Original subtitles

Chief Justice John Roberts: We'll hear argument next today:

Case 17-75-05, Madison vs. Alabama.

Mr. Stevenson.

Bryan Stevenson: Mr. Chief Justice,

may it please the court,

it's undisputed that Vernon Madison

now sits on Alabama's death row,

unable to fully orient to time and place.

The authority to execute someone

who is not an immediate threat is an awesome power.

And that power has to be utilized fairly,

reliably, and humanely.

Bryan Stevenson ( voiceover ): For most of my career,

I've provided legal representation

to people on death row.

I've argued a bunch of cases before the United States Supreme Court,

and each time I go, I stand there in front of the court...

I read what it says about equal justice under law.

- All right, thank you all very much. - Reporter: Thank you.

Stevenson: I have to believe that

to make sense out of what I do.

I've been thinking a lot recently about an incident

that took place when I was a little boy.

My mom saved up enough money for my sister and I

to get on a church bus trip

to the new Disney World that had just opened up.

I remember being so excited about it,

because not only were we going to go to Disney World,

we would be staying in a hotel,

and the hotel would have a swimming pool.

And my sister and I had never been in a real swimming pool.

As we pulled into the hotel, my sister started squealing.

As soon as the bus stopped she grabbed me,

and we went streaking over to this pool.

I grabbed her hand and we jumped high in the air

and we landed in that pool,

and it was as glorious as I had imagined it would be.

It was just unbelievable.

And we were having such fun,

and then I realized that chaos had broken out around us.

White parents were frantically running into the water,

snatching their children violently out of the pool, and I was looking at my sister,

I was looking, trying to figure out, what is going on?

Finally, there was one little boy left in the pool,

and this big guy came and he snatched him by the arm

and lifted him out of the water

and the little boy started crying hysterically.

I turned to that white man and I said, "What's wrong?"

And he gave me this look, and he said,

"You're wrong, nigger."

We got out of the pool and I ran to my mom.

And when I told her what the man said,

she looked at me and she said, "You get back in that pool."

She said, "Don't you let those people run you from that pool."

What I remember most vividly from that trip

is getting back in the pool

and standing in the corner of the pool

holding my sister's hand and desperately trying not to cry.

What do you do with a memory like that?

I still remember that,

and the question becomes:

Do the white kids remember the day

they were forced out of the pool by their parents

because two black kids got into the water?

Memory is powerful,

it is a powerful force in the way a society evolves.

We have a constitution that talks about equality, liberty, and justice for all,

and for decades, for centuries,

we tolerated enslavement of other human beings.

We tolerated abuse and violence against people.

We tolerated bigotry and discrimination.

And in thinking about what it would take

to move this court and this country

to a place of greater resolve when it comes to eliminating bias and discrimination,

it became clear to me that we haven't really talked much

about the legacy of racial bias.

I think there's a kind of smog in the air

that's created by the history of slavery and lynching and segregation,

and I don't think we're going to get healthy,

I don't think we can be free... until we address this problem.

But to get there,

we're going to have to be willing to tell the truth.

( bell tolling )

Bryan Stevenson: You know, I was just going through my files

a couple of days ago,

and I actually had this pad that had notes

of an interview I did with Rosa Parks.

I had the great privilege of knowing Rosa Parks when I was--

when I moved to Montgomery in the 1980s,

as a young lawyer I met an extraordinary woman who was the architect,

really, of the Montgomery bus boycott,

she was an amazing person, her name was Johnnie Carr.

And Johnnie Carr was a force to be reckoned with.

And when I moved to Montgomery, Ms. Carr called me up and she said, "Bryan,

I understand you're a young lawyer

and you've just moved to town." I said, "Yes, I am."

She said, "When I call you up and ask you to do something, what you're going to do

- is you're going to say, "Yes, ma'am.'" - ( laughter )

One day she called me up and said,

"Bryan, I want to tell you, Ms. Parks is coming back to town,

so we're going to get together and we're going to talk.

Do you want to come over and listen?"

I said, "Oh, yes, ma'am."

And I listened to these women talk for two hours.

They weren't talking about the things they had done,

they were talking about the things they were still going to do.

And finally, after two hours, Ms. Parks turned to me, she said, "Now, Bryan,

tell me about the Equal Justice Initiative.

Tell me what you're trying to do."

And I looked at Ms. Carr to see if I had permission to speak,

and she nodded, and so I gave her my whole rap.

I said, "Ms. Parks, we're trying to end the death penalty,

we're trying to do something about racial bias, we're trying to do something about the poor,

we're trying to do something about conditions of confinement."

When I finished, she looked at me

and she said, "Mm-mm-mm."

She said, "That's going to make you tired, tired, tired."

( laughter )

And Ms. Carr leaned forward

and she put her finger in my face and she said,

"That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave."

Stevenson: In 1989, we set up this project

here in Montgomery, Alabama,

to provide legal services to poor people,

incarcerated people, condemned people on death row.

Alabama doesn't have a public defender system,

and there were just a lot of people desperate for help.

Randy Susskind: Alabama has the highest death sentencing rate

in the country, per capita.

And I think, you know, from the very beginning,

Bryan's sense was, we should do as many cases as possible.

Stevenson: I think of a wrongful conviction

as any conviction where the law has not been followed,

where there have been

illegal practices or policies.

It doesn't mean that the person is innocent.

We represent a lot of people

who did the things they were accused of,

but I think you can be properly convicted

and unfairly sentenced.

We're gonna start moving because of limited time...

Sia Sanneh: I think in law school I conceived of myself as

becoming a great lawyer

and winning cases that get people out of prison,

and that is a huge part of what we do.

Stevenson: So I just wanted to get some reaction

to that idea, make sure we were comfortable with that.

Sanneh: But I think you have to be more than a lawyer

in the sort of technical sense.

Stevenson: I'd never met a lawyer-- ever--

until I got to law school,

and my time in law school was frustrating

because I didn't meet lawyers

who seemed to represent something I wanted to do.

And I tried to rationalize accepting a career as a lawyer

that I knew was not going to be fulfilling.

It was frankly in the midst of that

that I went to Atlanta, Georgia, and spent a month

with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee,

and for the first time I met a lawyer

who seemed to represent something that excited me.

I do think that the issue before us

is how the death penalty works in practice.

And the fact of the matter is, the death penalty--

and I practice in the Death Belt states of the South--

and the evidence is undeniable

that the death penalty is a result of race,

poverty, politics, and the passions of the moment.

One thing that's immediately apparent

with the death penalty in the South

is that it's about race and place.

You see lots of changes in the deep South,

but when you go to the courthouse,

nothing has changed--

it's like we're back in 1940 or 1950.

The judge is white, the prosecutors are white,

the court appointed lawyers are white.

And even in communities that have

fairly substantial African American populations,

the jury will be all white.

So the only person of color in the front of the courtroom

is the person on trial.

Anthony Ray Hinton: You see that smoke comin' outta there, boy?

- Man: Yeah. - Whoo!

Woman: How's it lookin', Ray?

Hinton: Oh, lookin' purty.

The secret to a cookout...

always have you a taste-master.

That's my taste-master right there.

He gonna let me know if it's right.

Oh, wait till you taste it!

It's good, Mr. Hinton, right on time.

Hinton: To me, life was good.

Not a care in the world,

just trying to get up every morning

and put one foot forward

and do the best you can and just enjoy life.

It was just good to be who I was at that particular time,

at least that's what I thought.

I found myself in a situation

that I never should have been in.

I was 29 years old.

Woke up, like any morning, ate breakfast,

and my mom asked me to go out there and cut that grass.

About 15 to 20 minutes into cutting the grass,

I just happened to look up

and there stood two white gentlemen

at the edge of the back porch.

I cut the lawnmower off and I said, "Can I help you?"

