Bryan Stevenson Interviewed on October 31, 2012

STEVENSON: So, I'm really, really honored by this kind of recognition and to receive something in his [Fred Shuttlesworth] name and also in the name of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which is an amazing institution. Not just in the state, but I think in the country, as a place where people can experience this history which is not as well as understood as I think it needs to be.

ANDERSON: Well we're honored that you will accept the Award--

STEVENSON: Well it's my pleasure.

ANDERSON: And spend a little time with us today and then come back on Saturday--

STEVENSON: Yes.

ANDERSON: Could you tell me more about your employees coming up to the Institution?

STEVENSON: Sure. We at the, at EJI [Equal Justice Initiative], we do a lot of work around excessive punishment, around mass incarceration, around abuse of power in the criminal justice system. But we also have a project on race and poverty. And in fact our newest work is really trying to look through the lens of history and to current issues and contemporary policies to try to push for 00:01:00deeper, more meaningful search for the truth, and for the ways in which we have to move forward to deal with this history of inequality and injustice. And the Institute is an amazing resource and place for experiencing some of that history. So every person who comes to work at EJI is required to come to the Institute here in Birmingham and spend several hours going through the exhibits, learning that history. I encourage all of my staff to read the history of the Civil Rights struggle, particularly the local history because some of these places where we are working--in some of these communities where we're dealing with issues that have very strong racial components to them--cannot be adequately understood unless you know this history, which dates back 50 years. 100 years. 150 years. And so we're really interested in how to reevaluate the 00:02:00history of racial inequality; very interested in that. In fact, one of our newest projects is even looking at the local history where our office is. So my office is on 122 Commerce Street in downtown Montgomery. Montgomery, like sections of Birmingham, is experiencing a little bit of development which everybody is excited about. We have a minor league baseball team now, the Biscuits; and there're restaurants and hotels that are coming into the downtown area. And I'm very pleased about that. I support that. But this street, Commerce Street, where so much is happening, is also a place that has a very, very significant history that we're not talking about, that we haven't recognized. Commerce Street was one of the most active slave trading spaces in America from 1815 until the beginning of the Civil War. And thousands of enslaved people were unloaded at the docks on the Alabama River, about 150 yards to the east of our 00:03:00office, and they were paraded up Commerce Street, chained together in caffolds, and then sold at the square, which is 150 to the west of my office. And it was a huge slave trading space. The Black Belt in this region was largely populated through slave trading in Montgomery. And there is a little, tiny sign that marks the slave auction site; but other than that, we don't talk about that history. We don't recognize that history. And in this effort to commercialize and celebrate all of the development opportunities, I think there is resistance in confronting that history, and I think we need to confront it. When I walk up that street, I imagine that experience--there were slave depots all over Montgomery. Montgomery was notorious as a place where African-Americans could be resold into slavery. Slave traders didn't have to prove that they'd actually 00:04:00bought you legally from some slave owner. So it was a place where many black people would be kidnapped and brought and then sold back into slavery because Montgomery didn't require proof of prior ownership. And there was some other aspects to the slave trade in Montgomery that were deeply troubling. There was no covenant that required that families be sold together. You could separate a family. So that space in Montgomery was a place of tremendous trauma and pain and anguish and great injustice. And we want to talk about that. We want to talk about other aspects of the African-American experience in the state. And that's why we want our staff to be very familiar with the Civil Rights experience and what they could learn here at the Institute is incredibly important toward that end.

ANDERSON: When you said that EJI wants to talk about it, do you know yet what that means?

