Bryan Stevenson’s Moral Clarity | WSJ Magazine

PHOTO: LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

In mid-September, human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson took the stage at the 30th-anniversary gala for the Equal Justice Initiative, the Montgomery, Alabama–based nonprofit he founded to provide legal representation to individuals who have been wrongfully convicted, unfairly sentenced or subject to prison abuse. The attendees assembled in a hotel ballroom in Midtown Manhattan were a mix of philanthropists, scholars and attorneys. The poet Elizabeth Alexander, who read at President Obama’s first inauguration, was there, as was musician Jon Batiste. Most knew what EJI does and who Stevenson is. They’d likely heard him speak many times before. But that was sort of the point.

Stevenson, 59, is soft-spoken and earnest. Even onstage, he speaks in a way that makes the audience lean in and listen close. By the time he shares his simple but powerful ideas—like his oft-repeated belief that each of us is “more than the worst thing we’ve done”—listeners are invested in every word. The effect is an opening up that doesn’t normally come from a fundraiser presentation.

When the three-hour program was over, Stevenson—who had traveled to a different state every day for the five days leading up to the gala—stood near the stage and generously received the throng of people who lined up to meet him, have books signed and take selfies. He later admits that he’s naturally shy.

If he is, Stevenson hides it well. He has won five of the six cases he has argued before the Supreme Court and delivered a TED Talk that has garnered more than seven million views to date. He has written a best-selling memoir, Just Mercy, about his life and work and is also the subject of a recent HBO documentary, True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality. He’s also a professor at the New York University School of Law.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, first met Stevenson nearly two decades ago when they both were young lawyers. “I heard him speak to a small group of students at Stanford Law School, and he blew my mind,” she says. “He was passionate and dedicated, but he was more than that. He spoke with a moral clarity, a clarity that shone so bright that at first many people in the room seemed restless, uncomfortable.”

Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is another leading civil rights attorney who counts Stevenson as a friend. “He exudes something that is very, very powerful, and that is a deep, deep sincerity and commitment to the principles that he believes in,” she says. “You feel it, you know it, and you hear it not only in the words he says but in the very timbre of his voice.”

The next day, at the New York office of Penguin Random House, Stevenson’s publisher, everything about him seems muted and measured, from his lean physique and cleanshaven head to the fitted black suit and turtleneck he wears. He declines water and takes up as little space as possible in the small conference room, sitting squarely in his chair with one leg crossed over the other and his hands in his lap.

I ask Stevenson how he transforms from the re-served man before me into a lawyer, sought-after lecturer and public intellectual. “You get to the point where you feel like you have some fire shut up in your bones,” he says, referencing the prophet Jeremiah. “And when you feel it, you can’t stop from trying to do what you have to do.”

Stevenson first came to prominence nearly 30 years ago when he was a young lawyer on fire about one of his clients, Walter McMillian, a black pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee’s hometown. In a scenario that recalled To Kill a Mockingbird’s plot, McMillian had been convicted in 1988 of the 1986 murder of a white woman and sentenced to death.

The circumstances around the case were murky. McMillian was arrested a full seven months after the murder, despite having an alibi backed by a dozen witnesses. (He’d been at home, hosting a fish fry.) After his arrest, authorities sent him directly to Alabama’s death row in Holman Correctional Facility, where he remained for nearly 15 months awaiting trial.

At trial, the prosecution presented no physical evidence but relied on the testimony of three supposed witnesses, all of whom had issues with their stories. Regardless, after proceedings lasting just three days, an almost entirely white jury voted to convict McMillian and impose a sentence of life imprisonment. Judge Robert E. Lee Key Jr. then overrode that sentence, as permitted by Alabama law, and condemned McMillian to die in the electric chair.

Stevenson took McMillian’s case after the conviction and was immediately convinced of his client’s innocence. That instinct was confirmed when he came across evidence in the Monroeville Police Department’s files: a tape recording of officers pressuring the prosecution’s lead witness into lying that he saw McMillian kill the woman.

Based on that evidence, Stevenson filed a challenge to McMillian’s conviction. Still, the judge refused to throw it out. Stevenson filed for an appeal but also tried another approach. Leaning into his skills as a storyteller, he took McMillian’s case to a producer for 60 Minutes. The segment aired in the fall of 1992, and on February 23, 1993, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals—which previously denied a series of appeals by McMillian—voted 5 to 0 to reverse his conviction. He was released from prison on March 2, 1993.

The McMillian case is the primary thread in Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, which has been made into a feature film starring Michael B. Jordan, out in December. “There’s a movie version of this story, but there’s a real version as well, and we wanted to live in that space more than anything,” says Jordan, who is also a producer on the film, via email.