And one of them replied, "We are detectives

from the Birmingham Police Department."

And I said, "OK, how can I help you?"

And he said, "Well, we have a warrant for your arrest."

On our way to jail, the detective turned around and asked me,

"Anthony, do you own a pistol?" And I said, "No."

He said, "Do your mother own a firearm?"

I said, "No-- Ah, yes." I said, "She own an old .38 Smith & Wesson."

My mom gave them the pistol.

I asked the detective at least 50 times,

"Why am I being arrested?"

Never would respond.

I asked him again, for the 51st time,

"Why am I being arrested?"

He said, "You wanna know why we're arresting you?"

He said, "You robbed a restaurant manager and you killed him."

I said, "You got the wrong person, I ain't done none of that."

He said, "Let me tell you something right now.

I don't care whether you did or didn't do it.

There's five things that're gonna convict you."

He said, "Number one, you're black.

Number two, a white man is gonna say you shot him.

Number three, you're gonna have a white prosecutor.

Number four, you're gonna have a white judge.

And number five, you're gonna have an all-white jury."

And he said, "Do you know what that spells?

'Conviction.'"

And sure enough, they find me guilty.

The judge said, "Anthony Ray Hinton,

it is the order of this court that I sentence you to death.

May God have mercy on your soul."

Tom Brokaw: The Supreme Court

was urged today to strike down the death penalty

because it is applied unequally to black and white.

Carl Stern ( voice-over ): It was eight years ago that arrests were made

for the murder of a white Atlanta policeman

during a hold-up at a furniture store.

The man convicted of pulling the trigger was Warren McCleskey;

he was sentenced to die in Georgia's electric chair.

The appeal was based on death row studies

showing that those who kill whites

are 11 times more likely to be sentenced to die

than those who kill blacks.

William H. Rehnquist: We'll hear arguments first this morning

in number 84-68-11, Warren McCleskey vs. Ralph Kemp.

Stevenson: Once I got involved

in representing people on death row,

it was McCleskey that began to illuminate

the ways in which our history of racial inequality

was limiting the commitment of the rule of law

and disadvantaging people of color.

What was surprising is that the United States Supreme Court

didn't question the data.

The court said, "Even though we believe you,

we're not going to strike down the death penalty

because a certain amount of bias in the administration of the death penalty

is, in our opinion, quote, 'inevitable.'"

And as a young lawyer working on that case,

that was a real crisis.

It felt like the court was abandoning the commitment to equal justice,

it was abandoning the commitment to racial equality.

Susan Boleyn: I believe that there is

a presumption, at least in Southern states,

that Georgia prosecutors, juries and district attorneys

cannot fairly and impartially administer the death penalty.

And I'd like to tell you that it's not 1950 anymore,

we can fairly and impartially administer the laws

as narrowly drawn under our constitution.

Michael Kinsley: Mr. Stevenson, do you have a question?

What has changed that allows you to support or assert

that the death penalty is being fairly applied now

in ways that it wasn't being applied in 1950?

First of all, as I'm sure you know, Mr. Stevenson,

we have more white persons incarcerated on death row for murders

than we do for black people. So--

How does that disprove that race is not a factor?

The bottom line is that there are only 27% of the black--

of the population of Georgia is black.

Yet 75% of the people that have been executed in that state

are African American, that's 25% more than the people who committed murders,

and it's 50% more than the people who exist in that state.

So do you want an answer to your question or do you want to tell me your statistics?

I want an answer to a question, but I want an honest answer.

Your point of view is that no person

who is a black person in Georgia

can get a fair trial, according to you.

You want to go into generalized statistics

because you cannot face the fact as an attorney

that there are people who should be held accountable of their actions

regardless of their race.

( spectators applauding )

Stevenson: The court in McCleskey

said that he failed because he didn't prove

intentional discrimination on the part

of each of the decision-makers in his case.

And we started thinking about that. It was like, well, how do you prove that?

Well, we need to start asking questions about the decision-makers.

So we started asking questions of judges,

"Have you ever used the N-word?

Have you ever hired people of color to be clerks?

Did you pull your kids out of the schools when integration came?"

And the same questions were appropriate for the prosecutor.

And no one wanted to answer those questions.

I was persuaded, and still am,

that the criminal justice system revealed the problems

of our history of bias against the poor and people of color

unlike few systems did.

Stevenson ( in conference ): In the state of Georgia,

when a black defendant is sentenced to death

and four of the twelve jurors who sentenced him

say that the Ku Klux Klan do good things in that community,

when that defense lawyer says that "I believe my client is genetically predisposed

to commit violent crimes, and that's why I'm comfortable with his death sentence,"

when the trial judge and the prosecutor refer to that black defendant

as "colored boy" throughout the trial, that's racial bias.

Kinsley ( striking gavel ): OK. And Ms. Boleyn, would you like to...

Stevenson: I think of McCleskey

as a critical moment in the court's relationship

to not only the rule of law and the Constitution,

but to race.

I had a hard time reconciling

this commitment to equal justice under law

with this doctrine of inevitability.

And what that ruling meant

is that not only was there not going to be an end to the death penalty...

it meant that Warren McCleskey would likely be executed.

And I've had some hard moments,

but that stands out.

It created a sort of injury.

An execution date was scheduled,

and Warren McCleskey was executed.

We are haunted, in America,

by our history of racial inequality.

For me, it actually begins

with the fact that we're a post-genocide society.

I think what happened to native people on this continent

was a genocide.

We forced these communities from land

through war and violence.

We didn't call it a genocide because we said,

"No, these native people are different.

They're a different race."

And we used this narrative of racial difference

to justify the abuse, the exploitation,

the destruction of these communities.

And that narrative of racial difference

is what then made slavery in America so problematic.

And you cannot understand slavery in America

without understanding the role that the United States Supreme Court played

in making slavery acceptable,

making slavery moral,

making slavery legal.

Slave owners in the American South

wanted to feel like they were moral people.

They were Christians.

And to feel that and still be owning other people,

they had to say that black people are different than white people.

And that was ratified by the Supreme Court

in the Dred Scott decision.

The Supreme Court says in 1857,

"Look, black people are an inferior race.

They're not like white people.

They're three-fifths human.

And because of that, they are not citizens.

They are not protected by the Constitution."

And that decision

not only allowed slavery to persist,

but it created a racial hierarchy.

It introduced-- formally, in the law --

this idea of white supremacy,

this narrative of racial difference.

We then have this bloody Civil War.

The North prevails,

we pass the 13th Amendment,

which ends involuntary servitude and forced labor.

We pass the 14th Amendment, which is supposed to provide equal protection.

We pass the 15th Amendment, which is supposed to give people the right to vote.

And the reaction to that, in many parts of this country, was violent.

In 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana,

150 black people are murdered by a white mob

because they were protesting their inability to be politically represented.

Congress says, "You know, we can't allow that kind of violence,

we're going to have our federal prosecutors prosecute those people for that violence,"

and white people are convicted.

And the United States Supreme Court says,

"No, Congress doesn't have the authority

to prevent that kind of violent intimidation.

States have rights,

and the federal government can't impinge on those rights.

So, this era, I think,

does something significant to the credibility,

the integrity of the United States Supreme Court.

It became a tool for sustaining

racial violence, white supremacy,

and exploitation of black people.

Man: We have dedicated ourselves firmly to the belief

that the best interests of both races

may be served by segregated schools.

Stevenson: When the 1940s and '50s come along

and black people begin organizing and protesting and challenging

this legal architecture of bigotry and discrimination,

the states used the same rhetoric they'd been using since the Civil War.

There's nothing in the Constitution of the United States

that says anything about education or schools.

The states authorize 'em

and the states support 'em and the states control 'em.

Stevenson: States say, "We can treat black people any way we want to,

and the federal government can't do anything about it

because we have states' rights."