STEVENSON: Yeah I'm, you know, I'm very interested in re-characterizing the 00:05:00experience of African-Americans in this country, through the lens of relationships with institutions. So, for example, I see four institutions that have shaped the hopes, the aspirations, the dreams of African-Americans in very profound ways, and I'm looking at institutions that have been threats, barriers, to full engagement. And so the institution of slavery would obviously be the first institution: it's what created so much of the tension and the misinformation and the bias and the presumptions and the prejudice. And in that context, talking about Commerce Street, talking about the way slave trading functioned, talking about the way the dynamics of slavery created something more than a slave society. Many countries had slavery. Europeans had slavery. Throughout all of the world there has been enslavement as a mechanism for 00:06:00economic repayment and as a penalty for war and all of these things. But slavery in most parts of the world represented something very different than it represented in the United States. In the United States, in the Southern United States, because of this racial difference between the people who were enslaved and the people who owned slaves, slavery became more than just economic payback and suffrage and dependence. It became a caste system, and we created a slave society that was also a society that was organized by race. And because of that the end of slavery didn't accomplish the same kind of relief the same kind of opportunity for enslaved people that it did in other parts of the world. And I think we need to understand the way in which slavery in this country created a mythology about the inhumanity of African-Americans, the inferiority of African-Americans, that the end of slavery didn't address. As a result of that 00:07:00we were set up for, I believe, 100 years of struggle, 200 years of tension, and we haven't confronted that slave reality. In fact, we've done the opposite. We've tried to minimize the horrific aspects of slavery. So we want to talk about that institutional relationship through a different lens. I think the second institution hasn't been defined as an institution--but I think it's important to think about it as an institution--and that was the institution of terror. At the end of Reconstruction until World War II, African-Americans were subjected to systematic terror. It was the threat of violence. It was lynching. It was convict leasing. It was bombings. It was all of the violence that made black subordination possible. Passing laws didn't persuade African-Americans that they were inferior or should be submissive. You had to enforce them with violence and with terror. And that's what happened. And that era of terror has 00:08:00not in my judgment been totally recognized. African-Americans in the Deep South recognize it. Many of us are offended when we hear people on TV talking about how we're dealing with terrorism for the first time after 9/11. And knowing that we have the capacity to respond to terror the way we've respond to terror in the last 15 years is a little troubling because we didn't make that response over the decades when African-Americans were being systematically victimized: they couldn't go to law enforcement, they couldn't go anywhere. And that inspired the Great Migration and did a whole host of things. But that institution of terror in my view hasn't been well defined, or well understood. Third institution was of course Jim Crow segregation; we know a lot more about that, because it's more recent, but also because there was resistance. We had very powerful leaders in 00:09:00the African-American community and other communities finding that experience in ways, I think, were quite profound. We also know about it because we succeeded in confronting it. What we don't appreciate about even that institution, however, is that it was systematic. It was structural. It was psychological. It had aspects to it that we haven't fully defined. As a result of that we thought we could change the laws that created it and then just move on. And I think that's a mistake, and I think we are still struggling to overcome segregation, apartheid, racial hierarchy, because we haven't talked about it. And in South Africa, Rwanda, these countries that dealt with horrific human rights violations recognized that to get past them, you have to commit yourself to a process of truth and reconciliation. And in the United States, we didn't do that. We created no space to tell the truth about what Jim Crow and segregation had done 00:10:00to everybody; not just African-Americans but to white people too. All of that trauma, all of that humiliation, all of that violence, all of that stigma, all of those presumptions, we never gave anybody space to talk about it. In fact we did the opposite. We wouldn't let people talk about it. And we've tried to move on, and I don't think we've moved nearly as far as we could've moved. And we won't get as far as we need to get until we go back and actually create that space. I think it cannot happen without that. Apartheid could not have been confronted without truth and reconciliation; Rwanda, the genocide could not be confronted without truth and reconciliation. I think in the United States, segregation and the legacy of racial apartheid and racial subordination cannot be confronted until we create that space. My family members and people in the African-American community need an opportunity to give voice to the pain and the anguish, the humiliation and the trauma that they lived with and continue to 00:11:00live with. And we need to let people who are white also know that they were also the victims of a lie. They were taught by their parents and grandparents that they are actually better than other people because of their skin color. And there is nothing more corruptive, nothing more abusive that you can do to someone than to feed them a lie and have them embrace that lie and let that lie shape their worldview. And so it's not just for African-Americans that I think we need to have this experience of truth and reconciliation. I think it's for the entire community. I think the fourth institution because we didn't engage in truth and reconciliation has emerged in the last thirty years, and I believe that's mass incarceration. I