Bryan Stevenson Wants 'Equal Justice'

Published Feb 16, 2015, 5:00 AM

From 1877 to 1950, nearly 4,000 black people were lynched in the United States. Bryan Stevenson says these stories aren't part of the collective historical memory of most Americans, but they should be. Stevenson is the founder and director of the Equal Justice Institute, an Alabama-based non-profit that fights for retrials, death-sentence reversals, and exoneration in the face of racially-charged legal practices and policies.

The Equal Justice Institute's report about lynching, recently detailed in The New York Times, is one piece of Stevenson's work focused on "confronting the legacy of racial terror"—a legacy that is directly observable today in the record numbers of incarcerated black men and boys. In this episode of Here's The Thing, Stevenson tells host Alec Baldwin that he believes the history of slavery and violence needs to be radically acknowledged and addressed if Americans are to achieve the promise of an equal society.

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. A recent New Yorker magazine article told the story of Chanelle Jackson and Alabama jury found Jackson guilty of murder old Twelve jurors voted against sending him to the electric chair, but Alabama is one of three states where a judge can override the jury's decision, and the judge, who was up for re election that year, did just that. Chanel Jackson was sentenced to death. Eventually, Jackson acquired a new lawyer, Brian Stephenson, who is my guest today. Evenson is founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and Alabama based nonprofit that fights for retrials, death sentence reversals, and exonerations. Stevenson is a fierce opponent of judicial override and works against the penalty system. He says is defined by error, bias, and unreliability. Our sentences for virtually every offense are way way out of control. It's not just the death penalty in life without parole. It's ten years for simple possession of marijuana. It's you know, fifteen years for writing a bad check. It's all of that stuff. And I absolutely believe that people saw what I saw. They could not be comfortable, they could not be siglent, they could not continue doing what we're doing without having to do something. I don't think there's been a time in our American history where there are more innocent people in jails and prisons than right now. You know, we have this tremendous prison increase. Three people in nineteen seventy two, two point three million today. There's no way to avoid the fact that whatever the proportion of innocent people that are being wrongly convicted, and it's high because of this increase in the number of people being sent to prison, We've never had as many innocent people in jails and prisons than we have today. And people read about innocent people getting out for the first time. The Innocence Project and DNA is something the important work all of those folks, but it's a fraction of the innocence population. They're dealing with, just that small, very small group of people whose crimes allow for biological evidence that can be tested which will exonerate them. That's a two of the innocent population, and it will haunt you. I've been representing a man named Anthony ray Hinton. So this is a case of a man who in was accused of two different murders. There were three fast food robberies in Birmingham and the police couldn't figure out who did it. They collected the bullets. They thought that the bullets might have been fired from the same weapon. And the third crime, the witness didn't die. The victim didn't die, and he went through a photo lineup and he picked out this guy, Anthony bray Hinton, who had no prior history of violent crimes. So they go to his mother's house. They find an old gun and they test the gun. They said, well, this is the gun that produced all these bullets, and based on that, they charge him with all of the murders. He goes to trial. He says, wait a minute, I have a lock solid alibi. I was fifteen miles away in a warehouse at the time of this third crime, and there's twenty people who can confirm that he was there. But now they're locked in to him. So they're not going to kind of be dissuaded by that. They put on their experts who say, yeah, this is the gun that fired all of these bullets. Because he's poor, he didn't have any money for a good weapons expert, so his lawyer had to get a civil engineer who never testified in this kind of case, who was blind in one eye, who couldn't actually turn on the machine, who has literally laughed off the stin convicted, sentenced to death, he's been on death row for twenty eight years, fifteen years ago. We get involved, we get the best experts in the country. They all say, no way in the world this gun produced these ros. Well, the state says, we're not going to back down, and they says, well, we don't have an answer to what these experts are saying, but we've got a conviction in the death sentence and we're just going to run with that, and every cours more expedient for them, and it's more effective and politically because if they have to say, you know what, we made a mistake, then people start to ask questions. In the article in the Channel Jackson case, you read about how all these judges who are running for office absolutely and