And that narrative was given to them

by the United States Supreme Court.

Thurgood Marshall: This is a part

of the group of lawyers

from all sections of the country

who are here in the Supreme Court

for the purpose of arguing the school segregation cases.

We believe that the proper place

for the issue of segregation is in a court.

Stevenson: When Brown vs. Board of Education is decided,

when the court makes this ruling

that segregation in education is unconstitutional,

it's a watershed moment.

It was finally the Court not yielding to bigotry

and bias and exclusion and discrimination.

And so, for them to declare in 1987,

in McCleskey vs. Kemp,

that they were retreating,

that these problems are, quote, "inevitable,"

it was heartbreaking.

I went to law school

because I'm a product of Brown vs. Board of Education.

I started my education in a colored school.

It was that commitment from lawyers to come into communities like mine

that made it possible for me to go to a high school

and to get to college.

( rain pattering )

So that's where my grandparents used to live.

They've fixed it up, actually.

And this is all kind of the black section of Georgetown back in here.

This was the segregated school for black kids.

That was where school ended when my dad was a kid.

It could take you to the sixth or eighth grade,

but after that, there was no more school.

So if you wanted to go to high school, you had to leave the county.

And...

this is the little church I grew up in,

Prospect AME Church.

Stevenson: My dad had lived with segregation his whole life,

had been taught to not draw attention to yourself,

not do anything that's gonna get you at risk.

It was a coping mechanism that was necessary

living in the community where we lived.

My dad was strategic and tactical.

My mom could be strategic and tactical too,

but she was also prepared to react.

And that reaction sometimes would create some tension.

If you went to the store,

the store clerks were always white,

and what they would do in those days is,

the store clerks would put your change down on the table.

They wouldn't put it in your hand, they didn't want to touch a black person.

She would say, "That's my money, you have to give it to me."

And I just think for her, it was hard to stay silent.

You know, when I went to law school at Harvard,

I, to be honest, I didn't--

I felt vulnerable.

I worried that I didn't belong there.

I was around people who could talk about how,

for three generations, their family members had been lawyers or doctors.

And I didn't want anybody to know

that I started my education in a colored school.

I didn't want people to know that my great-grandparents were enslaved.

But then going to death row,

seeing that struggle made manifest,

I realized that the things I had been silent about

are the things that I should be talking about.

Howard Stevenson: Bryan, when we've watched him argue in court--

I took both my sons to watch him argue at the Supreme Court--

I can see my mother in him.

But my parents didn't always agree on what Bryan was doing.

You know, "Bryan, if they did something wrong,

why are you defending them?"

The fear was initially

that when Bryan started in Montgomery,

they were getting a lot of bomb threats.

Christy Taylor: I have the trepidation of someone trying to harm him.

I feel that in the back of my spirit,

to be protective of him,

because people don't like what he has to say

or things that he's done.

Howard: Bryan's heart for this work

became evident very early on.

My father wanted him to make a lot of money.

I said, "Dad I don't think he's going to have that kind of a job.

( laughing ) I mean, you know,

Bryan's not going to be that kind of lawyer."

But they came around because

when they would meet the folks that he was working with

and see how their life changed, that looked more like church.

They were familiar with that.

- Hello! - Rev. Janet Maull-Martin: Hi, Bryan, how are you?

- I'm well, how are you? - I am well, it's so good to see you.

Great to see you too.

I used to play testimonial services

when I was a little tiny,

they didn't trust me for the main service yet,

so I would sit up there,

and they'd say, "You can play testimonial."

And people would stand up in these pews

and they would give their testimonies,

and I talk about this all the time.

Lot of times they'd be talking about

how difficult things had been.

They'd talk about how they didn't have enough food to feed their families

or something hard had happened.

But at the end of it they'd start singing

"But I Wouldn't Take Nothin' For My Journey Now."

You know, and I'd catch that key and things would just pick up.

And it was so formative

for a lot of what I'm trying to do now.

And so this is a precious place to me,

it's a special place.

It was a formative place for all of us,

me and my family,

and so, it's good to be back in here.

Stephen Bright: People who have a warrant that says

at some point you will be strapped down and put to death,

those people have the most compelling need for legal assistance

of anybody in our society.

Not only is the work to represent them,

but to also minister to that person,

to comfort that person,

to support that person and that person's family.

We are gonna be able to get some people over to safe passage,

but there are gonna be other people that that's not gonna happen.

Hinton: On December the 16th, 1986,

they transported me to Holman Correctional Facility

where they house death row inmates.

When I got convicted,

the prosecution ran out that day

and told the media that the state of Alabama

got the worst killer

that ever walked the streets in Birmingham

off the streets that night.

Only it wasn't true.

When I got there, they was in the process

of executing four men.

Thursday night is the night they execute you.

Never will forget the smell.

And I asked the guard, I said,

"Is there anything you can give me

to keep me from smelling that smell?"

And the guard looked at me and he said, "No...

but you'll get used to it.

And by the way, one day,

somebody will smell your flesh too."

How can another human being...

( expels air )

How can a human being...

tell another person that?

Stevenson: In many ways, you can say that the North won the Civil War,

but the South won the narrative war.

If the urgent narrative that we're trying to deal with in this country

is a narrative of racial difference,

if the narrative that we have to overcome is a narrative of white supremacy,

the South prevailed.

And that's what we were dealing with

at the beginning of the 20th century,

when we began an era where white supremacy,

racial subordination, racial hierarchy,

is going to be enforced in a new way: lynching.

Thousands of people pulled out of their homes,

burned alive, mutilated,

tortured, hanged, shot, drowned,

sometimes in plain view,

in front of thousands of people.

Sometimes the mob

would drag them through the black community,

force people out of their homes

to see the brutalized body of one of their neighbors,

one of their loved ones.

And oftentimes, a black person who had been lynched,

their body would be suspended on a bridge or on a tree.

And family members couldn't retrieve that body,

sometimes for days.

The sheriff would actually post someone to make sure

that the body was still there days later.

It wasn't a secret. It wasn't something that the Klan did.

The people who perpetrated these lynchings weren't people wearing white hoods.

There was no need to wear a hood.

You could actually pose with the victim's body.

You could carve their body up and collect souvenirs.

This was actually a point of pride.

Everybody was complicit.

And lynchings were largely taking place

in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system.

But there was this idea that black people

weren't good enough to even be criminal defendants.

And black people were lynched,

not just for some accusation of murder or rape,

they were often lynched because of some social transgression.

Not saying "sir" to a white person could get you lynched.

Going to the front door rather than the back door

could get you lynched.

Interracial romance was the most incendiary.

It was terrorism in the most complete sense.

These acts of violence were intended to terrorize people into not challenging,

not resisting, not confronting this racial hierarchy.

And in that sense, these lynchings

weren't just about those individuals.

This was about the entire African American community.

I do think, for African American families in the American South,

it was impossible to not have a story

about the violence and terror.

My grandfather witnessed a lynching.

He told me about seeing the mob,

them dragging someone to a spot,

him running to hide,

him looking through this little slat in a building

and watching this violence.

The thing that he would talk about

was knowing so many of these people,

and that creates this challenge

of how you live in a community

where you have to pretend to trust people

who you know are capable of engaging in the kind of terror

and violence that a lynching represents.

Stevenson: I've actually been representing people on death row

for about 31 years.

Walter McMillian was wrongly convicted

and condemned to death in Monroe County, Alabama,

which is about an hour and 45 minutes south of here.

Monroeville is the community where Harper Lee grew up

and wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird."

And if you've ever been to Monroe County,

it's a community that loves talking about

"To Kill a Mockingbird."

- ( laughter ) - And yet in the late 1980s,

a black man was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death

for a crime he did not commit.

