We spend the hour with civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In 2018, the organization opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, to tell the history of millions of enslaved Africans who were abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas by European powers, and to chronicle the legacy of slavery, racism, lynchings and segregation in the United States. The Legacy Museum has just opened its first international exhibition as part of the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland.
“In putting together the content we have at the Legacy Museum, you begin to appreciate just how global the institution of slavery was,” Stevenson tells Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman in Edinburgh. “We were eager to have an opportunity to present this content on this continent, which … hasn’t done very much to acknowledge this history.”
Stevenson details the Equal Justice Initiative’s goal of educating the public about racial iniquities, as well as his own family’s connection to slavery. “My foreparents did not come to this country seeking greater opportunity. They did not come seeking shelter from some distant threat. They came in chains. They were victims of a brutal abduction,” he says.
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The U.S. celebrated 250 years since its founding in July, giving the country an opportunity to reflect on U.S. history and also how that history is remembered and taught. President Trump has brought new attention to these questions through his repeated attacks on exhibits at national monuments and national parks, the Smithsonian museums and in school curricula. This is President Trump speaking last year.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner, which is what many of them — not all of them, but many of them — are doing. Our museums have an obligation to represent what happened in our country over the years, good and bad, but what happened over the years in an accurate way.
AMY GOODMAN: Last year, President Trump wrote online, quote, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump said.
Well, today we spend the rest of the hour with a man who’s dedicated his life to confronting the legacy of slavery. We’re joined by Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative has now opened four Legacy Sites to document the country’s history of racial injustice. There’s the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park and now Montgomery Square, which shows the resistance. The Legacy Museum tracks the history of millions of enslaved Africans who were abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas.
The Legacy Museum has just opened its first international exhibition, The Legacy of Slavery, here at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. It marks the museum’s first major exhibition outside the United States exploring transatlantic slavery and modern racial injustice.
In a moment, Bryan Stevenson joins us here in Edinburgh. But first, I want to turn to a video narrated by Bryan Stevenson about the Legacy Museum in Montgomery.
BRYAN STEVENSON: It’s important that we begin to commit to an era of truth and justice, that we tell the truth about our history, that we find the words necessary to understand all of the pain, all of the suffering that was created by 400 years of enslavement, lynching, segregation and injustice.
It begins in Africa, where millions of people were kidnapped, abducted, taken from their homes, taken from their families, chained, forced onto ships, where they were displaced forever.
Without understanding that legacy, we don’t appreciate the harm, the damage, the tragedy that surrounded the founding of this country. We still live in a country where there is this problem of racial inequality, racial injustice, and the narrative that created that problem of racial difference continues to haunt us today. And so this museum is dedicated to helping people understand the journey. We want people to understand the suffering that slavery created.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bryan Stevenson introducing the Legacy Museum in the cradle of the Confederacy, in Montgomery, Alabama.
Well, Bryan Stevenson has crossed the pond and now is joining us here in Edinburgh, Scotland. He’s the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, also the author of the best-selling book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The book chronicles his years as an attorney representing prisoners on death row, and was turned into a movie, Just Mercy, starring Michael B. Jordan as Bryan Stevenson.
Bryan Stevenson, it’s great to be with you here in Edinburgh, especially just coming from, this morning, I spent at the Legacy of Slavery Museum that’s at the library at the University of Edinburgh. And talk about the significance of going global, at least international, with this museum.
BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, thank you, Amy. It’s always an honor to be with you.
But in putting together the content we have at the Legacy Museum, you begin to appreciate just how global the institution of slavery was. And I don’t think there has been the kind of acknowledgment and reckoning in Europe with the role of these European powers that were primarily responsible for trafficking those 13 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.
What happened during the transatlantic trade was really unprecedented. There’s always been slavery in the world, and there have been different moments where people have been enslaved, but to dislocate, to kidnap and abduct 13 million people, take them across a terrifying journey where 2 million died, and then to create this legacy of slavery, which we live with in the United States and across the Americas, is something that I think needs to be more honestly acknowledged.