we're getting contributions from prosecutors who are trying cases before everybody toughens up about the law that they almost act in a different ways. Absolutely, we have elected judges. They run as partisan and partisan elections. You run as a Democrat or a Republican and you campaign on your toughness. And so to actually acknowledge that there's a problem with the death punty suggests that the death penalty isn't a reliable It creates a political vulnerability. We've been litigating for fifteen years. So just last year February, we got the United States Supreme Court to overturn the conviction. And I'm now kind of each day trying to get this man out of prison. But it wakes me up at it just so burdened me. And the thing I just went to see this client last week, Mr twenty eight years you know, and this he's a remarkable person. But when when also knowing that by admitting they were wrong, how much they would win? Yeah, absolutely, as you wind up having the purity and the dignity of the office elevated by them. You know, sometimes we make mistakes. I'm really sorry I've made that argument. Let's give this guy a couple of million bucks to live his life in the remaining years of his life, and at this point we would just take freedom. But I've made that argument to every attorney general since I said, look, if you said, did you almost gain any ground with any of them? Were some of them close? They were all the same. They all acted at the first conversation like, oh, yeah, that's a good point. But when they thought about it more and they got into that political context, they all retreated. But I've said to each of them, if you say, we even evaluated this case and we've concluded that this one is innocent, you gain credibility. Your ability to kind of do the stuff is actually enhanced. But they can't even do that, and so yes, that will haunt you. Is there's something about the d NA no pun intended of the prosecutors mistake? Well, I do. I think throughout our country we've been acculturated into believing that you never back down, you never never absolutely, and I think actually as a country that's our biggest problem. We have become unwilling to acknowledge that we make mistakes. What we do is tell people around the world how great we are. That's right, and that arrogance actually sets us up for the kind of conflicts that then follows. You know, this whole work we're doing on race and poverty is actually rooted at trying to persuade America that actually we need to just own up to all of the terrible things we've done and have a conversation about it. Be truthful to have an almost South African reconciliation. Absolutely, that's what we're trying to do. Actually, we've been doing this stuff on slavery. We're about to issue this report on lynching, which dominated from the end of reconstruction into World War Two. My whole view is that, you know, if you come to the South, we like to romanticize the mid nineteenth century, put up all these Confederate mon mento memorials, And the truth of it is, in America and we were in a society with slavery, we became a slave society. We actually created a myth and ideology that allowed slavery to be defensible. These people of color are different, they're not as smart, they don't work as hard, blah blah blah, and the Thirteenth Amendment didn't do anything to address that myth. And in that respect, slavery didn't end, it evolved, it turned into something else, and we had decades of terrorism. And these older people come up to me because they get angry when people start talking about nine eleven is the first time we're dealing with terrorism, because they feel implicated by that. They said, we grew up with terrorism, We had to worry about being lynched and bombed and threatened, and that legacy terrorism, if it's against someone else, that's exactly right, and that legacy we're doing in other countries is in terrible all right, exactly, and we haven't actually recognized our capacity to actually engage in terrorism. And I want to be very careful. I've learned to be hyper careful about these things because if this goes out over the year, I don't want people to the street. I'm not saying every act of the U. S Military and the soldier is an act of terrorist. I'm just saying there are things that resemble terrorists. And I never blamed the soldiers that the government has ordered done well, it's just our attention to where the lines are. If we're thinking about where the lines are and recognizing that we can go pass those lines, if we're not paying attention to those lines. That's all we're trying to talk about here. And there's no question that lynchings were terrorism. Public spectacle lynchings in the nineteen hundreds, in the early part of the twentieth century were terrorism, and they sent thousands millions of African Americans into communities like New York and Boston and Chicago and Detroit, in Oakland and Los Angeles, not as people looking for opportunities, but as exiles and refugees from terror. And that legacy of being terrorized by oh I absolutely do shape the way these communities emerged. And we never kind of talked about it. You couldn't get Congress to actually pass an anti lynching law because the Suntherners were saying, no, we will not back down from this. And even during the Civil rights movement, and this is