Ed Bradley: You didn't kill Ronda Morrison?

No, sir, I ain't never seen Ronda Morrison a day in my life. God knows, I ain't.

- Where were you on the day of the murder? - At my house.

Did you ever go into Monroeville on the day of the murder?

- No, sir. - You never went into town?

Never went to Monroeville, period.

Stevenson: There was a murder

that took place in downtown Monroeville.

The police couldn't solve the crime.

The pressure got so great on the police

that I believe they decided to arrest someone,

even though they knew that person wasn't guilty.

And the person they chose to arrest was Walter McMillian.

We believe they chose to arrest him

because he was a black man

who had had an interracial affair

- with a young white woman. - What did he say?

They told me that I was going to prison because of that nigger,

and they didn't understand why I wanted to mess with niggers.

Stevenson: The trial lasted a day and a half,

the jury actually returned a verdict of life imprisonment without parole,

but in Alabama, our elected trial judges

have the authority to override jury verdicts of life

and impose the death penalty.

And what happened in this case is that the elected judge,

whose name was Robert E. Lee Key--

I know you think I'm making that up, but that's true--

- ( laughter ) - overrode the jury's

verdict of life and imposed the death penalty.

I got involved in the case, and we came up with

some very dramatic evidence of Mr. McMillian's innocence.

I have never had a case where

the state's only evidence of guilt comes from one person.

It turned out that the man that they got to testify against him,

they had coerced him to testify falsely.

And for some very bizarre reason which I'll never understand,

they tape recorded the sessions where they were coercing him

- to testify falsely. - ( laughter )

Bradley: Why should anyone believe you now?

Right is right and wrong is wrong.

And for a man to straighten his own life out,

he must tell the truth.

Bright: What lawyers are doing in cases on behalf of their clients

is telling their stories.

We have to find out what that story is,

we have to document it,

and then we have to tell it in as compelling a way that we can.

Stevenson: It was so clear that they had violated the law

in so many ways.

But when we presented the evidence in court,

the court ruled against us.

This was a case that generated a lot of strong feelings.

I got death threats during this case.

And then we appealed the case,

and ultimately, we were able

to save Walter McMillian from execution.

For me, the innocence cases are the hardest cases.

I think people think of that the other way.

They think, "Oh, must be great to work on a case where there's clear evidence of innocence."

But I know that our system is capable

of executing innocent people,

of turning a blind eye.

Bright: The injustices in these cases literally

jump out at you when you look at 'em:

the race discrimination,

the trial by ambush in many of these cases,

the terrible quality of lawyers

that many people who are sentenced to death get

so that really, their trial is just a legal lynching.

Stevenson: By the 1930s and '40s,

there is a growing anti-lynching movement.

And eventually the strategy was adopted that,

"We're going to end mob lynching by telling the mob that we'll do it for you,

"we'll do it indoors, you don't have to do it outdoors."

The reliability of these proceedings,

the fairness of these proceedings, didn't get much better.

You have these show trials

that last six or seven hours,

and the same outcome.

We're going to execute this person.

And you see the numbers start to rise

of legal execution,

but in communities of color, it's just legal lynching.

People don't realize that the case

that mobilized Rosa Parks and Dr. King

here in Montgomery was not the bus boycott.

It was actually the arrest of a young teen

who was wrongly accused of a rape,

who was taken to death row,

put in the electric chair,

and forced to confess.

And then they used that to convict him

and sentence him to death.

And Rosa Parks was outraged, and Dr. King was outraged,

and they started asking the governor

and other people to intervene,

and after a couple of years of that advocacy they were told,

"Not going to do anything," and that young man was executed.

And the pain of that was part of the story

that then gave rise to the civil rights movement.

But it was about this continuum of

presuming black people guilty and dangerous, no matter what the evidence.

It was about the way our criminal justice system functions.

It was about lynching and its legacy.

Walter McMillian: We, uh, we farmed,

used to farm all that land back there, boy.

We used to farm the land,

just a plow with a mule.

My mama and my older brothers and things.

Then when I got older, I took over,

and my other brother, he took over.

That kept generations, it kept going.

Plenty of people plant a lot of cotton around here.

Stevenson: Walter McMillian was born

in a region of Alabama

that had been part of the plantation economy.

When emancipation came, these formerly enslaved people

became sharecroppers and tenant farmers,

and that's what his family did.

They didn't own the land they lived on,

it was a brutal, difficult life.

McMillian: I started workin'--

I started workin' about, oh, boy,

I think I was somewhere around about seven,

about seven, eight years old, something like that.

Stevenson: When Mr. McMillian got out of prison,

he wanted to just resume his life.

But he was never able to get fully settled.

He came and lived with me for a while,

he lived with his daughter, he lived with his sister.

Stevenson: I think he was traumatized

by his time on death row...

and I don't think there was really any way

to fully recover from that.

See, you just, you're thinkin' about--

you always just be lookin' back all the time.

You know this man done this to you,

and he might do it again.

( crying softly )

It's rough, I'll tell you.

Stevenson: It didn't take long

before the burden of his incarceration

began to manifest itself with dementia.

He began to show symptoms of a kind of dementia

that many doctors link with trauma.

I think that our history of lynching

casts a shadow over the modern death penalty.

And the cases of people like Walter McMillian

show the power of that shadow to be destructive.

We've now had 156 people proved innocent

after being sentenced to death.

With less than 1500 executions,

that means that for every ten people that we execute,

we've now proved one innocent person on death row.

It's a shocking rate of error.

Well, we tolerate that error

because we have a consciousness that says

what happens to those people isn't really that bad.

It's the same consciousness that allowed us to tolerate

thousands of lynchings.

And to understand the consciousness

that would give rise to that, you have to remember

how the courts had created this idea

that these black people are not people,

they're not fully human.

And so in that sense,

you can't disconnect the death penalty

from the legacy of lynching,

and you can't disconnect the legacy of lynching

from the era of enslavement.

I think that this line is a very real one.

And if we don't recognize that line,

we're not going to see the way that line will continue

to claim lives unfairly.

( playing piano )

( continues playing )

For me, music is therapy, it's a place to go.

It's the only thing I do

that takes me completely out of my head.

Like, when I try to exercise or something,

I'm still processing things,

but when I play, usually, I'm not thinking about anything.

And so for me it's been a real comfort, a real aid,

in managing the challenges that the kind of work we do can create. Yeah.

Sanneh: Bryan is the work,

there's no way to separate him

from the work.

It's his full self that he pours into it.

He's gone on a path that almost nobody else would have chosen,

and he's done it at times

that have been incredibly lonely.

Susskind: After a long day, he's getting calls,

multiple calls, every night,

from clients in prison who have his home phone number.

Some of these folks don't have family members,

and there's no one in the world.

On a Sunday morning, when most of us are takin' a break...

he'll call me from the road,

he'll be driving to a prison

to see an old client.

Ya know, the client doesn't need a legal visit,

it's just basically, he's just, as a friend,

going to visit somebody just so that they can get a visit.

Christy: For the most part, he's on the go.

I always say to him,

in a mother voice, you know,

"Eat. Rest your body. Take time for yourself."

You know, Howard and Bryan,

we don't see each other as much as we should.

We have a bond and a connection,

it feels always right,

and when we do get together it's wonderful.

( chatter )

( piano playing )

Christy: Oh, now you get it! ( laughing )

( Bryan continues playing )

( stops playing, laughs )

That's a good one.

Howard: My oldest son, Bryan,

who's named after his uncle,

his mother and I kind of agreed

that we thought Bryan might not have time for a family.

And one of the reasons we named him after his uncle

was envisioning him just always working and sacrificing that.

Christy: Let's do a Stevie Wonder song.

- The kids know-- Oh, no, he's-- - ( Bryan playing ragtime )

Howard: I used to worry about it all the time.