believe the way in which we have used the criminal justice system as a repository for our fear and our anger, for our presumptions of guilt that we assign to many people of color, our presumptions of 00:12:00worthlessness that we assign to people of color. We have created structures that are every bit as racially compromised as some of the structures that existed eighty years ago, but we've surrounded them with procedures and formalities that make us believe that things like the death penalty are shielded from racial bias. Or our sentencing system is shielded from racial bias. Or our criminal justice system is shielded from the ravages that poverty create, and a system that is wealth dependent. Our system, our criminal justice system, is shaped by wealth. It treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. And so that institutional reality had devastating consequences for communities of color. In the state of Alabama, 34% of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote. And in a state where we celebrate the Voting Rights Act, we celebrate that struggle, we are systematically losing African-American voters throughout the criminal justice system, and we're 00:13:00resisting even talking about that issue. We're going to get to the point in some communities where the level of disenfranchisement among African-Americans is actually going to be as high as it was when the Voting Rights Act was passed. And to me that's intolerable. We're using mass incarceration to devastate communities. There are places in this state and across the country where 40 to 50% of the men of color are in jail, or in prison, or on probation and parole; which is a permanent lifetime ban from certain kinds of opportunities. We've used the politics of fear and anger to do some really devastating things to children. My work has focused a lot on kids prosecuted as adults, children sentenced to die in prison. The United States is the only country in the world that has condemned thirteen-year-old children to die in prison--life in prison without parole. Seventy percent of those kids thirteen and fourteen are African-American or Latino. And to me that represents again this institutional 00:14:00threat, this barrier to full and fair participation in the society. And so our project is really aimed at giving voice to this lens, and then kind of trying to educate people about historical realities with a goal of engaging people more deeply. We don't want people to just know about lynching or the Civil Rights Movement. We want them to understand the trauma, the injury. We're about to publish a calendar. It's our first kind of publication in our Race and Poverty Project, and it's a calendar that documents the African-American experience; but it's not a calendar that celebrates black achievement. It's not about the first African-American to do this, or the first African-American to do that. It's a calendar that documents the oppression and the violence and the barriers that have been constructed to limit African-American achievements. It talks about 00:15:00lynchings. It talks about the laws that were passed that insisted on racial hierarchy. It talks about the struggle to actually overcome slavery. It talks about resistance to Civil Rights. It talks about all of the structural and personal barriers that African-Americans have had to confront, and it asks us to not simply remember the success and the achievement but to remember the ugliness, the pain, the anguish, the violence, the despair. Because if we don't understand that part we'll misperceive what the Civil Rights experience--what the history--is really about. And I'm hoping we can do that in other areas where we're very interested in actually examining the rule, the role of the law as a project with lawyers and people who have done legal reform. Very few people appreciate that bias and discrimination--bigotry and racial hierarchy--warrant 00:16:00personal attitudes in the movies and in our current culture. We like to reduce these problems to a handful of bad actors. We love to prosecute Klu Klux Klan members and extremists as the face of racial bigotry. When in fact, the face of racial bigotry were ordinary citizens--legislators, judges, city council members, ministers--who bought into a construct of racial hierarchy and acculturated to it, socialized to it, even made their religious faiths and values accommodating. And until we understand that, I don't think we actually get how big a problem this was. And so we like talking about the laws that were passed to construct this kind of racial hierarchy. At the Institute here you have the ordinances that were passed. I think that's really important for people to appreciate. It wasn't some mean white person down the street that wouldn't 00:17:00let black people do X and Y. This was a system. It was a system that had been passed down over decades, and so we're putting out reports about this relationship between race and the law. We're doing some things that are designed to engage the people in various communities around some of these issues. Because of our work in the death penalty area, we're very interested in the use of lethal violence as an expression of cultural norms, social norms that have racial implications. And so we're very interested in lynching, and one of our hopes is to actually begin talking about monuments and memorializing lynching sites. And we want people to appreciate the proximity between these horrific acts of gross human rights violations--mass violence, mass torture--that were 00:18:00committed in these communities all around us. We have no consciousness about it. We don't talk about it, and I think we have to confront it. In our country we know that when you victimize people unfairly you can't just ignore it. I mean, we're doing a lot to appreciate what 9/11 did, and we would think it unconscionable to have experienced that violence and that injury without talking about it; without doing something to reconcile ourselves with that. And yet, in the context of lynching, we never did that. We don't talk about it. We're not even allowed to actually understand where it happened and who was involved. And so our project is going to do a lot of work around that phenomenon. And there are things in that vein that I'm hoping we can do to really push on what this legacy of racial inequality has done.