part of where I get in trouble because I'm a little provoked by how all we want to do when we talk about the nineteen forty and fifties and sixties is celebrate the civil rights movement, to celebrate the progress that we made and free it. If everybody gets to celebrate, there are no qualifying questions that you have to add answer before you get to participate, and we've reduced it almost to this kind of three day event where Rosa Parks gives up her seat on the first day. Dr King leads a march on Washington on the second day, and then we pass all these laws on the third day. And it provokes me because we're ignoring the decades of damage that we did to everybody by humiliating people of color every day of their life. I grew up in a community where I saw my parents humiliated every day of their life. The damage we did in southern Delaware on the Eastern Shore, where the movie theaters were segregated, where the schools were second, I started my what did you see, Well, I started my education in a colored school. I would drive past the Milton Public School and see all the white kids going to this big, beautiful brick building, and then we would go into this shack and I would go to the beach. Where are the best parts of the beach. We couldn't go to because they were racially segregated. I didn't like movies when I was a kid, caring in the sixties. Yeah, I didn't like movies because you had to sit in the back. It was such a humiliating experience. And then after integration with the schools, I'd see my friends, but I couldn't be with them in some of these other spaces until there was complete desegregation, and it hurts. I used to get mad at my parents for not taking me to town because we lived out in the country there's nothing to do, but they didn't want me to go with them in town because they didn't want me to see them humiliated by any white person that they encountered. And it accumulates these injuries, this burden, this problem, and we haven't talked about it. And even for white people, a generation of whom were taught that they are better than other people because of their skin color, we haven't helped them recover from that lie because we just tried to play it off. And we needed truth and reconciliation after nine and we didn't do it. And because of that, we've now set ourselves up for the conflicts and controversies that were still experiencing, where the police are the face of this racial order, and this presumption of guilt haunts us and follows all these young people called. The Bureau of Justice is now reporting that one in three black male babies born in the twenty one century is expected to go to jail or prison. That wasn't during the twentieth century, wasn't during the nineteenth century. It became it's only getting worse, and it's well, I think it's because we've never confronted this presumption of guilt, which is a result well, I think it's a result of this racial narrative that has existed for so long that we're not actually proactively trying to do that. So there were many people who, first of all, I'm gonna use some phrases I'm not really comfortable with, because when you hear people say let's continue the conversation, let's be part of the it makes me want to vomit because I'm sick of convert We've had quite a bit too much conversation action. But my point is to to borrow those words, you know, in the conversation, if you will. A lot of people assuming there were saying, let's let's take race out of this now. If you if you notice something like my criticisms of Obama have nothing to do with race. But but you come roaring in with with the with the racial question, you can't. It is a defining feature of American life. It has so kind of compromised. But you tag, but do you think it's changed? And I will tell you what, tell you why. To me, America was always the big table. There was bounty at the table, and there were jobs. And this is a metaphor for the jobs and the money and the housing and the lifestyle and the cars and the vacations. And over the last fifty years, there's less seats at the table. And now there's still more seats at this table, and it's still a great table. That the trick became in order to keep the critical massive American satisfied. We had to make sure that a lot of people didn't even get near the table. And I thinks about economics, it's not about race. Well, I believe that racism has has metastasized into really what is an economic question? We were going to use color as an excuse to keep you off the playing field and keep you from competing because there's not enough at the seats at the table anymore. Well, I don't think we can separate race and economics. I mean the slavery about the economic viability of this new generational people would come to this great Land and how to make it profitable. And we got people enslaved here, not because we thought we were doing something proactive to help Africans, but because we had these economic needs, We had these labor needs. And the same is true in post reconstruction. You know, Convict Leasing and Jim Crow and all of these institutions were about helping people stay profitable, helping them stay secure. And even the nineties and fifties and sixties it had these social features, but there were real economic tensions there. So I think for people of color and poor