And so, we were eager to have an opportunity to present this content on this continent, which, as I said, hasn’t done very much to acknowledge this history. So, I’m really thrilled that the organizers of the festival invited us to bring a component of our museum here, and I’ve been really, really excited to see so many people taking it in.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah Lewis, who we had on last week, the art historian from Harvard, who’s written this incredible book and now has an exhibition opening in Chicago on the life and death of Emmett Till, pointed out that today, August 11th, but in 1841, Frederick Douglass gave his first anti-slavery address in Nantucket. What I was so struck by today at your museum here in Edinburgh was that he came here, too, to address slavery, to address Europe, to talk about — and Africa, to talk about how people were enslaved.
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of rich history. I mean, many of these countries were, in many ways, not just complicit during the transatlantic trade, but during America’s Civil War. There were people in Scotland supporting the Confederacy. There were people in the United Kingdom that were trying to sustain slavery because of the economic benefits to people in this region.
And Douglass understood the importance of challenging that and confronting that. And so, he did come to Scotland and not only energized abolitionists here, but he made the very powerful arguments, that he was so uniquely gifted to make, about why slavery needed to be condemned globally. There could be no place on the planet where we would tolerate the humane treatment that — the inhumane treatment that slavery represented. And his legacy in Scotland and across the United Kingdom is, again, something that I think needs to be acknowledged more clearly.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the Scots who came to the United States who were involved with the slave trade, a massive number of people who owned — and particular families, who owned 10,000 slaves.
BRYAN STEVENSON: When you look at the American South today, you absolutely see the footprint of Scotland and Scottish immigrants who occupied that region and enslaved, as you said, thousands of people and created this institution that was so resistant to emancipation, so resistant to freedom.
And what’s interesting for me is, when I think about Douglass, I also think about my own struggles with my American identity. And this has been something I’ve been thinking more about in this 250th year. I’ve often struggled with my American identity, because I am not the child of immigrants.
My foreparents did not come to this country seeking greater opportunity. They did not come seeking shelter from some distant threat. They came in chains. They were victims of a brutal abduction. They were trafficked across a terrifying ocean where millions died. When they arrived on these shores, they could not pursue an American dream. They were enslaved. And for generations they were subjected to the brutality and the violence and the bondage that slavery represented.
After emancipation, they were betrayed. When our courts prioritized states’ rights over constitutional rights, they were subjected to this era of white supremacy and terror violence, where thousands were lynched. Millions had to flee lands that they owned. They went to the North and Midwest, where they had more security but still were subjected to bigotry and discrimination.
When I was born, I could not attend the public schools in my community because of my race. The public schools weren’t open to Black children. When lawyers came in and finally opened up those schools so that I could attend school, and I went to high school and college and then law school, I graduated from law school and was still subjected to a presumption of dangerousness and guilt. As a young lawyer in my car on the streets of Atlanta, the police approached me, pulled their weapons, pulled me out of my car and threatened to blow my brains out because they suspected me of doing something criminal in front of my own apartment.
And for the last 40 years, I’ve stood next to poor people, Black and Brown people, who should be presumed innocent in our court of law but have in fact been presumed dangerous and guilty. And when you live through that life, it’s challenging to kind of think about your American identity.
But doing this history work has caused me to reflect differently about it, because what I realize is that those 4 million people who were emancipated after slavery were extraordinary people. They could have chosen revenge and retribution against the people who enslaved them, but instead they chose America. They chose to commit to this country. They built schools and families and churches. And I think they became great Americans because of the choices that they made. Despite the violence that they faced and the threats that they faced, they continued to work to build a more perfect union.
I live in Montgomery, Alabama, and when I think about those extraordinary women in 1955 who risked their lives by saying no to racial segregation on buses, what Claudette Colvin and Susie McDonald and Aurelia Browder and Mary Louise Smith and Rosa Parks were saying when they refused to give up their seats is that they were saying, “I intend to be a full American.” And I think they became great Americans. And the 50,000 Black people who stayed off the buses for 382 days and gave birth to the civil rights movement were great Americans.