ANDERSON: I know I picture you in a prison with a young person talking. I mean 00:19:00you are very hands on, and here you are speaking in really broad terms about systemic change. You're an incredible communicator, and so I'm excited about the potential of what you're talking about. Also, how do you balance being in the weeds and getting work done?

STEVENSON: Yeah. You know? It's an interesting evolution for me. I mean, I did start out really just working on individual cases with clients, and the influence of poverty and influence of race was so pervasive. And all of these individual cases, all of my clients, are poor. Many of them are people of color whose race has absolutely been a factor in their ability to get fair and just treatment. And we've done a lot of work around that. I see some of these issues as Civil Rights issues, as human rights issues. To me, the death penalty is a Civil Rights issue. Excessive punishment is a Civil Rights issue. Mass incarceration is a Civil Rights issue, and through our work in individual cases, 00:20:00and in efforts to kind of challenge these issues, it's always been the way I've thought of the work that I do and the work that we do at EJI. I think we're now at a point where it becomes important to make these connections in a more direct way, and that's the reason why we've made kind of race and poverty our newest project. In many ways, it's an evolution. You know? The work I've done around death cases--where we've been challenging the exclusion of African-Americans from juries and the kind of really racialized ways in which cases are sometimes prosecuted, the exclusion of people of color in decision making roles in the system, the disparate sentencing--all of that has been about the way in which this legacy of race and racial bias manifests itself today. I think now it's 00:21:00time to really take these issues and put them in this broader context so people can understand why we're still talking about race. Why we're talking about poverty as structural poverty. Not just as someone who doesn't have something and the relationship between the two. We're in a region where race and poverty have gone hand in hand to create barriers to opportunity and full expression of all the values we say we care about. And so, for me, it becomes necessary to make those connections. And so in a lot of ways it's my time in prison cells with poor people and with young men and boys of color, and women of color and other people that has got me to this place where I now think it's really important to put in a broader context this, this struggle and these issues.

ANDERSON: Who's gonna get the calendar? I mean, I'm thinking I want every known 00:22:00person who's in prison to get it, but they can't even read Slavery By Another Name. So?

STEVENSON: [laughs] Well, that's a really good question. Well, you know? The calendar is as much for people who are outside the prison context as it is for people inside, and so we'll focus on the thousands and millions of people who need to understand that history. Who won't have that barrier, but we're also going to keep challenging this idea that incarcerated people--condemned people--somehow should be shielded from understanding these historical forces. I tend to think that a deeper understanding of these forces can actually be a pathway to recovery, to reinterpretation, to rehabilitation. You know? I work with young kids and one of the saddest things I do is I talk to these kids, and if you get them to engage in really honest conversation, the bottom line is that many of them are quite hopeless. They see their friends and their neighbors and their siblings dying or effectively dying by being sent to prison for the rest 00:23:00of their life, and it creates this despair. And they say to me," Mr. Stevenson: , I know I'm going to be in prison or dead by the time I'm twenty-one," and they're twelve and thirteen years of age. And they say I've got to go out here and get mine while I can. And that kind of framing is the kind of framing that for 150 years African-American leaders were trying to protect against. You had to persuade people during slavery that freedom would be good. That it would be safe to be free. And even though it wasn't always safe to be free, you had to have that hope. You had to have that vision. During Reconstruction, people embraced freedom, and then it was crushed and taken away from them. And so to keep striving for it took courage. You couldn't just look at what was right in front of you and accept that and react to that and have that shape your hopes and dreams. You had to fight against it. You had to submit to it in many ways. You had to play along with it in many ways, but you had to understand and believe that there was more. And those who had that vision succeeded, and those 00:24:00who didn't died in agony, in misery--victims of this horrific system. It's true during the Era of Terror, convict leasing, all of these institutions. That was true during the Civil Rights Movement. Lots of people claimed to have been active but most people were sitting on the sidewalks or hiding someplace. It really required a lot of hope and a lot of courage to say, "You know what? Even though we're going to be confronted with ugliness and violence, we're going to still press on." And that prevailed in many ways, but that hope and courage was essential. There could be no Civil Rights Movement without believing things you hadn't seen. Believing that there could be integration in Alabama. Believing that you could achieve opportunities that had been denied for a century. And so that same frame is needed for our young people in jails and prisons, and for our whole society. Right? Because a lot of these sentences, a lot of what's expressed by mass incarceration is hopelessness. We can't do better for people, 00:25:00so let's throw them away: "Three strikes, you're out! We'll put you in prison for the rest of your life." The growth of life imprisonment without parole is an acceptable sentence and we actually take pride in our ability to throw people away. And that has to be challenged, because it is ultimately hopeless. It is the opposite of courage, in my view. It repudiates everything we claim when we talk about rehabilitation and redemption and recovery and reconciliation. And so I think there ought to be a whole community of people--faith people, people of color, poor people, people who understand the importance of getting back up when you've fallen down--who are pushing, demanding for something more hopeful. But instead, I think we've been distracted by the politics of fear and anger in a way that has silenced us and made us complacent. And part of what we want to do is challenge that silence and engage people and get them to understand that you 00:26:00shouldn't, you can't celebrate Civil Rights and be silent about mass incarceration. You can't embrace the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Voting Rights struggle and be indifferent about disenfranchisement of ex-offenders. All of these things express basic realities, basic truths, and it wasn't true fifty years ago and a lie today. If it was true then, it's true today. And that struggle is very much a part of what we're hoping to animate through some of our work.