people, they were always in another room too. When we talk about that table, we let some people of color get in there enough to take this exactly, but it's always been this still in their absolutely. To get back to this point I'm making, and that is that I believe that there's two hierarchies here. One is people in power politically, and then there's the uh, the power of the masses of people who I mean, to me, my daughter, my eldest daughter, has grown up since nineteen in a wash intolerance and cultural equality. These are kids who they know the name of Kanye West's baby, and they don't know who their senator is, and a celebration of all things black in culture, fashion, They worship Beyonce. They are completely color blind black, white, music, sports, culture, what have you. They worship and they don't and they don't see that, and yet still more black people are going to prison. Well that's where's that disconnect. Well, I think it's because it's become culturally complicated, but I don't think the fundamentals have really changed. I go to a gym in Alabama where I see these young guys firefighters, police officers that I used to go to. Different I mean, it's a different time. I don't go to that gym anymore. But these young white guys who are listening to rap artists, they're listening to Kanye, they're listening to Beyonce, but they have Confederate American tattoos. And when they enforce when they work as police officers and they see young black men, they presume they're guilty, they presume they dangerous, they presume that they're up to something, and they target them and they've victimized them. At the same time that they are persuaded that they couldn't possibly be racially biased because they like Kanye and they like Beyonce. And that cultural narrative has always existed, right, people would go to the movies in the first half of the century and watch black performers acting roles that comforted them and feel like that somehow made them beyond race. But in truth, they bought into the same narrative of racial difference. They bought into the same idea that these uh, these barriers that kind of are are really condemning and condemned and and harp, you know, and just really disrupting the lodge of the poor, and people of color didn't have any implications for them. They didn't have to apologize for anything. And I think that reality is still there. And you know, you don't have to be an overt rate, you don't have to be bad, you can have all of these other things. You can even have good black friends and all this stuff. I'll tell your story. I was in a courtroom in the Midwest, just not not too long ago. It was it was actually a juvenile case, and was the first time I'd gone there. Was representing a young kid, a young white kid, asking when you say you're representing someone, how do they get you? Yeah, how does someone now? Ryan Stevenson twenty years ago was different. You can bring them up on the phone. How did they get you to show we we get hundreds of requests wedding well, we get hundreds of requests each week. We only represent a small portion of the people. But when we have a campaign, like when we were doing the juvenile work, trying to get the court to end life without parole sentences for kids, we were taking those cases and I took I want to stay active. I like being an active lawyer. So I took, you know, a small set of those and I would go to courts and went to South Dakota. I went to these states, Iowa, Indiana to do these hearings. I always have cases that I'm working on directly personally, even though there are much smaller subset than the people who request us. But I was in this courtroom in the Midwest, just getting ready for the hearing, had my suit on, had my shirt on, had my time, sitting at defense counsel's table. The judge walks in and he sees me sitting at defense counsel's table, followed by the prosecutor, and he looks over at me and he says, hey, hey, hey, you get out of here. I don't want any defendant sitting in my courtroom without their lawyers, you go back out there in the hallway and wait until your lawyer gets here. And I stood up and I said, oh, I'm sorry, your honor, I didn't introduce myself. My name is Brian Stevenson. I am the lawyer. And the judge starts laughing, and the prosecutor starts laughing, and I make myself laugh too, because I don't want to disadvantage my client. I'm laughing because I'm horrif it's horrifying. Right. Then the client comes in again, this young white kid. We do the hearing, but afterward, I'm sitting in my car and I thought to myself, what is it about this judge that when he sees a middle age black man in a suit sitting at defense counsel's table, he can't imagine that that's the lawyer. And is that going to manifest? What what state was that in? This was actually in Iowa. Judge wasn't a bad guy. We actually had a good outcome, but it's the way it was. The outcome. Well, we got the client of reduced sense. He was one of the people who didn't end up with life without parole. But it's the way I ever mentioned again. Nope, nope, make your hands for any kind of even implied apology. I don't even think he worried about it. It was just to even aware. No, it was just funny, you know. And the truth of it is, though, when that judge is imposing sentences on young definitive color, their race is