And this history has shaped my new identity, because now I want to be a great American, too. I want to create an America that honestly confronts this history. And it’s not greatness based on wealth or power or status. I think greatness has to be based on our commitment to equality, commitment to justice, our commitment to fairness, our commitment to eliminating bigotry and hatred.
And that’s what this exhibit is about. It’s about rooting us with a more complete understanding of who we all are — not just African Americans, but all of us. We are all survivors of these eras of violence and terror. And to reckon with that, we have to appreciate who has been great and who has not been so great. And those who have tried to perpetuate and sustain these institutions, have tried to preserve the legacy of racial hierarchy and white supremacy, who have tried to adopt mindsets that honor that are people who can’t really claim the greatness that I think is key to our future in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Your great-grandfather was a slave, was enslaved?
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yes, my great-grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia. And it’s so interesting, because, you know, growing up in a really poor, racially segregated community, when integration came, a lot of us didn’t want to talk about where we were from. We knew we weren’t welcomed. And so, I didn’t talk about the fact that most of the adults in my community didn’t have high school degrees because there were literally no high schools for Black people in our county when my dad’s generation came of age. And I didn’t talk about the fact that many people had outhouses and [no] running water. And I went through school kind of holding that truth about my family history.
But when I got to Harvard on my first day of law school, the organizer asked all of us students, a group of 12 of us, “Why are you in law school?” And my classmates all started talking about how they were the sons and daughters and nephews and nieces of lawyers. And it made me uncomfortable, because I realized I wasn’t related to any lawyer. And after the seventh or eighth person made these family connections, I realized something I hadn’t even realized until that moment. And what I realized was that not only am I not related to a lawyer, I realized I’d never even met a lawyer. And by the time they got to me, I felt diminished, and I didn’t want to answer the question honestly. I told a joke, and I got out of there.
And I called my mom. I said, “Mom, I don’t think I belong in this law school.” And my mom said, “What are you talking about? You belong wherever you go. Now, you go back there and tell those kids why you’re really in that law school. Tell them about your great-grandfather.”
And so I did. I went back, and I found some of the students, and I told them that my great-grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia. And even though it was against the law for enslaved people to learn to read or write, my great-grandfather learned to read while he was enslaved, could have risked his life, could have lost his life. But after emancipation, my great-grandfather would read the newspaper to formerly enslaved people who didn’t know how to read.
And my grandmother loved the fact that her father knew how to read. And she told me that when he would start reading, she would wrap her arms around his leg. I said, “Mama, why’d you do that?” And she said, “Well, I just loved the fact that he knew how to read, and I wanted to learn to read.” She said, “I thought you learned how to read by touching somebody while they read.” And he figured out, “No, that’s not what you — that’s not how you learn to read, Victoria.” And he taught her to be a reader.
And my grandmother worked as a domestic her whole life, but she was someone who believed in the power of words and education, information. She would have loved you and what you do. And when I would go visit my grandmother sometimes, she would come out, and she would stand on the porch, and she’d have a stack of books, and she’d make you read something before she would let you into that house.
As I said, I grew up in a poor, racially segregated community. I wasn’t related to a lawyer, never met a lawyer. But my mom went into debt when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and she bought us the World Book Encyclopedia, and we had those books in our house. And I told my classmates, I said, “I’m not related to a lawyer. I’ve never even met a lawyer. But I read all about the lawyers.” And, you know, when I was a kid, I didn’t always appreciate that, because Christmas comes along, you’re 10 years old, you go outside, and your friends are like, “Well, I got a basketball,” “I got a bicycle,” “I got a baseball.” And I’d have to say, “Well, I got volume G of the World Book Encyclopedia.”
But I think about that now, and I thought about that then. And what I realized when I was a student is that I was not less than any of the other students. I wasn’t diminished by my not having relations that were lawyers. I, in fact, began to feel lifted up by that. And that’s the power of this history. I talk about my great-grandfather all the time now. I talk about my grandparents all the time, because I know that I am being lifted up by millions of people who had dreams of freedom, who had aspirations for something better. And I feel that. I do. I feel that in my work.