ANDERSON: I wanna ask you about travel outside our country. I'm sure that you are asked to speak a lot. And here, the mission of the Institute was to promote civil and human rights worldwide through education.

STEVENSON: Yeah.

ANDERSON: I would love to know your perceptions of us that you've encountered.

STEVENSON: Yeah; well it's fascinating. I have done work outside of the U.S. and it's always been an interesting experience for me. I was doing work in Brazil 00:27:00many years ago because there was an effort--they don't have the death penalty, but there was an effort to bring the death penalty back--and I was asked to spend some time down there and it was interesting because their sense of race and racial identity was very different than what we have here in this country, and yet there were these very stark realities. Brown and black people did experience bias and discrimination even if they didn't self-identify in that way. And it was fascinating for me to talk about racial identity and racial struggle in a society where these realities existed, but there hadn't really been an expression around that frame. And I've seen this throughout the world. I think the United States has a reputation as being a first world country, as having a commitment to human rights; and there are a lot of things that we do that I think are admirable. But we are also very myopic. We are not good at 00:28:00evaluating these issues close to home. We're the only country, along with Somalia, that has refused to sign the Covenant on the Rights of the Child, and I think that undermines our status, I think it makes us less credible when we talk about human rights globally. We do a lot of things to say we believe democracy is important and expression is important, but when we disenfranchise people here, and we're indifferent about that, that compromises our commitment to human rights. And I think other countries are very quick to recognize this. And so I do think this is a global issue. I don't think we can maintain the relationships we want to maintain with other countries, many of which are critical for our self-interest without being more attentive to human rights in this country. Without being more rigorous about how we enforce the values and the laws and norms we talk so much about in this country. And I have never been shy about 00:29:00giving voice to the problems in the U.S., outside of the U.S.. And a lot of people think that's not cool, but you know I was in Russia on the day when Boris Yelstin commuted all of the death sentences of people on death row there. Russia does not have an active death penalty anymore, and I was very comfortable saying, "You know? You will be moving ahead of the United States on this human rights issue. You know? You used to have the highest rate of incarceration in the world with reforms. That will no longer be true. It will be true for the United States." And these are realities that I don't create, but they're realities nonetheless. And I think we have to talk about them. You know, I did work on capital punishment on China. The Chinese were very quick to point out that they don't execute juveniles. You can't get the death penalty if you're under the age of eighteen. When I was there in the early part of 2000s, we did. And those kinds of disconnects compromise our ability to advance human rights 00:30:00globally. So I do think it's important that we have this global perspective, but I also think, you know, that as the slogan says "It's important to think globally but act locally." I think we have the ability to change and affect human rights on a daily basis in our community here. And we shouldn't believe that it's better to go do this someplace faraway because sometimes that's easier. But the reality is, until we address these issues locally, were not going to have influence and credibility globally.

ANDERSON: Are you hopeful about our country, especially after this past summer?