shaping his comfort level with putting them in prison forever. It's impacting the way he thinks about their guilt and the propriety of these very harsh sentences. And he can go home and go have dinner with some nice African American woman or man, and he can listen to this music. But that narrative has not. We have to do something proactive to actually shield ourselves from acting on these biases that have been going on for decades. You can bet that Stevenson, who was currently a law professor at New York University, is educating his students on this particular bias. If you want to learn more about the prison system in the United States, take a listen to my conversation with Martin Horn, former New York City Commissioner of Correction and Probation. He recommends big changes for our society. I would legalize drugs across the board. You would really legalize which draft all of them. You would legalize all dress. I would sell it in the liquor stores, right, and I would tax the hell out of it. Find Martin Horn in the archives that here's the thing. Dot org. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. My guest is Brian Stephenson, who has argued six cases before the U. S. Supreme Court. In two thousand twelve, Stevenson gave a ted talk. He cited his grandmother as a big influence. He told a story of how one day, when he was nine, she took him aside and told him he wasn't like the other grandkids. He was special. She told him not to repeat their conversation and made him vow never to drink beer. When he was fourteen, his older brother offered him a beer, and Brian remembered his promise beer. I said, no, I don't feel right about that. You'll go ahead, y'all go ahead, And then my brother started staring at me. He said, what is what's wrong with you? Have some beer? Then he looked at me real hard. He said, Oh, I hope you're not still hung up on that conversation mama had with you. I said, well, what are you talking about? He says, Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special. Brian stuck with his grandmother. He still has never had a single drink. His TED talk has over two million views, and in the week after he gave it, Ted and the attendees of the talk pledged over one million dollars to Stevenson's organization, the Equal Justice Initiative. As a kid growing up in rural Delaware, Stevenson had no clue that any of this awaited him. I don't even have an awareness of what's possible for me. I'm just trying to get into school. Now what. Well, my dad was working in a food factory. You know. I had two siblings, an older brother thirteen months older and a sister eleven months younger. You know, we're just all crammed into this little space. I lived in this really poor world section chickens and pigs. People have outhouses. You know. We used to like using the outhouse because we thought it was cool. You yeah, it's it's at least adventure. You know, you got your water from a well, and we were just trying to find a way to kind of be seen, you know. So I went and played was a musician, playing in the church. Lots of time in church, because it was the one place where you could say things, You could actually speak in front of a group of people, you could be heard. There was this identity that you could have there that you couldn't have in town, where you had to be small and invisible. My grandmother was actually the daughter of people who were enslave. Her parents were born in Virginia in the eighteen forties. She was born in the eighteen eighties. And because her father learned to read quietly silently at the age of twelve and had to keep it a secret, he talked about slavery all the time with her, and she talked about it all the time with me, and so there was this kind of dull thing, and she kept saying, I need you to be smart. If you learn things, you can survive in ways that you can survive if you don't learn things. And so I became somebody interested in the world outside of my world because my grandmother the daughter of slaves. Yeah it was a drink, Yeah, that's right. That she has had a powerful influence on me. But that was my kind of beginnings, and so we desperately wanted to go to the public school. In fact, my mom was this kind of person who she would always answer any question you asked her. And if I said, Mom, what's that bright star in the sky tonight, she said, well, that's the star that's close to the moon. She wouldn't know the name of the planet or anything, but you'd always want you to feel like your questions have good answers. The one time I remembered her not answering my questions when we would drive past the Milton Public School and I'd take, what does the word public mean? And she bite her lip because you didn't want me to know how to be able to go in there, and that reality was very hurt. No, she didn't, and when we got to the school was all this kind of conflict. But eventually things settled down, and I just was so struck by the expectations of poor performance that I encountered the guidans count said, oh, we're gonna send you to votech We're gonna put you in the low section of this grade. And I had been doing reading Dr. Seuss My mom was one of these people bought books for us even though we couldn't afford them. But I felt like I was ready and I was provoked by it. So I wanted to prove people, no, I can do. So what