When we put together our exhibit, when we put together this content, I constantly feel like we are being witnessed, watched by all of those who were subjected to the immense suffering and constant sorrow of enslavement. When we built our National Memorial, I felt like we were being observed by the souls and spirits of all of those people who lost their lives in such darkness and such anonymity.
And that’s the way I feel today. I feel like I want to represent the 10 million Black people who were enslaved for 246 years, when our government begins to try to eliminate their history, their stories from our cultural museums. I want to advocate for those who were terrorized by terror violence. I want to represent the millions who had to deal with the humiliation of segregation and racial humiliation that was so much a part of our history in the United States, when people try to tell us, “That’s not the important stuff. That’s not the stuff you should be reading.”
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about these four sites that you have. And talk about the significance of it being in Montgomery, why you chose to settle there, the cradle of the Confederacy, the names of the schools.
BRYAN STEVENSON: No, you’re absolutely right. Montgomery has prided itself on being the heart of Dixie, the cradle of the Confederacy. When I moved there in the '80s, 59 monuments and memorials to the Confederacy spread around the city. Those still exist. Our three largest high schools, until very recently, were named Jefferson Davis High, Robert E. Lee High and Sidney Lanier High, a Confederate general. Those schools are 97, 98% Black, because they're public schools. And when I moved there, you couldn’t find the words “slave,” “slavery” or “enslavement” anywhere in the public landscape. And this is a majority-Black city.
So, for me, it has been really important to create this new era of truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and repair, truth and restoration, in a place that has historically been unwilling to be honest about this history. And we opened the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which just makes a presentation about not just the horrors of slavery, but the way it evolved.
And I continue to believe that the great evil of slavery in the United States wasn’t the brutality and the violence — that was horrific — but it was the narrative we created to justify enslavement. The enduring evil of slavery was the narrative, because people who enslaved other people didn’t think of themselves as immoral or indecent or un-Christian. And how do you think of yourself as decent when you are pulling away a mother from her screaming children, knowing that mother will never see those children again? Well, you need a narrative.
And so we created a false narrative in America, where we said that Black people are not as good as white people; Black people are less capable, less evolved, less human. And that narrative survived the Civil War. In fact, I often argue that the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. And even many abolitionists in the United States, they didn’t believe in slavery, but they also did not believe in racial equality.
And so, Reconstruction collapses. Our court prioritizes the interests of these former enslavers over the emancipated, formerly enslaved. And we tolerated decades of mob violence, mobs going to jails, pulling people out of jails and torturing them, sometimes on the courthouse lawn. We tolerated that. Congress did not respond. And then we codified racial segregation, this racial order, in the law, until my lifetime, many of our lifetimes.
And so, you can’t understand that without understanding this enduring narrative. And we continue to face racial bias because that presumption of dangerousness and guilt is still with us. That’s why I was pulled out of my car in Atlanta. That’s why I still have to confront these things.
And so, we’re trying, with our sites, to engage people. So, the Legacy Museum presents that content. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice documents all of the terror violence, all of the thousands of lynchings that we’ve been able to identify across this country, and we have monuments for every county, and we name the people, many of whom had never been named before. Most Americans can’t name a single Black person who was lynched between 1877 and 1950.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve named over 100,000?
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yes, yes, thousands of people whose names are in the memorial. And we now have a project where we’re inviting communities to put up markers that allow local members of a community to reckon with these histories.
AMY GOODMAN: And you have these bottles of dirt.
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And I saw a replica here.
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yes, yes. We ask community groups, that are often multiracial, multigenerational, to dig soil at the spot of the lynching. We put them in the jars, that have the names and the victims, and you can see those jars in our museum in Montgomery and on display here in Edinburgh. And the National Memorial represents this ongoing effort to create a greater awareness about lynching. We want to put up a marker at every lynching site in the United States, so that we don’t forget, that we make that commitment of “never again” in the context of our own struggle.
Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is a 17-acre space that we’ve built to dig deeply into the horrors of slavery, but also into the bigger meaning of what it took to survive, to endure. We have a boat that will take you there across the Alabama River, a place — a river that trafficked thousands of people. And you’ll see holding pens. You’ll see representations of art and sculpture that model the labor of cotton fields and things like that. We have actual dwellings from plantations that were about to be destroyed, and we brought them on our site.
But the other thing we do at Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is talk about the strength and the character and the resilience of enslaved people. This is the other thing that I just think most people haven’t appreciated. It would have been so easy, if you were an enslaved woman and you’d been raped or you’d been violated or you just gave birth to a child, to not want to love your child. Half of all enslaved people were separated from their children and their siblings and their parents. And it would be very tempting to say, “I can’t give my heart to this child, because I know that child’s going to be taken away from me.” But most enslaved women did the opposite They loved even harder, because they didn’t know. And the ability of enslaved people to love in the midst of agony is part of the legacy that I have inherited, that those who are descendants of enslaved people. And I want us to appreciate their strength, their resilience, their character, their resolve.
One of the exhibits we have in the museum and at the sculpture park are the ads that formerly enslaved people took out as soon as they were emancipated. Many people spent their last nickels and dimes placing ads in newspapers, looking for their children, looking for their siblings, looking for their parents. And it speaks to their love of one another. And that is also part of it.
And so, we end the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park experience with the National Monument to Freedom. It’s this 43-foot-tall, 150-foot-wide massive monument, where we’ve taken the names of all 4 million emancipated Black people listed in the 1870 census, which was the first time Black people in this country could claim a surname that would be recognized by the government, and we have all of those names on the monument. And I see families come and people come, and they find their family name, and they put flowers in a little water. And it’s emotional, and it’s intense, but it’s joyous to connect with that legacy. And even though I was working on it for months and knew everything that we were doing, when they put up the panel that had my family name, I couldn’t help but also shed a few tears, because it made me appreciate the struggle, the sacrifice, the work that others have done before me to create the moment that I’m in.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. We’ll be back with him in a minute here in Edinburgh, Scotland. We’ll both be speaking today at the first-ever — I think it’s called a Global Ideas forum, talking about 250 years, the history of the United States. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” performed by the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers in the reflection room at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. I just met Jason here. His singers are performing throughout the Edinburgh International Festival. He’s now at University of Maryland, but, in fact, Alabama was where he —
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yes, he spent a good part of his career at Oakwood University, which is in northern Alabama. It’s an historically Black college. And he developed a group there called The Aeolians, who became just world-famous because of their skill in choral singing. He’s an incredible musician and choral leader, and I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to work together with him and many other artists in our sites.
AMY GOODMAN: And his chorus sang together with the Royal, what, Scottish Symphony and Chorus and the Lincoln — Jazz at Lincoln Center —
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — theater, as they all performed All Rise, Wynton Marsalis’s remarkable symphony, Saturday night.
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah. When we dedicated that national monument I was talking about, both Wynton and Jason Max Ferdinand Singers were there together, and it was just an extraordinary moment. Those are both artists that appreciate the power of this history and how it can be elevated when we understand the music, the soundtrack, that has made that struggle possible.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in Edinburgh, Scotland, here with Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which runs the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, also the monument to those who have been lynched. Just to correct what I said earlier, thousands of people were lynched. But you’ve documented over 100,000 people talking about — linking their names —
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — to those who were enslaved.
BRYAN STEVENSON: That’s right. The 1870 census identifies 120,000 unique names that the 4 million formerly enslaved people adopted. And many of us still carry those names. And so, those are the names you can find at the national monument at our Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.
And the fourth site, that we just opened, is Montgomery Square, which takes this deep dive into the history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and that 10-year period between 1955 and 1965, when Montgomery really gave birth to the civil rights movement and changed the world with the introduction of so many extraordinary people and the deconstruction of Jim Crow laws and racial apartheid, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. We think Montgomery plays a really important role in world history.