You know, needing his own downtime, his own family,

his own space.

But, um,

he's convinced us that he's good.

- ( chatter ) - I think I want to be a-- a--

- A designer. - Designer.

Bryan: Oh, beautiful!

Scientist, inventor, adventurer,

- game-maker... - Christy: That's a lot.

And the richest and most famous man in the world.

- Besides you. - Oh, wow, well, you'll--

you'll definitely be able to be richer,

that's for sure. Um...

Stevenson: I've never really spent a lot of time

thinking about what I don't have.

There are times, obviously, when you feel like you're--

you have a different life, I have a different life, you have a different situation.

I love children, I love my nieces and my nephews

and all of that.

But it never feels to me--

It's never felt like a sacrifice.

It just feels like, you know,

I have the opportunity to do these amazing things with amazing people,

and I feel really privileged to do that.

( chatter )

Hinton: I wrote Mr. Stevenson a letter.

I said, "Mr. Stevenson, I would like for you to become my lawyer,

but before you say yes or no,

all I ask is that you read my transcript."

I said, "And if you find one thing in my transcript

that points to my guilt, do not worry about becoming my lawyer.

Stevenson: When I met Anthony Ray Hinton,

years after we'd won freedom for Walter McMillian,

it was very sobering for me,

because he was actually on death row

before Walter McMillian.

Walter did six years on death row before he was released.

Mr. Hinton had already been on death row for 14 years before I met him.

And the evidence of his innocence was just as dramatic,

so we immediately start working on the case.

Judge McMillan: Mr. Stevenson, we'll be equally as lenient

on the time considerations of your argument.

Thank you, thank you, Chief Judge McMillan.

I represent the petitioner in this matter, Anthony Ray Hinton.

Let me first start out by saying

that this is an extraordinary case.

We have alleged in the court below,

as we have represented to this court,

that Mr. Hinton is innocent.

Hinton: I said, "Mr. Stevenson,

if no two guns is alike,"

I said, "I know that the state of Alabama is telling a lie."

I said, "I need you to hire a ballistics expert,"

and I said, "I need you to get a Southern white man."

I said, "All of my life I lived in the South,

and I know how the South work."

I said, "They only gonna believe one of their own.

I need that Southern white man to just tell the truth."

Stevenson: We have now alleged

that we have done testing

by some of the best experts in this country,

that establish that there is no match

between this weapon and the projectiles.

Stevenson: Once we got involved and we were able to get

the best gun experts in the country to look at the evidence,

and they quickly concluded that this gun

was not the weapon that was used in these murders,

we thought we could get a quick resolution.

Judge McMillan: Thank you, Mr. Stevenson.

I'd like to thank both counsels

for your excellent presentations.

At this time, the court will be in recess for five minutes.

Bailiff: All rise.

Hinton: We took this new evidence to the Attorney General,

whose name at that time was Bill Pryor,

and asked him to reexamine the bullets.

His staff was quoted as saying,

"It would be a waste of the taxpayer money,

and it would be a waste of his time."

And although it would only take one hour,

that is one hour that he was not willing to take.

And for not doing his job,

George W. Bush appointed him to a federal lifetime appointment.

Sixteen years went by,

three different attorney generals.

My life was not worth one hour.

My life worth was not worth the truth.

Stevenson: There would be a lot of times

when the weight of all of this

would get to both of us.

You know, you keep hoping that this is going to be the month

and we'd get a ruling, and it wasn't the ruling we needed.

And I just think your capacity to maintain hope

in the face of such irrational resistance is challenged.

You know, there would be days when he'd say,

"I just don't know how much longer I can do this."

And year after year went by.

Bright: There's a huge difference between law and justice.

Law says that if a person misses a deadline by a day,

even though it's an innocent mistake,

that person is gonna be denied any relief in the court.

That's not justice.

Justice would say: Let's look and see what happened

and do the right thing.

Susskind: The most difficult thing, at least for me,

is, I can file motions, I can appeal losses,

I can challenge your conviction, challenge your sentence.

That's what I have to offer as a lawyer.

But then ultimately no court agrees with you

that there's an injustice in the case

and your client gets executed.

It actually happened to three of my clients in a row,

all within a one-year period.

You want to just lean out the window and scream,

"Does anyone see what's happening here?"

Stevenson: In 2009,

we got involved in a case of a man

who didn't have a lawyer,

who was scheduled to be executed in 30 days.

This was after the court had ruled, in Atkins vs. Virginia,

that you can't execute the intellectually disabled.

And it turned out this man did suffer from intellectual disability.

So I went to the trial court and said,

"You can't execute him." But the trial court said,

"Too late, somebody should have raised that years ago."

I went to the state court, they said, "Too late."

The appeals court said, "Too late."

The federal court said, "Too late."

We got to the day of the execution

and I was waiting on a ruling

from the United States Supreme Court.

Finally the call came,

and the ruling was that our motion for a stay of execution

was due to be denied.

And I then had to do the hardest thing I do in my job.

I got on the phone and I told this man,

"I'm so sorry,

but I can't stop this execution."

And then the man did the thing

that I dread the most in my work:

He started to cry.

And then he tried to say something to me,

but in addition to being intellectually disabled,

he had a speech impediment and he began to stutter.

And in this moment, he kept trying to say something,

and he just couldn't get a word out.

And I didn't know what to say, I just was holding the phone.

And my mind began to wander...

and I remembered going to church one Sunday when I was a little boy.

My mom had taken me to church.

I remembered being in church talking to my friends

and seeing this little skinny kid I'd never seen before.

I asked that little boy, I said, "What's your name? Where are you from?"

And I remembered how that little boy also couldn't get his words out,

and he started to stutter.

And then I remembered: I laughed.

And my mom saw me laughing at this little boy

and she came over and she grabbed me by the arm

and she pulled me aside...

and she said, "Bryan, don't you ever do that.

Now you go back over there and you tell that little boy you're sorry.

After you tell that little boy you're sorry,

I want you to hug that little boy.

After you hug that little boy,

I want you to tell that little boy you love him."

And on the night of this execution what I remembered

was walking over to this little boy and saying,

"Look, man, you know, well, you know, I'm sorry."

And then I remember lunging at him

and giving him my little boy version of a man hug,

and then I remember trying to say to this child as insincerely as I possibly could,

I said, "Look, man, you know, you know, I don't know, well, you know, well, um, I love you."

And what I'd forgotten was how that little boy hugged me back.

And then I remembered how he whispered flawlessly in my ear, he said,

"I love you too."

I was holding the phone, and tears were running down my face.

Finally, my client got his words out.

He said, "Mr. Stevenson, I want to thank you for representing me."

And then he said, "I want to thank you for fighting for me."

And the last thing that man said to me, he said,

"Mr. Stevenson, I love you for trying to save my life."

He hung up the phone, they pulled him away,

they strapped him to a gurney, and they executed him.

I hung up the phone and I said, "I can't do this anymore."

I was sitting there in agony

thinking about why I do what I do.

I kept thinking about how broken he was.

My clients have been broken by poverty, broken by disability,

broken by trauma, broken by bias and discrimination.

But what I realized that night

that I had never realized before,

is that I do what I do because I'm broken too.

Stevenson: People sometimes say to me,

"Oh, it must be overwhelming and difficult

to represent people on death row,

to be fighting against the system,"

and it is.

The truth is that if you stand next to the condemned,

if you fight for the poor,

if you push against systems that are rooted and heavy,

if you keep pushing and you keep fighting

and you keep doing, you're going to get broken.

What I realized is that I am part of the broken community.

And when you realize that, you don't have a choice

in standing up for the rights of the other broken.

And so when I feel overwhelmed, I go into the conference room

and I look out the window and I think about the people

who were working here 60 years ago

trying to just create more justice.