“It was important to me that the performance was not an impression; it was about getting the essence of Bryan right,” says Jordan, who found Stevenson’s optimism to be his most striking quality. “He truly feels—despite all the things he’s seen and heard—that change is possible. That justice is possible.”

Singer John Legend first connected with Stevenson in 2015 after reading Just Mercy. He was blown away by the book and later by Stevenson himself. “He seems almost otherworldly sometimes when you talk to him,” says Legend. “I don’t know how he is when he’s not working. But, wow, when he’s in these moments where he’s teaching people, educating people, I feel like it’s almost spiritual.”

Stevenson had that effect on people even as a boy in segregated rural Delaware. His grandmother took him aside one day when he was 8 or 9 and told him he was special. Her prophecy proved true as he matured, excelling in sports and academics. Stevenson, the son of a factory worker father and an administrative clerk mother, went on to serve as student body president and graduate at the top of his high school class. All the while, he was developing a deep commitment to the cause of racial justice.

He traveled throughout Delaware as a teenager, competing in oratory contests and giving impassioned speeches about race and racism. He won most of those contests, says his younger sister, Christy Taylor, a music teacher. “God has chosen him for this walk.... His walk and his path have been chosen before he was born,” says Taylor. “As a Christian, I hate those clichés, but it’s true.”

Indeed, it was in the local African Methodist Episcopal church that Stevenson developed his belief that a just world was possible and further honed his public speaking skills. “The church was a safe place to be your authentic self,” he says. “If you could play a little bit or sing a little bit or recite something or read something, people would encourage you for what you could do. And not resent you or attack you or threaten you.”

He eventually followed his older brother, Howard Stevenson, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to Eastern University, a Christian school just northwest of Philadelphia, and graduated magna cum laude in 1981 with a degree in political science. From there, Stevenson went on to Harvard Law School on a scholarship. He had never met a lawyer, but, as a beneficiary of Brown v. Board of Education, he hoped the law was an area in which he could apply his pursuit of justice.

It didn’t take long for him to become frustrated with his legal education, which he believed didn’t focus enough on the poor and disfavored. In search of something more relevant, he entered a dual-degree program at Harvard’s Kennedy School the following year, thinking public policy might prove more grounded than law. It didn’t. Stevenson doesn’t know what he might have moved on to next if he hadn’t learned about the law school’s intensive course on race and poverty litigation. It required students to spend a month with an organization doing human rights work. In 1983 he went off to Atlanta to intern at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (now the Southern Center for Human Rights), an organization founded after the 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment with a mission to protect the rights of disadvantaged people facing the death penalty.

“We hit it off immediately without any kind of awkward getting to know each other or anything like that,” says Stephen Bright, then the SPDC’s director. In Bright, Stevenson saw a model for the kind of purpose-driven lawyer he wanted to be. In Stevenson, Bright saw a quick study uniquely committed to the work. “Bryan really can assess a situation very quickly, think through it very quickly,” says Bright. “He really has gifts in that regard that are quite extraordinary.”

During the internship, Stevenson was tasked with helping on a case that the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped could help lead to the end of the death penalty. McCleskey v. Kemp had been filed on behalf of Warren McCleskey, a black man who was sentenced to death for killing a white police officer during a furniture-store robbery. His lawyers set out to prove that the death penalty, as administered by the state of Georgia, was unconstitutional because it discriminated based on the race of the victims and defendants.

In analyzing more than 2,400 homicide cases in Georgia throughout the 1970s, the legal team found that a defendant was 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black, and 22 times more likely to get death if the accused was black and the victim white.

Through the internship Stevenson began to feel the law’s potential to work against injustice. Equally important, he got to meet and know those on death row who needed help. After graduating from Harvard with degrees in both law and public policy in 1985, he joined the SPDC as a full-time staff attorney.

He was still getting his feet wet in April 1987 when the court ruled 5 to 4 to uphold McCleskey’s death sentence. Writing for the majority, Justice Lewis Powell dismissed the racial disparities found in Georgia’s death penalty as “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.”

“When the Supreme Court ruled the way it did, it was disheartening for a host of reasons,” Stevenson says. First, because he’d come to know McCleskey and feared he would be executed, which McCleskey ultimately was. But also because the opinion seemed to completely undermine the court’s commitment to “equal justice under law,” a phrase etched on the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

“I’m still quite shaken,” Stevenson says, “by a court ruling that talks about racial bias in the administration of the death penalty as inevitable. It still to me is a betrayal of a profound order.”

PAST PRESENT | American artist Dana King’s work Guided by Justice, showing women marching in the Montgomery bus boycott, at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. PHOTO: LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

In 1989, the SPDC divided its work by region, and Stevenson was appointed to run the Alabama operation out of Montgomery, where he worked on the McMillian case and many others. When a 1994 elimination of federal funding forced the Alabama office to close, Stevenson transformed the operation into the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative. The following year, he received a $230,000 MacArthur Fellowship, which he donated entirely to EJI’s efforts.

