120
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, edu-
cating 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
wa s spec ia l. Her prophec y proved t r ue a s he mat u red,
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 presi-
dent 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 impas-
sioned 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 readsomething, 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 profes-
sor 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 organiza-
tion 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 vic-
tim 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“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 wit-
nesses. (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 tes-
timony 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 con-
demned McMillian to die in the electric chair.
Stevenson took McMillian’s case after the convic-
tion 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 pres-
suring 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 any thing,” 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 him-
self. “He seems almost otherworldly sometimes
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. Opposite:
Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s Nkyinkyim
Installation, depicting the trauma of enslavement, also
at the memorial.121with 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 dis-
missed 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 opin-
ion 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.”I
N 1989, the SPDC divided its work
by region, and Stevenson was
appointed to run the Alabama oper-
ation 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 organiza-
tion’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 abol-
ished 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 out-
side the court.” EJI’s next big project would be hisattempt 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 incarcera-
tion. 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 pow-
erful 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 bear-
ing the name of at least one victim.
The columns are positioned at eye level toward
the entrance but ascend with every step until they’refinally suspended above visitors at the
gallery’s innermost point.
Ifill, who wrote a book on lynching in
2007, was deeply moved by the memo-
rial. “I was really quite overcome with
the volume and the density and the heavi-
ness,” 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 discrim-
ination,” he says.
Regarding the idea of formal repara-
tions 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 consis-
tent 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 cre-
ated 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 injus-
tice 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 clar-
ity.” Thanks to his deeply religious upbringing, he
abstains from drugs and alcohol and leads a mod-
est 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 accom-
plished 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.”