Sometimes I go to Dexter, Dr. King's church.

We're at the heart, even the birthplace,

of the modern civil rights movement.

( applause on archive footage )

Stevenson: And the images that we like to show of Dr. King

are him giving these brilliant speeches

about the moral arc of the universe.

But the image that I think best captures his courage

is the image of him in a Montgomery police station

with his arm being pulled violently behind his back,

where he's being arrested because he has organized

a protest against racial segregation.

Martin Luther King Jr.: Just the other day,

one of the fine citizens of our community, Mrs. Rosa Parks,

was arrested because she refused to give up her seat

for a white passenger.

Stevenson: When you look at our history when it comes to race,

order is a defining characteristic.

Every time it seems that people of color

have some moment of progress,

there is a reaction against that,

and the reaction is usually to criminalize

and use the criminal justice system to reshape,

redefine what's just happened.

So when people start protesting, what do we do? We call them criminals.

Dr. King is convicted of a crime

for organizing the Montgomery bus boycott.

That frame is a constant frame in American history.

That's what gave rise to convict leasing.

What happened in the 1870s when Reconstruction collapses,

is that states immediately began criminalizing

all kinds of conduct by black people

that they would never criminalize for white people.

Oh, if six black people are together after dark,

that's a crime.

If black people try to get a job without a letter

from their former slave owner, that's a crime.

They start arresting people of color

and convicting them of these made-up crimes,

and they were leased to commercial entities.

It was a new kind of enslavement.

The label "slave" is replaced with the label "criminal."

But it created the same ability

to oppress and to control.

Using crime and criminality

has been an effective tool throughout.

So, in the 1950s and '60s,

when people start protesting and marching,

they're criminalized.

And it is the criminal justice system,

it is those who wear uniforms,

that become the foot soldiers

of this effort to sustain racial inequality.

President Richard Nixon: When the nation with the greatest tradition

of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness,

then it's time for new leadership

for the United States of America!

( crowd cheering )

( sirens wailing )

Stevenson: When Richard Nixon claims power,

he uses the same trope:

"We've got to have law and order."

Nixon: And to those who say that law and order

is a code word for racism,

our goal is justice-- justice for every American.

My car hasn't been involved in no burglary.

Stevenson: As we move into the 1970s,

everybody is talking about getting tough on crime,

and we commit now to build

a new institution that will operate that control,

and we're gonna call it mass incarceration.

And the prison population begins to grow.

We go from 300,000 in 1972

to 2.3 million today.

We become the society with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

We've allowed the criminal justice system to be the repository

of what we do with our rage, our anger, our frustration,

when we've had moments of progress

with regard to civil rights and racial justice.

We do it to everybody. We do it to women.

The percentage of women going to jails and prisons

has increased 646% over the last 25 years.

We do it to children.

We began lowering the minimum age

for trying children as adults.

We did it to the mentally ill, people with disabilities.

We spent $6 billion on jails and prisons in 1980,

$80 billion last year.

And the people who profit from that industry

have a perverse incentive to make sure no one is released.

And the more people we incarcerate,

the more money they make.

And it's not unlike the economic dynamic

that allowed us to keep enslaving people.

It's the reason why this statistic

about one in three black male babies

going to jail or prison

is an indictment on this country

and our failure to recognize this historical legacy.

Stevenson: My grandparents were from Caroline County, Virginia.

But in the early 20th century,

they, along with lots of other black people,

went north, and ended up in Philadelphia,

and that's where my mother was raised.

My grandfather ended up living in the projects

in South Philadelphia,

and when he was 86 years old,

some young kids broke in and tried to steal his TV,

and he said "No," and he was stabbed to death,

he was a murder victim.

I was 16 years old.

I saw the pain and anguish that created in our family.

The question we asked was: "Why? Why did this happen?

Why would these young kids act like that?"

When I go into poor communities and I sit down with young boys

and I try to have an honest conversation with them,

they'll say, "Mr. Stevenson,

I know I'm gonna be in prison by the time I'm 21."

'Cause they're living in communities where

80% of the young men of color end up in jail or prison.

And so they say to me, "Mr. Stevenson, I've got to go out here

and get mine while I can."

But a bigger question is,

why was my grandfather in South Philadelphia

living in the projects in his mid-80s?

And that has a lot to do with this history.

It has a lot to do with that era of lynching.

It's why 6 million black people fled the American South

in the first half of the 20th century

in one of the largest mass migrations in world history.

The black people in Cleveland, the black people in Chicago,

the black people in Detroit, in Los Angeles,

in Philadelphia, in Boston, in New York,

came to these communities as refugees and exiles from terror

in the American South.

( onlookers shouting )

Stevenson: Those communities have never been given

the opportunity to recover

in the way that I think they should.

And that creates conditions today

that are very problematic.

What's happening to too many of our children in these communities

where people fled from violence and terror

is that they're still being terrorized.

Yeah, no guns this time.

Stevenson: They live in violent neighborhoods,

they go to violent schools,

and by the time they're five,

they actually have a trauma disorder.

Threat and menace becomes a defining reality in the lives of these children,

and when you're constantly dealing with that year after year after year,

at the age of eight if somebody comes to you and says,

"Hey, I got a drug, why don't you try this?"

And for the first time in your life you have three hours

where you don't feel threatened and menaced, what do you want?

You want more of that drug.

And if somebody at 10 or 11 says,

"Hey, man, why don't you join our gang,

we're gonna help you fight all of these forces

that are threatening and menacing you,

and you say, "Yeah,"

instead of seeing that choice

as a choice that that's a bad kid,

we ought to see that choice as a choice of a larger problem.

We've got 13 states in this country

with no minimum age for trying a child as an adult.

I've represented nine- and ten-year-old kids

facing 60- and 70-year prison sentences.

We started putting 13-year-old children in prison

with sentences of life imprisonment without parole,

we've condemned them to die at 13 and 14.

Sanneh: I came to this work through the death penalty,

and so I think I felt

that I emotionally was prepared for anything.

One of the first cases I worked on

with a young teenager,

I went and drove to a county jail

after hearing from a relative

that they had a nephew who'd been arrested,

charged with a felony and was being held in the adult prison.

I got there,

and there was this 14-year-old African American kid

in the hallway

chained to a pole

in an enormous orange jumpsuit

that was so big for him it was completely covering his hands.

And I remember just the sight of all these people

coming and going around him...

just completely unaffected by that.

It's the first time I remember being in a prison

and really having to dig my nails into myself

to prevent myself from crying.

Stevenson: In 2005, a case called Roper vs. Simmons,

the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for children.

Alabama had one of the largest

juvenile populations on death row,

that when that decision came down,

we started talking with them about the fact

that they weren't going to be executed.

I think some of us expected joy and relief,

but what we got instead was,

"I'm just getting a different kind of death sentence.

I'm going to die in prison through incarceration

rather than execution."

It made us start to think more critically

about the propriety of a death-in-prison sentence

for any child.

We impose life without parole on people we think will never change,

are beyond redemption and hope.

All children change. They grow.

And to condemn them at any point

during that process seems unfair.

Newscaster 1: The Supreme Court heard arguments today

about the propriety of imposing life sentences

on some of the country's youngest criminals

for crimes that do not involve murder.

Do they belong behind bars forever?

Or should they have a chance, someday, at freedom?

Newscaster 2: The cases before the court today were both from Florida,

a defendant who was 13 when he raped a 72-year-old woman

and a 16-year-old who committed armed burglary and assault.

We're very hopeful that we can create the kind of jurisprudence

that sentences children rationally and appropriately,

and we concede that some kids are gonna have to be punished,

and have to be sent to prison,

but we don't believe that any child,

particularly a child of 13,

should ever be condemned to die in prison.

And we'll wait to see what the court says.

What about the argument that you don't know

what the child's going to become?