happened, well, I did really well because I was when you're in the when you're in the environment you're in, when did you realize quote unquote you had it? Well, you know eventually because my mom, Yeah, exactly, I got put in the kind of the part of third and fourth and fifth. Yeah, the advanced track. Was the only black kid and then one or two of us that it was challenging. Were you learning even then how to be that? From that? Absolutely? I was what eight and you're the other? But you know, when it was time for you to stand up and recite your multiplication tables and all that kind of stuff, I wanted to be strong. I wanted to come where you go to high school. I went to the same public high school, Cape and Lopin high school. In that point you nailed that, well, yeah, because then you know, I felt like I had been on top of it. So I was doing, Yeah, that's where you go to college. So I went to Eastern College, which was a small private school outside of Philadelphia, and that was a very different world because it was just beautiful. There were lakes and rivers and streams, and I was studying philosophy. I'd go sit on these hillsides thinking all these deep thoughs, but I was still doing the sports and I wasn't drinking. And then that's right, and that's how I end up. So then when I'm a senior, somebody says, well, what are you going to do after you graduate? And that's when I realized, for the first time, nobody's going to pay me to philosophize who graduate? And I start yes. I started looking, and I realized, you can't do graduate work in history of political science unless you know something about history. You do I found law school because the truth is, I went to Harvard Laws. How did that happened? Well, because you didn't have to know any thing to go to law school. That was really my thinking, and that was the one thing would appeal to me exactly, and so I ended up there, but I hated it my first year. They were talking about torts and contracts, and they weren't talking about race, they weren't talking about poverty. They weren't even talking about just this race thing. Well, this is a quality thing. I felt like, Well, law means we can confront in just racism at Harvard. Oh yeah, I mean it was ae UM. Well, actually it was actually in Boston. I was, you know, I'd never been up there, and I was my first weekend there. I was walking in downtown Boston and the truck drove by me and said, and the guy said, he asked me a question, So, where's Roxbury. I didn't understand what he was asking, And he said, Where's Rocks? And I kept getting closer to him. When I got close to him, he said, go back to Roxbury, nigger. That was first weekend I was there. What about on the Harvard campus itself or in the classroom? You know, I was fairly insulated in the classroom. I was just trying to keep up. I didn't experience the kind of racial tensions that that I'd seen as a young kid. It wasn't that there were no people of color on the faculty, had no black law professors, but it was and it was difficult to have the conversations that I was interested in having. So I left after my first year and went to the School of Government, Kennedy School, thinking well, this will be a more appropriate forum for me to talk about poverty and race and inequality. And it was worse. They were teaching us to maximize benefits and minimize costs, and it didn't seem to matter whose benefits got maximized and whose costs got minimized. And so I left there, went back, and that's when I had this experience of going to the Deep South and working with this human rights organization providing legal services to people on death row. Everything changed. Organization it was called went right from Harvard to there, Yes, right from Harvard to Alabama. And I actually went there as a law student in the middle of my law school study to work for a month with this organization as a project, an internship with a Southern Center for Human Rights, and that's Southern Center for you, that in Birmingham in Atlanta, Georgia. And that's the first time I met somebody on death row. And it's that experien that changed everything. When I met this condemned person who was literally dying for legal help, was going to be executed because he couldn't find a lawyer. And to realize that even in my aignorance, even with my limited skills, that I could have an impact on the quality of his life and his chance of being alive and avoiding wrongful execution. It radicalized everything. Then when I got back to Harvard, it all mattered to me. I needed to understand civil procedure, in criminal procedure, and constitutional law. You couldn't keep me out of the law library because I needed to know all the things I needed. Absolutely, that's exactly right. And then everything changed and I left there, and I went to that organization and worked there four years before we started this project. Four years. Yeah, why didn't you stay there? Because Alabama was really from to Atlanta to Alabama. Most people the other well, Alabama was in crisis. The people executed in America were executed in Alabama. There was no public defender, there were no institutions providing legal services. So I went over to start this promotion. Shame, no shame at all. Now people were exploiting the absence of these resources. And the goal was to start this project