AMY GOODMAN: In the museum here, and in Montgomery, as well, you talk about people being “grandfathered in,” that term. The grandfather clause was literal, because Blacks couldn’t vote. Whites would not have been able to vote if they had to be able to read, for example.
BRYAN STEVENSON: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, they were told, “If your grandfather could vote, you can vote.”
BRYAN STEVENSON: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, that wasn’t the case for Black people.
BRYAN STEVENSON: That’s right. And that was the pretense to suggest that these literacy tests, these poll tests, were race-neutral. Oh no, it’s not race-neutral: “You just have to be the grandchild of someone who could vote,” which, of course, no formerly enslaved person would be. And we want people to understand just the intentionality behind disenfranchising Black people.
So, when you come to our museum, we have actual questions that were from the poll tests that Black people had to take. And they were questions like, “How many jelly beans in this jar in front of you?” And we have models of the jars at the museum. They’d ask things like, “How many bubbles in a bar of soap? How many windows at the White House?” These absurd questions. And when people take them, they realize just how cruel it is to kind of suggest, “Well, you can register to vote, but you have to pass this test.”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s take this forward. We only have like eight minutes left in this broadcast. There’s so much to discuss. You talk about slavery to lynching to the death penalty to mass incarceration. You say lynching is the stepchild of lynching — death penalty is the stepchild of lynching. Explain. I mean, right through to you just arguing before the Wisconsin Supreme Court last week —
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — about why a 10-year-old should not be sentenced to life without parole.
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: A 10-year-old.
BRYAN STEVENSON: That’s right. And that’s going to — argument will be in September. But, yes, that is still the work that I do.
And I say that there is this connection, because violence was the way in which we tried to maintain this racial order, this caste system. Black people weren’t willingly going to drink out of inferior fountains or inferior bathrooms. They needed — the people with power had to use violence and threat. And so, lynching became a mechanism for that. And people got so used to seeing violence in response to any kind of act of Black independence or whatever, that when it became no longer possible, that’s when you begin to see an increase in the use of the death penalty.
And, of course, we know that throughout most of the 20th century, the death penalty was disproportionately used against Black people whose victims were white. When you look at the crime of rape, 87% of the people executed for the crime of rape in the United States were Black men convicted of raping white women. And there’s always unreliability.
And so, yes, I don’t think you can disconnect that history of lethal violence from the modern death penalty. And I’ve always argued that the death penalty isn’t an issue that can be evaluated by asking whether people deserve to die for the crimes they’ve committed. I think the threshold question is whether we deserve to kill when we have a system that has been so compromised by this history of racial bigotry, when we have a system that makes so many mistakes. For every eight people we’ve executed in the United States, we’ve identified one innocent person on death row who’s been exonerated. It’s a shocking rate of error that we would never tolerate in health safety or aviation safety. If somebody said, “Oh, one out of eight apples has a toxin on it, and if you touch that apple, you’ll die,” we would stop eating apples. We would stop selling apples. And apples have value and virtue in ways that the death penalty doesn’t.
And our indifference to these problems, I think, is like the indifference that was exhibited during those decades of terror violence and lynching that we saw throughout this country. So, I do think that the legacy of slavery can be seen not only in lynching, not only in segregation, but in the way we continue to tolerate bigotry and violence in our current carceral system, police violence, people being presumed dangerous and guilty because of their color. You can’t disconnect these acts, these contemporary acts, from this larger history.
AMY GOODMAN: We spoke to Keith LaMar on Monday, live from Ohio’s death row. The Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, the Republican governor, just granted him a three-year reprieve from execution. He’s now set to die January 2030, along with a few other men. Can you talk about what this means, when this governor himself has come to be against the death penalty?
BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah, for me, it’s — I don’t think there’s any doubt that one day there will not be a death penalty in this country. I just think that the force of human progress, if we continue to struggle, will not tolerate —
AMY GOODMAN: How many states don’t have the death penalty?