Well, I think that's right, we don't know,

but we do know that when we intervene with children

our chance of success is so much greater

than when we intervene with adults.

Which is why we shouldn't condemn children

in the way that we condemn adults.

My brother colleague is here,

I'll turn things over to him at this point.

Bright: One of Bryan's great gifts

is to be able to see how you can take one body of law

and apply it somewhere else.

He used the death penalty law

and he started challenging these life-without-parole sentencings for children,

that that no matter what somebody does,

you have to take into account their youthfulness,

their lack of maturity, lack of judgement,

and all those things,

in trying to come up with a sentence

that's proportionate to the crime.

Stevenson: We challenged life without parole

for kids who had been convicted of non-homicide offenses.

And then we challenged mandatory life-without-parole sentences for any child,

where the court doesn't even consider the fact

that we're talking about a 15-year-old or 16-year-old

or 17-year-old.

And we won these cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

To punish people constitutionally

we have to be committed to fairness,

we have to be committed to reliability,

and we have to be committed to punishments that are humane.

Because how we punish,

how we treat the disfavored,

the marginalized, the poor,

the condemned, the incarcerated,

doesn't just say something about them;

it says something about us too.

I really believe it's the broken among us

that can teach us the way compassion is supposed to work.

It's the broken that can teach us

the way mercy is supposed to work.

It's the broken that can show us

the power of redemption and justice.

- ( camera shutters clicking ) - ( reporters clamoring )

Ray! Ray!

( wailing )

- Oh, my God! - Ray!

Oh, I love you so much!

Oh, my God, Ray!

Oh! ( sobbing )

Oh, Lord. Thank you, Jesus!

Oh, Ray, I love you.

Oh, Lord.

( sobbing )

We wanna thank all of y'all for bein' here.

This is a very, very happy day.

It's a tragic day too, because Mr. Hinton has spent 30 years locked in a five-by-eight cell

where the State of Alabama tried to kill him every day.

His case, in my judgement, is a case study

in what's wrong with our system.

He was convicted because he's poor.

We have a system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty

than if you're poor and innocent, and his case proves it.

We have a system that is compromised by racial bias, and his case proved it.

We have a system that doesn't do the right thing

when the right thing is apparent.

A prosecutor should have done these tests years ago,

and they didn't, and that's a shame.

Hinton: One day Bryan came to the prison.

He said, "Ray, the judges in Alabama...

just not gonna do the right thing.

I want to take your case

to the United States Supreme Court."

Two years later, the United States Supreme Court

did something that it had never done

in the history of the court:

All nine judges ruled that I was entitled to a new trial.

( cameras clicking, onlookers chattering )

Stevenson: Right before Mr. Hinton was released,

we were talking.

He was telling me, "I can't hate people.

I don't want to stay in a prison when I leave here."

He said, "It's gonna be hard,

but I think I've actually decided

that I'm going to forgive."

Hinton: Every day I have to live with the fact

that I lost 30 years of my life.

The system, some people would say,

"It worked because you got out."

And to those people I say,

"If the system had worked, I never would've went in."

Lester Bailey: To the west and to the east,

to the north and to the south...

Hinton: I'm not so much worried about the system

as I'm worryin' about the people that control the system.

Preacher: What I want to use for a subject this morning is,

bad things happen to good people.

- Amen. - Bad things happen to good people.

Hinton: Nobody in the state of Alabama,

governor, lieutenant governor,

senators...

have had the decency to say,

"Mr. Hinton, we're sorry."

I truly don't want to believe

that they haven't apologized

because of the color of my skin.

I guess men of power

feel that they don't have to apologize

to a man of no power.

( water running, dishes clattering )

Stevenson: We've got a political culture where our politicians think

that if they say "I'm sorry," that makes them look weak.

I actually think being willing to say "I'm sorry"

when you've made a mistake

is how you become strong.

You show me two people who have been in love for 50 years,

I'll show you two people who have learned how to apologize to one another,

to navigate the hardships, the complexities,

to show humility when they offend.

And I don't think we've done much thinking about that

in this country.

I feel like we haven't learned collectively to apologize.

And when I think about the courts,

I don't think that they're excluded.

I think the United States Supreme Court should apologize

for its role, its complicity,

in fostering a society that has excluded,

marginalized and brutalized

people of color for two centuries.

I still believe in the rule of law.

I just have come to recognize that we're not going to achieve the justice that we need,

the equality we seek, if we stay in the courts alone.

The people with power are unwilling to get proximate.

They won't do uncomfortable things.

( chatter )

I remember when I was a little boy,

my grandmother would come up to me

and she'd give me these hugs

and she'd squeeze me so tightly

I thought she was trying to hurt me.

My grandmother would see me an hour later and she'd say,

"Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?"

And if I said no, she would jump on me again.

She wanted me to understand

what proximity can mean, how it can empower you.

My grandmother was an expert

in fostering reflection.

And because she was the daughter of enslaved people,

she understood the power of narrative.

Her father would talk to her every day about what he went through as an enslaved person.

And she had these various strategies and tactics

for getting me to understand things.

One of the things she did when I was younger,

she said, "We're gonna go to Bowling Green, Virginia."

She said, "Bring your best suit."

We got down there, it was the middle of the summer, a hot day.

We start walking down this dirt road.

I said, "Mama, where are we going?"

She said, "Don't worry."

We got to this field

and there was a shack in the middle of the field.

She said, "We're gonna go inside this shack,"

and when we go inside this shack,

you're gonna hear something." I said, "OK."

I was standing in there, and I couldn't hear anything.

And then I noticed that my grandmother was crying.

I'd never seen her cry before.

And when she started crying, I started crying.

She squeezed my hand and she said, "Stop crying."

I said, "But I didn't hear anything."

She said, "Yes, you did."

I said, "No, Mama, I didn't hear anything." She said, "Yes, you did."

I moved to Montgomery in part

because that's where the courts were.

At the time when I moved here,

I didn't know about the history of the slave trade.

This was a community

shaped by slavery...

and when I started realizing that,

things began to change.

I'll sometimes walk down to the river,

which was a portal for the domestic slave trade.

And I was sitting down there one day

thinking about my grandmother.

That shack was the slave cabin where her father was born.

And all of a sudden, sitting there,

it felt like I could hear the sounds of enslaved people coming into that river.

And I understood what my grandmother was teaching me.

I can hear it.

When I go into jails and prisons, there's a sound.

And it's the sound of suffering.

It's the sound of agony. It's the sound of misery.

And when you hear that misery,

when you understand that, it will push you to do things

that you won't otherwise be able to do.

There's a history of untold cruelty

that hides in silence in this country.

And I think there are things we can hear in these spaces

that can motivate us.

( chatter )

Stevenson: We are so thrilled,

so thrilled that so many of you are here.

We think something really important has to happen in this country.

We think we've got to change the narrative

when it comes to race and racial inequality.

I don't believe that people who live in Alabama,

I don't think that people who live in America, are free.

We're going to ask you to do something brave today.

We're gonna ask you to go to lynching sites and bear witness.

We're gonna ask you to go to lynching sites

and recover a part of this history that has been hidden.

We're going to give you jars,

and we're going to ask you to go to these sites

and to put the soil in the jar

and to honor and remember

the lives of these victims lost.

When you go into these sites,

sometimes they're uncomfortable.

They're places that feel very desolate,

they're places that feel even a little menacing.

And so, it is in many ways

an act of courage and bravery to go back and do it.

( rain pattering )

Boy: On January 2nd, 1901,

a black man named Louis McAdams was lynched near Wilsonville.

Mr. McAdams had been accused

of attempting to murder a prominent white merchant.

The vast majority of documented lynch victims

never had a chance to stand trial

for their alleged crimes...

and like Mr. McAdams,

took the presumption of innocence with them to the grave.