and then go back to Atlanta. But we couldn't find the people we needed to make the project succeed. And one year turned into five, five, ten, ten, thirty, and here I am. Now you're a grown man. You're extremely successful, very admired, smart guy. But at the same time, emotion it's a part of this work. I mean, you know, how do you manage your feelings and how do you manage your emotions doing this kind of work? It must be tough. It is to what do you do? You know? I hateful? It is painful. I think you you just demand more, you keep fighting more. Um. You know, you have to have different metrics for how you evaluate what you're doing. You know. I I tell the story a lot. It's it's it's a guy taught me this. I was giving a talk in a church. Old guy in a wheelchair comes in sitting in the back. He's staring at me and older black man and I finished my talk. All the kids seem fine, but this older black man is just staring at me the whole time I'm talking. Hout is very angry look on his face. He's really distracting me. When the kids go, this man comes up to me and his wheelchair. He has a kid rolled him up to me and he gets in my face and he says, do you know what you're doing? And I look at him. I don't know how to respond, and I and he says it again. He says, do you know what you're doing? And I stepped back and I start mumbling something, and then he says to me, he says, you're beating the drum for justice. And then he says, you keep beating the drum for justice, and it moved me. He grabbed me by my jacket, pulled me into his chair, and he turned his head. He says, let me show you something, young man, and he says, you see this cut I have down here on the bottom of my neck because I got that cut in Green County, Alabama, nineteen three, trying to register people to vote. Then he turned his head and he says, you see this scar I got behind my ear. He said, I got that scar doing Freedom summer Philadelphia, Mississippi. He turned and said he said, you see this dark spot And he said I got that bruise during the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama. And then he looked at me. He says, people think I'm some old man in a wheelchair covered with cuts and bruises and scars. He said, I don't tell you something. He said, these aren't my cuts. These aren't my bruises, These aren't my scars, he said, these are my medals of honor. And that is in some ways the way we have to sometimes convert the pain into a cause, victory into victory, and you begin to realize that if you can beat the drum for justice with whatever you have in the face of that, there is a strengthening that comes with it, and then you feel empowered. You know, ultimately I'm not there yet. I want to when I kind of go out say I became a freeman because I resisted the things that I think bind us and burden us and enslave us and confine us and condemn us. And that's kind of a kind of a quest that makes you feel like, you know, I can keep doing this, and it's energizing in its own way. I'm gonna ask you a question, and I'm gonna give you my answer to want you to give me yours first, or if you could pick not one but among many, what would one be? What do you think we need to be doing now in this country or even in the state of Alabamas. What thing do we need to do? I think we actually really need to concertize the mistakes of the past and very visible way. I think what's going on in Germany right now is really instructive. You go to Germany and you are forced to confront the legacy of the Holocaust. You can't spend time there without being confronted with that. I'd like that to happen in this country. We want to put up markers and monuments at every lynching site in America. We think the South should be cluttered with reminders of what we did through enslavement. I think the civil rights narrative needs to change. We need to start talking about all the ways in which white people resisted this. What percentage of the legislature in Alabama is black? A very small percentage, and they have no power a percentage of the population, and no person of color can win any statewide office. We won't. We know, No, it's so INTI well they do. In fact, in fact, we just had one which was a ballid initiative to remove the apartheid language that still prohibits black and white kids from going to school together in Alabama. State Constitution of Alabama still prohibits black and white children from going to school together. They tried to remove it into thousand and four and the majority people said no, let's keep it in. They put it on the ballot in and even bigger majority said let's keep it in. And it speaks to the lack of shame. You think that is because people don't feel in any way implicated by that. They don't feel troubled by it, they don't feel a shame of they don't feel like that it does anything to cast upaul over who they are, and that absence of shame condemns they want to maintain something as ridiculous as let's leave language in our And did anybody who was a leader, political leader, or activists there who articulated in any way that defended why they needed to have that in there. Yeah, they would say, if we take this out, there might be a right to equal education. And if there's a right to equal education, then our texts might go up. There's always an economic rationale to defend oppression, always