STEVENSON: [laughs] You know? I have to be hopeful. I think when you, when you allow yourself to get hopeless about what can be done you begin to prepare yourself for failure. You shut down. You're not as creative. You're not as 00:31:00courageous. You're not as energized. You're not as engaged. It's just what the body does. It's what the mind does, and so I think you have to remain hopeful. There are times when it's hard, because the signs you see, the words you hear are very, very discouraging. But I do remain hopeful: I see a lot that encourages me. On mass incarceration, I think we're about to turn a corner. I think the economic crises had one upside, and it's basically the only upside: it caused us to appreciate that we cannot afford that nearly six million people on probation and parole in this country and 2.3 million people in jails and prisons. Even here in Alabama where the prison population of close to 30,000 people, which is six times greater than it was in 1979. In 1979, there were 5,000 people in jails and prisons in the State of Alabama. Today there are 00:32:0030,000, and you know our violent crime rate was the same then as it is now. So this increase in 25,000 people in prison is not about crime. It's about a misguided war on drugs, which is not a crime problem. It's a health problem. And if we really cared about people who are struggling with drug addiction and drug abuse, we would actually engage them through a health framework and try to heal them, to try to help them. But instead we punish them, we threaten them, and then we condemn them to prison--at our expense--for decades. And so the only upside is that cost is causing us to reevaluate some of these policies. I think we now realize that we are bankrupting our educational system. People who are sending their kids to Auburn and Alabama and other colleges and universities in this state are paying more because we are spending millions of dollars to incarcerate people who are not a threat to public safety. And it doesn't really 00:33:00make sense to do that. We should use those dollars to invest in more opportunities for people. Some states (the state of California) spent over $100,000 per juvenile in juvenile detention, and you just think what you could do if you spent just a tenth of that on the kids to prevent them from engaging in behaviors that result in these arrests. And what you would do for the larger community. We don't like to spend money on poor people, we don't like to spend money on people who are vulnerable and marginalized, but we ultimately DO. We just do it in the correctional context. And I would rather do it in ways that actually prevents crime; lowers the misconduct; creates a healthier, safer community for everybody. And then you get someplace. You don't keep repeating the same mistakes, and I do think that there is some recognition, now, that we're going to have to bring the prison population down. That we're going to 00:34:00have to embrace some reforms. We can't just punish our way out of all of the social problems and economic problems that we've created; and that we're going to have to reevaluate what it means to be a healthy place. You know? You see this, we do these reactionary laws that are so misguided, and I think the immigration law is an example of that. We now have this unbearably racist law in Alabama. It's a law that basically legalizes racial profiling. And as a result of that, we realize that we were going to be punished by people who don't want to be profiled, who are not poor, who are not marginalized. They're investors. They're Europeans. They're Chinese. They're Asians looking for economic opportunity, and we cannot have that benefit, we cannot have that business that we care so much about without confronting the racial history. And the reputation 00:35:00and the identity we've created for ourselves by resisting Civil Rights, by resisting equality, by promoting--if you will--and taking pride in a history that actually glories in some of these dynamics. You know? Because I'm a product of the Civil Rights Movement and grew up with Jim Crow, I'm the first to admit that I don't like that we love talking about the good ole days, that we sentimentalize these experiences as if they were just glorious and wonderful. We embrace Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday; and we don't even really understand what that means. We think these icons of the Confederacy are people to be emulated and respected but we don't really understand what that represents. We're not very careful about not naming things after people who were 00:36:00proponents of horrific racial violence and destruction and engaged in systematic violence directed at people of color. Some of the worst eugenicists that used sterilization and abusive medical procedures in poor communities and minority communities are the people in the Alabama Medical Hall of Fame. And we're not very careful about that, because we haven't really committed to confronting this history, and so I believe our economic development and future is going to always be constrained until we do that. And so that's what makes me hopeful. If we can give expression to these problems in ways that people recognize it's not just for black people. It's not just for brown people. It's not just for undocumented people that we're insisting on fairness and equality. It's for everybody. Then perhaps there might be an opportunity to see real progress.

ANDERSON: That's what the Movement was about.

STEVENSON: Completely about. The Civil Rights Movement was always expressed in terms of: "This is not for us. It's for everybody." And I don't think people 00:37:00actually understood it then, and I'm not sure they understand it now. And in too many places we celebrate the Movement. We talk about the Movement in that same narrow frame: "It was for them. Well, that's your holiday. That's your success. That's your story. Ours is the great Confederacy, and the great resistance of this, and the great-" And I think we have to confront that. We have to talk about that.

ANDERSON: I could talk to you all day and listen all day.

