barriers. And that actually makes me not weaker, but stronger.
How did you come to that realization?
When we took on the project of race and poverty living in Alabama we saw this preoccupation with mid-19th-century history. They tell a story about the Civil War that’s very, in my judgement, misguided. “All our generals were great. The architects and defenders of slavery were noble, honest men who should be celebrated.”
Really?
Yes! All the high schools are named after their Confederate generals. Jefferson Davis’ birthday is a state holiday even today. Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday. In Alabama it’s not Martin Luther King Day, it’s Martin Luther King slash Robert E. Lee Day. And they put markers and monuments everywhere and there is not a word about slavery. I realised part of what has corrupted us is that we haven’t told the truth about this history. So we actually put out a report about slavery. And we did a project last year where we put out markers about the slave trade in Alabama—lots of resistance. The Alabama Historical Association said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” But it’s really when I started being more truthful about my own family’s history, so saying, “I grew up poor.” I did. We grew up in a black settlement. You know, people had outhouses. That wasn’t what I wanted people to know about me when I was at Harvard, but now I realise…
Was that because you wanted to fit in?
I just didn’t trust them with that information and so I didn’t share it. What I’ve learned now is that you’ve got to trust yourself. That’s what we’re really doing with our race and poverty program. We put out this report on lynching last week, and my goal is to put markers and monuments at lynching sites all over America.
It’s truth-telling. Because the only way we’re going to make progress is through truth and reconciliation.
And if I’m insisting on that for the nation then I’m going to insist on it for myself when it comes to these issues. It’s actually been really liberating, and I’ve been remembering these things my grandmother used to talk about, what she taught my mother about managing the challenges of racial terrorism expressed through lynching. All of that has definitely made me more hopeful, more determined, but also stronger in terms of how to confront some of these big issues.
How did your family react when you started talking about it publicly?
I think we’ve all been ready. My brother’s a psychologist and he does a lot of work on race and ethnicity as well, pushing school systems to deal more effectively with the challenges that kids face because of race and exclusion. We’ve always been mindful of the way these issues play out. My sister, all of us.
What does your sister do?
She’s an elementary school music teacher. And also a church musician. She plays for a big church in Delaware. In that sense she’s carrying on my mum’s career.
Wonderful. I have to say, I experienced this colour-lens when I went to America for the first time. I became really conscious of my skin colour because other people were conscious of it. And I felt sad. I thought, What does this do to individuals, and what does this do to a country?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that it’s gone on unchallenged for so long. That’s the real ugliness of it. And I think there is this presumption that gets created around race. I tell this story sometimes. I was going to court a couple of years ago and I was sitting in the courtroom, trying to get ready to do this hearing. I got there early, and it was the first time I’d ever been in this courtroom. And I had my suit on, I had my shirt and tie, sitting at defence counsel table. The judge walked in and he saw me sitting there and he said, “Hey, hey, hey, you get out of my courtroom without your lawyer! You wait out there in the hallway ‘til your lawyer gets here.” And I stood up and said, “Oh I’m sorry Your Honour, I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Bryan Stevenson. I am the lawyer.” And the judge started laughing. The prosecutor started laughing. I made myself laugh because I didn’t want to disadvantage my client who was a young white kid.
The irony!
Heh! I did the hearing, but afterwards I was sitting in my car thinking, Why does this judge see a middle-aged black man in a suit and a tie at counsel’s table and it doesn’t occur to him that’s the lawyer? What is that? And then I thought, Well, is whatever produced that going to disadvantage black defendants when they’re being sentenced by this judge? Of course it will. Is it going to create barriers for fair treatment when this person encounters people of colour? Of course it will. And I’m not even saying he’s a bad person or anything, but it’s that kind of bias that has been fostered.
It’s the unconscious narrative.
Yes it is. And so we’ve got to challenge that.
Every great moment in history, every instance where progress has been made has been created and sustained by people who have gotten close, who’ve changed narratives, who’ve been hopeful and who’ve done something uncomfortable. That’s the blueprint for what we are trying to do at the Equal Justice Initiative.
Through all these challenges, what brings you joy? What do you love?
I really feel fortunate that I get to work with people, some of whom are incarcerated, some of whom are condemned, some of whom are in really difficult situations, but because they share so much of themselves with me, I reciprocate that. I love my clients, I do. I feel like there are a lot of people I get to watch grow and change, and that’s really, really, affirming. And I love the people we serve. There’s a community of people who give up a lot to do this work, and I appreciate and love them for that. And I actually love the idea that we are trying to advance. To me, it’s rooted in something really beautiful, something really righteous. And it may seem idealistic and a little misguided to kind of organise your life around it. To some people it seems that way. But to me it makes perfect sense. I can’t actually imagine doing anything else. Other people say, “You need to make money.”
But in this work I get to feel the things that make my spirit soar, see the things that give me hope.
And, you know, it’s the rare joy that comes along when you win and people who’ve been condemned and beaten and neglected and abused and told they’re nothing get to stand up and show the world just what they are. That, for me, is gratifying in ways that few things can be. And so I love the work I do.
That was one thing that struck me so much about you is that your work is who you are. You do it because it completely aligns.
Yeah. It’s the great privilege of education. You get to make choices about what you can do and what you want to do. My Dad didn’t have as many choices to do what he wanted to do. And many people struggled to create opportunities that got me the education I had. And so to make those choices in a way that aligns with the things you care most deeply about is a real privilege. And you should celebrate that. I get sad for people who have the capacity and the opportunity to make choices, but don’t make the choices that align because they’re afraid of this or that. I get it.
I understand. But I just have found something infinitely rewarding, and being able to do the things that I care about is deeply empowering.
Do you think that’s the point of this existence?
You know, I think for me it is the point that makes sense. I don’t want to put that on anyone else. My dad is now 85. And he is going strong. He still works and lives by himself and he takes care of himself.
Really?
Yes!
What a man!
And I’d be grateful to be where he is at that age in terms of his own sense of peace and his own sense of purpose and fulfillment. And it’s been a different path than mine. But for me at least this is the road I need to be on.
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