Black History Month: Past, Present & Future (Bryan Stevenson)
As mentioned, Week Two is here so let’s keep the celebration going with BHM spotlights! You may recognize this leader from his 2016 interview in the Netflix documentary, “13th” or perhaps from his inspiring TED talk back in March of 2012. Today, we honor the ongoing achievements and legal career of Bryan Stevenson.
BRYAN STEVENSON (1959 - Present)
Stevenson has been representing capital defendants and death row prisoners in the deep south since 1985. Since 1989, he has been executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a private, nonprofit law organization he founded that focuses on social justice and human rights in the context of criminal justice reform in the United States. EJI litigates on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged, poor people denied effective representation, and others whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct.When asked recently “How do you think our current era of criminal justice and policing is a continuation of our past?” He responded in part...“Even before the Civil War, law enforcement was complicit in sustaining enslavement. It was the police who were tasked with tracking down fugitive slaves from 1850 onwards in the north. After emancipation, it was law enforcement that stepped back and allowed black communities to be terrorized and victimized. The police don’t think they did anything wrong over the past fifty or sixty years. And so, in that respect, we have created a culture that allows our police departments to see themselves as agents of control, and that culture has to shift. And this goes beyond the dynamics of race. We have created a culture where police officers think of themselves as warriors, not guardians.”