STEVENSON: [laughs]

ANDERSON: I have so many questions. I just want to know one thing. I'm kind of lost. Who listens to you? Are you spending more time in Alabama or outside Alabama?

STEVENSON: You know? Our work has become more national. Our work with kids was national. Most of those cases were done outside the state. The lead case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court was actually an Alabama case, but our work has really been national on that issue. I do a lot of work on the death penalty all 00:38:00over the place, but our litigation is mostly here in Alabama. Our wrongful conviction/abuse of power stuff tends to be regional in the South. Our race and poverty work I expect will be national, but it will have a regional focus because obviously the states of the Old Confederacy are the jurisdictions where these dynamics were particularly intense. But I'm hoping it will have a kind of regional component to it but with a national goal. We think the whole country needs to engage in this dialogue around racial memory and overcoming racial inequality through truth and reconciliation. People think--younger people who grew up in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Baltimore, Boston--who believe that they have no connection to the South and the reality is of course they do. They don't 00:39:00even understand the Great Migration and how they are refugees of the same kind of violence and terror that we're talking about in this region. They're not disconnected. They are the exiles. And because they sought a refuge in another part of this country doesn't make that experience any less meaningful and powerful. And so we've got to understand that and think about that through that lens.

ANDERSON: I looked for the answer to this question elsewhere, because you have received some press. Like I said, you're a wonderful communicator and that's been captured. It's so great to have that, and I'm not endeavoring to get your life's story because we don't have time.

STEVENSON: [laughs]

ANDERSON: But I do wonder did you say "I'm just gonna pick the most regressively structured state and go there?" When you made the decision to go to Alabama, 00:40:00because the Constitution just sets this place up.

STEVENSON: Yeah

ANDERSON: These things are doubly entrenched.

STEVENSON: You know? There's a part of that analysis which I think is true: I mean I started in Atlanta with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. I was doing a lot of work here in Alabama. This was in the mid-80's, and it was clear to me that Alabama was a state where there were very few resources. There was no public defenders system here. There weren't institutions that were focused on the plight of incarcerated people, condemned people. There was no real tradition of a vibrant legal community that was engaged in the kind of resistance to fear and anger in the criminal justice context, and so we clearly saw a big need here, and that was the reason why I came. I didn't really intend to stay. I 00:41:00mean, my hope had actually been to go back to Atlanta and keep doing the work I was doing there. But the proximity is the pathway to truth: you cannot really appreciate what the needs are until you get close enough to evaluate them. And being here and experiencing what I experienced made it harder and harder to be anyplace else, to go anyplace else because the issues that I saw were deeply disturbing and engaging. And the opportunities I saw to make progress were also engaging. And you know? Now, this is home. It's where I've been for almost thirty years now. And it becomes part of what's important, because in many ways it's only when we see progress, it's only when we achieve success in places that are entrenched, where the resistance is constitutional, where the barriers are 00:42:00so insidious that we can actually really claim progress. You know? It's very easy to create diversity and promise and opportunity in elite institutions and elite places where nothing really challenging emerges. You know? You really do measure progress, you measure commitment to the rule of law, you measure a commitment to equality and fairness by how you treat the poorest, most marginalized, most victimized, most institutionalized people, in the most regressive and resistant places. And that means that Alabama will still be the thermostat for how we progress on race in this country--not some other jurisdiction. Because as we are part of this country, this country can't claim anything until we see that in places like Alabama. And so, yeah, I don't have 00:43:00regrets about being here. It's been challenging and at times overwhelming but also deeply enriching and that's the beautiful thing about proximity: it can break you and cut you and bruise you, but it can also give you insights and truth and an understanding of the power of human dignity and human worth that you will not appreciate in more comfortable and convenient spaces. And so I actually still feel really privileged to have been here doing the work I've done.

ANDERSON: Thank you. Thank you for doing it.

STEVENSON: Thank you. That's very kind.

ANDERSON: For someone I've never met till today for whom I say, "Thank you."

STEVENSON: [laughs] Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

ANDERSON: So, like I said earlier, we're really glad you're going to be apart of this special week for us [Birmingham Civil Rights Institute]. It is our twentieth anniversary. I think you're being the recipient and giving us the 00:44:00occasion to really understand what you are really all about. It's very crucial for us at this current point in institutional mistreatment. Thank you.

STEVENSON: Yes. Sure, sure. You're welcome. Terrific.