both or both, you know. But we can always come up with something that says, if we do this, it's gonna be problematic for us. Let me offer you my take, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart. The one thing that we need in this country right now is we need for people like you to run for office, because with real political power on the state level on the federal level, I don't think it very much done comparatively. But you should consider that if you don't mind my saying, no, I don't, and I respect that perspective. I do, and I do take it to heart because I know that it's a product of a lot of careful thinking. And I agree with you that the political process has been so compromised by people who enter it for all these other reasons. My big question is has it been compromised in a way that even visionary people can't be vision you are? I mean, that's the if I weren't practicing an attorney with a forum that I can sometimes manage to accomplish real change. I don't think there's any choice that I'd have to try to figure out how to do that. You don't have to answer this question, but I'm assuming it's public record. What's the budget of the organization down and now that it's this year is four million dollars, So it's four million bucks. And you have to run around like a derve or shoal over the country giving speeches amazing money yourself. That's right, and it's a lot of it's on you. Oh yeah, we don't have a development staff or anything like that. No, we it's a different model. We've just said, you know, we're not going to worry about it. We're gonna hopefully get what we need and we're gonna keep doing what we want to do. It's not the most uh, you know, financially thoughtful way of doing at it, but we've been able to do what we want to do. But yeah, it's a challenge. But I look at the work that we did on banning life without parole sentences for kids. I couldn't have done that as a politician, doesn't matter what office I was holding, I could not have done it. Touch it couldn't even touch. The death penalty is ultimately going to be resolved when we get the courts to be so beat down by the inhumanity and the and the errors and the cruelty of it that they say no more. And so that's a forum that I continued to see opportunities for advancing these issues because it's about rights and protecting the rights of disfavored people. It is no longer something that I'm as optimistic about our political process being responsive to my friend who's a politics of that, he said that the reality of the politician today, he says, as, yes, you have all these powerful tools and nowhere to plug them in exactly. Yeah, I don't want to kind of give up on it because I think we still need good people to do it. But I definitely want to find ways. Yeah, I am torn, but I definitely want to find ways to get out there. And We're going to keep doing that, you know, And I'm excited about these projects. I think that we are going to push. I think we can reduce the prison population by half in the next ten years if we push in the right way. You know, they are narratives we have to control both state and federal nationwide. I think we can get well. I think it's the kind of declaring that the war on drugs was wrong, which now people on the right and left are comfortable with drug policy. Well, we think that we should just decriminalize these sentences that have put people no, because I think that's a harder sell in too many places, and we don't need to legalize to get people out of jails in prisons. Personally think that certain drugs should be legal. I don't really feel I don't. Actually, I'm I'm I'm. I see the content intos of drug addiction and drug dependency, and poor and minority communities don't want that. Yeah, No, I don't. Really. I want people to not be drug dependent, because your life is compromised through that stuff. But more than that, I just want to get these people out of prison and not drug dependent, because then they can be good workers and they can take advantage of whatever job programs we create, which you can't take advantage of if you're drug dependent, truthfully, and then you can become a good father, and you can become a good husband or a good daughter, and a good wife, and a good child and a good parent, all these things that people can't be when their lives have been so destroyed by the distractions that you have to have to cope with the ugliness of life. And for me, that becomes both a moral imperative but also a strategy for improving public safety and recovery for communities that have been ravaged by so much threat and menace. But I think we can do it that way of reducing eliminating people being under jails in prison, and then just having some proportionate rational sentencing. It's crazy. We we have to. We have to have a complete We do reconstruc we didn't we do. Thank you for your time. You're very welcome. Brian Stevenson recently published Just Mercy, a memoir about his experiences fighting injustices in the American legal system. The work is stressful. Rosa Parks once personally warned Brian about exhaustion. To relax, he turns to his baby grand piano at home. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's the thing.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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