BRYAN STEVENSON: Right now there are 27 states that still have a death penalty, but that represents a tremendous decline over the last 12 years. Over a dozen states have abolished the death penalty. The execution rates are at their lowest level in 30, 40 years. There are fewer and fewer people being sentenced to death.
We don’t have to kill people to show that killing is wrong. And, in fact, I think sometimes when governments say, “We’re going to kill you if we really have a problem with you,” that actually stimulates the kind of violence that we’re trying to prohibit.
And so, what I think Governor DeWine has recognized is what many of us recognize, which is that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I don’t think anyone should be reduced to their worst act. None of us want to be judged that way. Someone who tells a lie doesn’t want to just be a liar. Someone who takes something doesn’t just want to be a thief for the rest of their life. And even if you kill someone, you don’t — aren’t just a killer. And that’s what the death penalty doesn’t permit, is for you to be anything other than this crime.
And so, I think we’ve seen that act of commutation — or, of just — of mercy, short-term, in Ohio, but we’re going to see this in other states, as well. I’m very hopeful that we’ll see more commutations by executives, places like California, places across this country, North Carolina and other places. And I hope that we will push this forward.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s attack on history, you know, the tearing down the federal exhibit in Philadelphia’s Mall of George Washington owning slaves, for example, calling it racist to talk about this history. What is your response to erasing history?
BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, I think it’s — I think it’s not only dishonest. I think it’s unhealthy. You know, it’s like saying to doctors, “You’re not allowed to tell people if they have high blood pressure or diabetes. We’re going to ban you from doing it, because we don’t like to hear that. We don’t want people to be worried about that.” The truth is, is that if we’re not honest about the conditions that undermine our health, if we don’t have the ability to say, “Oh no, you have this disease,” then we can’t get to treatment. We can’t get to recovery. We can’t get to healing. The same is true for a nation and its history. If we can’t talk about segregation, if we can’t talk about slavery, if we can’t talk about lynching, we’re not going to make the progress we need to make to make sure those things never happen again.
I think a lot of what the president is saying and doing, despite his power, is desperate, because we are pushing forward in a narrative struggle, and we have lifted up these voices. People have said, “No, we’re not going to tolerate bigotry any longer.” And I think that threat of eliminating bigotry has pushed some people to act desperately. And that’s what I see these orders and these kind of efforts at trying to sanitize cultural institutions from talking honestly about these histories.
One thing I’ve learned through my work is that truth crushed to earth finds a way to rise again. There will not be a way possible in America to keep those of us who are insisting on being honest about history to be silent about this history.
AMY GOODMAN: You have Montgomery Square, because you’re celebrating the resistance, at the best and worst, of Alabama, from Rosa Parks and others sitting down on the bus to the march from Selma to Montgomery. Where is your hope nationally and globally?
BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, I do think we need to see more of a commitment to truth-telling. People often ask me, “What can I do?” I think learning is an action item. I think when we inform ourselves, we make ourselves capable of being fluent and responsive in a complex world, in a multiracial democracy. Too few know too little for the moment that we are in.
So, that’s my hope, is that we can create a new landscape, a new way forward. I think there’s something better waiting for us. I really do. I think there’s something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, waiting for us in the United States. But to get there, we’re going to have to have the courage to be honest about the things that hold us back. And this history of bigotry, that we haven’t confronted, holds us back.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much, Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, author of the best-selling book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
We’ve been broadcasting from Edinburgh, Scotland, from Panmure House, a restored 17th-century structure that served as the home for the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith. Thanks to Panmure House’s director, Professor Adam Dixon, as well as Sarah Cheung and Blair Barrows. And to our crew here, Jeff Williams and Pete Bailey and Juliet Dunlop and Colette Casher, we thank you so much for helping this broadcast be possible, as well as Denis Moynihan and Hana Elias, who are with us in Edinburgh, and our whole team in New York. I’ll be with Bryan Stevenson and Sarah Lewis, with the documentarian Ken Burns and the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as well as Wynton Marsalis and others, today at 4:00 Edinburgh time at the King’s Theatre, tomorrow at the Bertha DocHouse in London.
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