Man: Be careful.

Stevenson: When we bring these jars of soil into a space like this

and we put them on display, we just make tangible,

we make visible, this history of terror and suffering,

and we would resurrect the lives of these people

who have been forgotten,

who were never honored, who were never protected.

When I see the jar, it tells its own story.

There's a variation in color,

down on the Gulf Coast, where its sandy and light,

in the Black Belt, where it's really dark and rich,

in the northern part, where the clay is red.

There's this geographic story,

but there's also a story about our history.

There's sweat in that soil,

the sweat of enslaved people;

there are the tears of people who suffered

when they were being brutalized and lynched;

there's the blood of these victims.

But there's also hope in that soil.

People say to me, "Why do you want to talk about all these bad things?

I don't want to hear about native genocide,

I don't want to hear about slavery,

I don't want to hear about lynching,

I don't want to hear about all that bad stuff."

I think there is a need for a cultural movement

that pushes us to remember more.

For me, it is about truth-telling

in a way that is designed to get us to remember.

And not just remember for memory's sake,

but get us to remember so that we can recover,

we can restore, we can fight, to claim a different future.

Stevenson: So, there are a few things

that we think have to happen in this country

that have not happened.

In South Africa, there was a recognition that after Apartheid

they could not recover without truth and reconciliation.

In Rwanda, there is a recognition that there won't be recovery

without truth and reconciliation.

If you go to Germany today,

you can't go 100 meters in Berlin, Germany,

without seeing markers or stones or things

that have been put in the ground to mark the places

where Jewish families were abducted

and taken to the concentration camps.

The Germans actually want you to go to Auschwitz

and reflect soberly on the history of the Holocaust.

In this country, we do the opposite.

Stevenson: We're living in a region where the landscape is littered

with the iconography of the Confederacy.

When I look around and I see

the iconography of the glory of enslavement

and the era of lynching,

I say we're not a very healthy place.

And a lot of it emerged in the 1950s,

when people are talking about civil rights.

Students ( chanting ): ...six, eight, we don't want to integrate!

Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate!

Stevenson: This cultural movement was designed

to make it feel like

it was every white person's duty

to fight against integration.

Why did you come out of school?

Because I'm not goin' to school with niggers.

Stevenson: I don't think we've done a very good job in this country

of understanding

how vast and intense

the opposition to civil rights was.

We don't want no niggers in school with us!

Stevenson: I think the civil rights community won the legal battle,

but the narrative battle was won by people

who were allowed to hold onto this view

that there are differences between people who are black and people who are white.

Stevenson: And that's why I think this narrative of racial difference

survived the civil rights era.

I think we have to pay attention to the narrative battle.

We've got to do better at creating a narrative

that pushes us into a new place.

I don't think we've created many places in America

where we tell the history of slavery

or the history of lynching, the history of segregation

in a way that motivates everybody--

black, white, brown, young, old--

to feel inspired to say, "Never again."

And that's the genesis behind this effort

that we're now engaged in

to build a memorial and to build a museum.

Stevenson: We divide the museum into eras.

You have Era One, which is on slavery,

Era Two, which is on lynching,

Era Three, which is on segregation,

and Era Four on mass incarceration.

We call this a narrative museum

because on this wall we actually present a thesis,

a story, about the history of racial inequality in America.

Stevenson: I want there to be repair in this country

not just for communities of color

that have been victimized by bigotry and discrimination,

I want it to be for all of us.

I don't think we can get free

until we're willing to tell the truth about our history.

I do believe in truth and reconciliation,

I just think that truth and reconciliation is sequential,

that you can't have the reconciliation without the truth.

I feel like we're doing something important in Montgomery.

It is a place where, if we can show

that truth can set us free...

that means we can probably do it anywhere.

( indistinct chatter )

Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey!

( laughter, chatter )

Stevenson: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Stevenson: You know, my grandmother died when I was college,

it was before I made any decision to go to law school.

And I think if my grandmother gave me anything,

she gave me the confidence to believe things I haven't seen.

I'd never met a lawyer before,

I certainly never met a black lawyer before.

So I had to believe I could be one,

even though I had never seen one.

We had to believe we could create an institution that could help condemned prisoners

in a state that was very hostile to condemned prisoners.

We had to believe we could build a museum

and create a national memorial

that honors thousands of victims of lynchings,

even though there wasn't really precedent for that.

( crowd applauding, cheering )

Stevenson: Tonight we are taking this broken history,

this denial of inequality and injustice,

and we're trying to do something with it.

Montgomery is not a perfect place, it's a broken place,

because we haven't done all the things we need to do to get to justice.

But I am persuaded tonight that we can do it.

And tonight I want you to join us in making

the beginning of this movement, this legacy museum,

this memorial for peace and justice,

more than a monument, more than a statue, more than a place.

We want you to help us make it a movement.

We want to create something that is lasting and changing,

and we believe tonight that if we believe in freedom,

if we believe in love,

we can create a more just society.

I want to thank all of you

for being with us, standing with us,

fighting for us, but mostly, staying with us,

as we try to create a better tomorrow.

Stevenson: God, we want every heart, every spirit,

every mind, every soul that walks through this place

to remember.

But we don't want them to just remember,

we want them to be inspired, we want them to have hope,

we want them to have courage,

we want them to have faith.

When they leave this place, we want grace

and mercy and love to order their steps.

Thank you,

God bless you,

please be with us always.

( all applauding )

Stevenson: We have a monument for every county in America

where a lynching took place.

And we have a replica of each of those monuments

at the memorial site.

And we're asking communities to organize

and come and claim their monument

and bring it back to their community.

There are hundreds of lynchings

where thousands of people were complicit, were involved.

Those lynchings represent a particular need

for communities to say more, to do more,

to memorialize these spots,

to commit to protecting themselves

from that legacy perpetuating racial bias for another generation.

I believe we're all more

than the worst thing we've ever done.

We are a slave state, but we're more than slavers.

We are a lynching state, but we're more than lynchers.

We're a segregation state, but that's not all we are.

The other things we are

create an opportunity to do things that are restorative,

that are rehabilitative, that are redemptive,

that create possibilities of reconciliation and repair.

I get frustrated when I hear people talk about how

"If I had been living during the time of slavery,

of course I would have been an abolitionist."

And most people think that if they had been living when mobs were gathering

to lynch black people on the courthouse lawn,

they would have said something.

Everybody imagines that if they were in Alabama in the 1960s

they would have been marching with Dr. King.

And the truth of it is,

I don't think you can claim that

if today you are watching these systems be created

that are incarcerating millions of people,

throwing away the lives of millions of people,

destroying communities, and you're doing nothing.

I think there's something better

waiting for us in this country

than another century of conflict and tension

and burden, because we won't face the legacy of our past.

I think it's important that we understand

all the brutal, all the ugly details,

because those are the things that actually give rise

to what might allow us to one day claim something really beautiful.

♪ We've been 'buked ♪

♪ And we've been scorned ♪

♪ We been talked about ♪

♪ Sure as you' born ♪

♪ But we'll never ♪

♪ Turn back ♪

♪ No, we'll never ♪

♪ Turn back ♪

♪ Until we've all ♪

♪ Been freed ♪

♪ And we have ♪

♪ Equality ♪

♪ We have hung ♪

♪ Our heads ♪

♪ And cried ♪

♪ For all those ♪

♪ Like Lee ♪

♪ Who died ♪

♪ Died for you ♪

♪ And died for me ♪

♪ Died for the cause ♪

♪ Of equality ♪

♪ But we'll never ♪

♪ Turn back ♪

♪ No, we'll never ♪

♪ Turn back ♪

♪ Until we've all ♪

♪ Been freed ♪

♪ And we have ♪

♪ Equality ♪

♪ And we have ♪

♪ Equality ♪