The investment has paid off. Since the organization’s founding, Stevenson and his growing staff have overturned 130 death sentence convictions in Alabama and a number of others nationwide. With Stevenson as lead attorney, EJI lawyers have won five Supreme Court cases, including Roper v. Simmons, a 2005 landmark case in which the court found sentencing children under 18 to death to be unconstitutional.

Next, in 2012, came decisions in Jackson v. Hobbs and Miller v. Alabama, which together abolished mandatory life without parole for children. Montgomery v. Louisiana just a few years later would lead the court to apply its Miller ruling retroactively.

Despite these decisions, Stevenson says he started to notice a new resistance to civil rights in state and federal courts about a decade ago. Watching one decision after the other, he concluded they were becoming increasingly narrow avenues for change. “It should be the rule of law is sufficient, but we saw in McCleskey and in the legacy that has emerged since McCleskey that the commitment to the rule of law was compromised by this confused thinking about the significance of racial bias,” Stevenson says. “From McCleskey to Shelby County [the Supreme Court case that knocked down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act], it just became clearer and clearer that we had to change the environment outside the court.” EJI’s next big project would be his attempt to do just that.

On April 26, 2018, Stevenson and his team opened the doors to two sites: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The museum, adjacent to EJI’s office, plots in careful detail the unbroken line from slavery and lynching to the modern death penalty and mass incarceration. One of the most compelling displays is a wall of jars, nearly 300 in total, filled with soil collected by volunteers from the sites of lynchings. The mosaic of browns, tans and blacks come together to tell a powerful story of widespread terror. “The soil [collection] thing is really important,” Stevenson says, “because it gives people an opportunity to do something that doesn’t seem too, too scary, but has meaning and power.”

For the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, EJI staffers aimed to document every lynching that took place in the U.S. between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950. They found records of more than 4,000 instances in 12 Southern states, around 800 more than previously reported, and identified another 300 or so lynchings in other states during the period.

EJI partnered with architect Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group to build a tribute to the victims, one Stevenson hoped might present the full story of lynching as racial terror and point a way toward healing. The result is a six-acre complex that spirals out from a central structure, a gallery lined with over 800 six-foot-tall steel columns, each representing a county or state where lynchings took place and bearing the name of at least one victim.

The columns are positioned at eye level toward the entrance but ascend with every step until they’re finally suspended above visitors at the gallery’s innermost point.

Ifill, who wrote a book on lynching in 2007, was deeply moved by the memorial. “I was really quite overcome with the volume and the density and the heaviness,” she says. “It helped me see the scope of it, to reinforce what I had written 10 years before about the power of these events to transform and fundamentally shape how black people think about their own citizenship and white people and what white people won’t acknowledge about themselves.”

“The fact that all these people are going to Montgomery now to go see it—it’s just a game changer,” says Bright, Stevenson’s old mentor.

Stevenson hopes the memorial helps make the case for why justice has to be bigger, broader and more meaningful in the American imagination. “I want us to repair the damage that has been done by centuries of bigotry and bias and discrimination,” he says.

Regarding the idea of formal reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans, he says it only makes legal sense. “People act like you’re talking about something so radical, but it’s just consistent with the way we talk about remedy in every area of the law,” Stevenson says.

He points to a missed opportunity in the now-gutted Voting Rights Act, legislation that was passed in 1965 to prohibit discrimination in voting but did nothing to facilitate voting among the previously disenfranchised. “Part of the Voting Rights Act should have said, ‘If you’re black you don’t have to register to vote,’ ” Stevenson argues. “Instead, not only do we not register black people, we just created new forms, new mechanisms, new barriers, and that’s what we’re debating—whether those barriers are as bad as the old barriers.”

He genuinely believes such a move might still be possible, despite decades of organized opposition to affirmative action. It’s an example of Stevenson’s abiding faith, which he explains in biblical terms. “Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists,” he often says, paraphrasing Hebrews 11. “If we’re not imagining things that we haven’t seen, if we’re not willing to believe things we haven’t seen, then we’re going to be defined by all of the inequality and injustice that is all around us.”

People tend to speak of Stevenson in spiritual terms. John Legend uses the word “otherworldly,” while Michelle Alexander refers to his “moral clarity.” Thanks to his deeply religious upbringing, he abstains from drugs and alcohol and leads a modest lifestyle. He takes no salary from EJI. And in a Midtown conference room, as he speaks on the inevitability of justice, he sounds less like an accomplished lawyer than an inspired teacher. “I just don’t think you can doubt the power of love to change hearts and minds,” he says. “Even the soulless can be moved in ways that shock them when they start feeling something.”

Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s Nkyinkyim Installation, depicting the trauma of enslavement, also at the memorial. PHOTO: LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE