Hi Brian, Hi Katie, and hello listeners, wonderful listeners. The time has come. The first episode of my new documentary series on nat Gio America, Inside Out, is out in the world. For those of you who are interested, you can watch it on National Geographic at ten pm for the next several Wednesdays, or on the NATCHIO channel website, which is channel dot National Geographic dot com. Full episodes will also be available on who the day after they air, or you can find them on YouTube and Facebook until mid May. So get them while they're hot, people. You know, I'm very excited about this series. I hope people will watch, and more importantly, that there will be a springboard for important conversations we just don't seem to be having in this country, Katie. As we mentioned last week, the first episode of the series is about how we approach the history and the future of race in this country, a pretty fraught topic. It includes the debate over the hundreds of Confederate monuments around the country. The episode really uses Confederate statues as a conversation starter because they stand for so much and they're more than what they appear. If you understand when they were put up and what they symbolize to many people. It really broadens your understanding of the issue of race and of history. And there are more than six hundred and fifty of them throughout the country, particularly in the South. You and I have talked about this issue before in our podcast with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrew. He was on the pod last June and episode thirty three, and I highly recommend that show. He was also in this episode of my Natio series. He told me he got death threats after the New Orleans City Council voted to remove four of those Confederate statues in the city. And there's a pretty chilling thing he told me in the documentary, Brian, Yeah, one scene in the doc really jumped out at me. May Landrew said that three of the statues were taken down at night on the advice of security personnel, who basically said it's harder to get shot by a sniper at night. It's a very explosive issue, and as I said, it's about much more than statues. It's about who we are, what we stand for, what we believe in the history we've acknowledged. So in this episode, I wanted to understand over one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War? Why is there so much intense emotion over these monuments? Which brings us, of course, to today's guest, Brian Stevenson. Katie. I know you're a very big fan, so huge fan. He's featured in your nat GEO doc and for very good reason. He spent his career fighting injustice in our legal system. He's a lawyer who successfully argued cases in front of the Supreme Court, and he's also head of the Equal Justice Initiative down in Montgomery, Alabama, which is an organization he founded as a young man. He's so written a wonderful book called Just Mercy, which I highly recommend. And we wanted to include Brian in the documentary and then talk to him more today on the podcast because he is really, among other things, making it his mission to make sure there are things about our past that are not swept under the rug, that are painful, things that we all need to acknowledge before we're able to move forward. I am thrilled that he is able to join us. I've interviewed many people over the years, but he's been a career highlight for me and I admire him deeply. So we talked with Brian about America's history of slavery and racial violence, about his own experiences with school segregation as a child, and about the new museum and memorial that he's helping to open later this month, and about the purpose he really hopes that they serve in bringing us together as a country. Absolutely, So we started by asking him to tell us about the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization he started building in We're a private, nonprofit law office. It grew out of a desperate need in Alabama to provide legal services to people on death row. Alabama doesn't have a public defender system, and there were nearly a hundred condemned prisoners literally dying for legal assistance in the nineteen eighties, and so we started this project to meet that need, and it's grown and expanded over the last thirty years. We began working on other cases involving wrongful convictions and unfair sentences. We started challenging the problems of the poor in our legal system. I really do believe we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty then if you're poor and innocent. We've grown, we we've done work on children. We were working on behalf of the mentally ill. It's been focused on criminal justice reform, and then about ten years ago we began taking on these bigger projects of race and poverty more broadly. And you've argued before the Supreme Court on a number of occasions and really changed our interpretation of the Constitution to protect particularly young people who are charged with crimes and either sentence to the death penalty or to life without parole. Yeah, I take really seriously the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. It's a part of our constitution that isn't as developed as I think it should be. And so yes, we have been challenging what we perceived to be excessive punishment, unfair sentencing uh in many of our states. And one of those issues that took me to the Supreme Court a couple of times is what we're doing to children. The United States had three thousand children sentenced to die in prison, some as young as thirteen years of age. A life without parole sentence is a sentence that basically says, you're never going to be safe, You're never going to be uh, someone we can release. You're beyond hope you're you're beyond ride emption, and I just think that's just not true for any child. It may be that that child doesn't get to the point where we can release them, but to condemn them before they've evolved, before they've grown, was for me fundamentally at odds with what we know about children. It's the reason why we don't let them vote, we don't let them smoke, we don't let them drink. We know that there's a point that they haven't reached yet to make those choices, but we weren't honoring that in the criminal justice system, and so we took that case of the court, and the Court has now banned mandatory life without role sentences for children. We're trying to still protect children in other ways. On any given day, there are some ten thousand children housed in adult jails in prisons, and those kids are at great risk of sexual violence and abuse. And so we still have a lot of work to do, but we have been pushing hard to help particularly vulnerable communities in our criminal justice system. In many ways you talk about mass incarceration, Brian is sort of part of this long tail of history and one of the byproducts of slavery and how it is morphed into things like mass incarceration and the death penalty. Can you explain that to our listeners? Sure. I think we have a history of racial inequality in this country that we've been largely silent about, and it makes us indifferent uh to racial bias and racial discrimination. Today, the Bureau of Justice predicts that one in three blackmail babies born in this country is expected to go to jail or prison. And that's not perceived as a crisis. It's not a political issue. Elected officials aren't talking about it. And I think the reason why we haven't responded to that as a tragedy in the way that I think we should is because we have been acculturated to just accept a certain amount of racial bias, a certain amount of racial disparity. And I think the legacy of our history of racial inequality has compromised us. I really do think we are breathing in a kind of small kind of pollution that has left us less healthy when it comes to confronting bias and discrimination. And I actually believe it begins with the genocide of Native Americans. We are a post genocide society when Native people came when Europeans came to this continent, we killed millions of Native people. It was a genocide, but we didn't call it that. We said these Native people are different. We said Native people were savages, and through that language we were comfortable with removing them from their lands and killing them by the millions. It was that same narrative that made us comfortable with enslaving Black Africans. And I don't think that the great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude of forced labor. I think it was this narrative of racial racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy, and we never dealt with that. If you read the thirteenth Amendment, it talks about ending forced labor, involuntary servitude, but it doesn't say anything about ending this narrative of racial difference. And because of that, I've argued that slavery didn't end in eighteen sixty five. It just evolved, and that created this era of racial terrorism. And from the eighteen seventies until the nineteen fifties, thousands of black people were pulled out of their homes. They were drowned, they were beaten, they were hanged, they were burned, they were tortured, sometimes literally on the courthouse lawn in front of thousands who cheered, and that spectacle violence, that terrorism was something we didn't really confront And then we moved from that era uh into the civil rights era, and we celebrate the civil rights activism of Dr King and Rosa Parks, but we don't talk about the deep commitment to resisting integration to all of those elect officials who were preaching segregation, forever, segregation or war. Even though we want passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, that narrative of racial difference persisted, and today we live at a time where that narrative is still alive. There is a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to black and brown people, which is why mass incarceration and the modern criminal justice system reflects this continuing legacy. It's the reason why black and brown people feel so menaced and targeted by the police, why there's anger and frustration when unarmed people of color are killed by the police. And I don't think we can understand these issues without understanding this historical legacy. I know you believe, Brian, as I do that we can't really make progress. We can't even begin to have conversations about some of these issues if we don't acknowledge that they happened. So let's talk about the ways you're doing that with the opening this month in April of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. So let's just talk about those two projects and and why they're so important. First, let's talk about the Lynching project. How did that start? Why did you want to you that? And what was that like putting it together? Well, first of all, thank you for that, um, that question, Katie, and and that reflection. I do agree that we have some work to do in this country to make our history more evident, to make it understood. And um, the work we started doing on lynching was in response to that. UM. I live in a region where thousands of black people were brutalized, were tortured, uh, and we haven't acknowledged that history. It was terrorism. And older people of color come up to me sometimes and they say, Mr Stevenson, I get angry when I hear somebody on TV talking about how we're dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in our nation's history. After nine eleven. They said, we grew up with terror. We had to wear about being bombed and lynched and menaced every day of our lives, and that legacy isn't something we've confronted or discussed. The black people in Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit didn't go to those communities as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities. They went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South. And so we wanted to first document this history. So we spent five years combing through archives gathering evidence about lynchings. We identified about eight hundred more lynchings than prior researchers had uncovered, and we put out a report. And then we wanted to make this research accessible to people in public spaces and visible exactly, and so we started putting up markers at lynching sites. And then we had this idea of involving more people, of inviting community groups and members to go to lynching sites, to collect soil at the lynching site, to put it in a jar with the name of a lynching victim and the date of the lynching, and then to make a reflection. And we've now collected hundreds of jars of soil from lynching sites, and black people and white people and young people in old people have played a role in creating a new visual of what this history represents. And you saw the exhibit in our office, a wall full of jars. Oh my gosh, it's so it's just extrat They're so unbelievably moving in their simplicity. And you can see the different soil from different regions of Alabama and other Southern states, which in many ways I know I wrote about this in National Geographic. Each jar tells a story, not only a story of a human being, but a story of the circumstances or where this happened. And some of these stories are so moving. There's one that I keep thinking about, Brian, that you told me about about a school teacher who who scolded some some boys. Can you explain that story for us? Sure? No, I think the stories are really important. Katie and Elizabeth Lawrence was a Birmingham school teacher working with black children because of course the schools were segregated it and she was walking home one night when a group of white kids began throwing stones at her, and she did what any responsible adult would do. She turned to the children and said, don't throw stones at people. And the children went home and told their parents that this black woman had scolded them. And the parents were offended at the idea that a black person would correct their children, and so they organized a mob. They went to the home of Elizabeth Lawrence and they lynched her. Uh Brian, didn't they burn her house down? To Yes, when her son tried to uh complain about it, they burned her house down. They ran him out of the state. He fled to Boston. And the pain of these kinds of events, which happened all the time, is all of the students of Elizabeth Lawrence, all of the neighbors, all of the black people who looked up to her and respected her and admired her and loved her for trying to educate their children, they were required to be silent about the violent that took her life, because if you complained about lynching, then you would be targeted. I think also people think that lynching automatically means someone is hung from a tree, because that symbol has been so emblazoned in our consciousness. But in this case, they just brutally beat her. Yes, that's right. Many lynchings involved beating someone to death. We have accounts of lynchings where people were burned at the stake, We have accounts where people were drowned. We have accounts of people who were shot, sometimes hundreds of times by a crowd of a thousand. Well, and crowd is a really interesting point, because these things didn't happen, you know, with a few guys gathered around in secret. Often these lynchings occurred in the town square with hundreds or even thousands of people watching. And how did good people allow this to go on for decade after decade after decade. Yeah, it's a really important question, Brian. I think the thing that really pained me about this era is that this violence wasn't conducted by the clan and the cover of night, with people wearing hoods. People would actually pose in photographs next to the battered body that they had killed. They were proud to be participating in this kind of terror and violence. They would bring their children. We have photographs where you see little children being held up by their parents so they can see this person burning to death or hanging. And this culture of violence was celebrated. Uh, And that is I think one of the reasons why we are very intentional about characterizing this as terrorism. They weren't just killing individuals. They were sending a message to African Americans throughout the region that if you challenge the racial order, if you fight for your rights, we will brutalize you. They would sometimes leave these by these hanging for days, not allow the family to come and gather the body, because they wanted the entire black community to know what had happened. And the documentation of this violence, the photographs, the postcards that would be sent around, was a way of spreading the terror, spreading the message that if you resist our racial order, we will kill you. You couldn't get black people to drink out of the Colored fountain unless there was a threat of violence, and lynching became the threat that allowed Jim Crow to grow. And it was so so disgraceful, you know you. I featured one of those photos in this Hour. I did, And when I thought about it, how they were shared and passed around and celebrated, I thought of it almost as a disgusting, perverse precursor to a weird kind of social media that galvanized a group of people and kind of kept them as one in their hatred and brutality. That's right, and I think what it did was to create a culture where it is okay to victimize these black people. It is okay to see them brutalize, it's okay to torture them. They're not the same as us, They're not human like us. And everyone was complicit. You didn't have to be in the photograph, you didn't have to be in the mob to be responsible. Elected officials look the other way. The federal government looked the other way, which is why this was a national phenomena. We had the resources to go to world, to Germany and fight in World War One. We had the resources to go to Europe and fighting World War Two. We had the resources to keep people safe from this kind of violence, but we were unwilling to do it. And no one ever got prosecuted, you know, I mean, for for participating in these kinds of crimes, which is infuriating. But what I think is beautiful about this exhibit. I mean, it's so it's so painful, but there's a certain amount of beauty in validating and recognize seeing the people who never had a proper burial, whose lives were never celebrated who whose stories were never told. I think that's right. I mean, I've been especially moved to name these unnamed victims of terror and violence, to give them a space somewhere where people can recognize the tragedy of their loss. And that's been the heart of the reflections that community members have shared when they do these, and I've been really moved by it. We you know, we had a woman go to a lynching site by herself. It was on a dirt road in the middle of a rural county, and she was very nervous about it, a middle aged black woman, and she kept telling us, I don't know if I should do this, and we said, well, it's up to you, and she said, I'm going to go. And we tell people you don't have to explain to anyone what you're doing. If you feel uncomfortable telling them that you're getting soiled because of a lynching, you can just make up something. And she said, she was on this road and a truck kept driving back and forth, and a white man in this pickup truck kept slowing down and staring at her, and she was getting very nervous and worried that this man was going to do something and find me. The truck stopped and this large white man got out of the truck and walked over to her, and he asked her what she was doing. And she had planned to say, I'm just getting some dirt from my garden, but there was something about the way he asked that just emboldened her. And she said, I'm digging soil because this is where a man was lynched. And she had the memo that we gave each of our our volunteers that described the lynching. And the man said, is that paper talk about that lynching? She said it does. He said, can I read it? And he picked up the paper and started reading it. She said she was trying to finish her collection because she was so nervous. And then she said, after the man read the paper, he put it down and he said, would you mind if I helped you dig? And this man got on the soil and began digging with his hand and helping her fill the jar. And at the end they took a picture together, and she said, I would have never expected anything like that to happen, but I feel empowered. I feel energized that we can do things to tell the truth about our past and find our way forward. We use soil because I think soil is a really powerful medium for confronting history. Buried in that soil is the sweat of all of those enslaved black people who populated this region. Buried in that soil is the blood of those who were lynched and murdered. Buried in that soil are the tears of those who were humiliated during Jim Crow and segregation. But also in that soil is the potential for life. We can plant things, we can grow things that are healthier, that are capable of nurturing a new day. We can't do that if we don't talk about our past. And that's why these projects for me have been really exciting. I'm committed to truth and reconciliation. I just believe that truth and reconciliation is sequential. So to first tell the truth before we can have reconciliation. This is why I say Brian Stevenson for Press is it in. I mean, honestly all the time. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment with Brian Stephenson. And now back with Brian Stevenson. I think a lot of people who haven't read your book or which is amazing recommended reading Just Mercy Everyone, or didn't watch your Ted talk, both of which I highly recommend. Um want to know a little bit more about your own personal story, and so I wondered if you could just share a little bit about growing up in Delaware. I know your great grandparents were actually slaves, how you experienced school desegregation personally, even though you're you're not such an old guy. Um, just can you tell us a little bit about what informed the work that you're doing now? Sure? Yeah. The line between me and my enslaved great grandfather is pretty short. My my great grandfather was born in slavery. My grandmother, who was born in the eighteen eighties, spent a lot of time with me, and she was in my ear constantly talking about the stories her father would tell her about being enslaved. He was actually an enslave person who learned to read when it could have cost him his life, and it was the secret that the enslaved community kept. And when emancipation came, she would talk with pride about how uh, formerly enslaved people would come to their home and my great grandfather would read the paper and it made her really value education. Uh. And so when I was a little boy in a community where the schools were still racially segregated, my mother, you know, went into debt to buy you know, the World book Encyclopedia. She wanted us, uh to learn about the world in which we lived. And I started my education in a colored school. And then lawyers came into our community and made them open up the public schools. And because of that intervention, I got to go to high school. My dad couldn't go to high school in that county. There were no high schools for black children when he was a teenager. So I was definitely mindful of what the struggle for for justice and the effort to create opportunities meant. And it's the reason why I ultimately ended up in Alabama providing legal services to people who were being condemned, who were being unfairly treated, who are being wrongly convicted. And for me, um, that legacy, which is painful in many ways, has another side, Uh. You know, there is a dignity and the people who endured slavery. There is a strength in the people who found a way to give love to their children despite the brutality and torture of lynching. There is a courage, uh in the folks who stood up against Jim Crow and marched and protested for the right to vote. And the strength of those people is something that I feel. You can't live in Montgomery, Alabama without being and energized by the legacy of people who have been here. I have difficult days and I go out and I look through my window and I think about the people doing what I'm trying to do sixty years ago, and they had to frequently say my head is bloodied but not bowed. I've never had to say that. But I feel fortunate to have have been raised by people who gave me an awareness of that history. But not only that gave me that strength, gave me that love, gave me that insight that sometimes you have to stand when other people say sit down. Sometimes you have to speak when other people say be quiet. And I'm grateful for for parents and grandparents and great grandparents who have taught me that, uh. And that's what I want to give to the people I spend time with. Brian, what do you say to people today who might tell you, you know, the United States had a very racist pass and these things are terrible. But you know, we're not racist today and we've moved beyond this, and so um, you know, why are we spending so much time kind of mired in these issues? I mean, I I that's a sentiment I actually hear sometimes what do you tell those people? Well, I think there's a lot of evidence that we have not overcome that. I mean, there are presumptions of dangerousness and guilty black and brown people bear, and it doesn't matter how educated they are, how smart they are, how hard working they are. And I just think we're not being honest if we failed to recognize that. You know, I'm a practicing lawyer, went to Harvard Law School, argued all these cases before the Supreme Court. And I've been in courtrooms in the Midwest, not the South, sitting at defense council's table before hearing starts in my suit and tie. And if I'm there for the first time, I had to judge walking one time and say, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, you get back out there in the hall way. You wait until your lawyer gets here. I don't want any defendants coming into my courtroom without their lawyer. And I had to stand up and apologize. I said I'm sorry, your honor, I am the lawyer. And the judge started laughing, and the prosecutors started laughing, and I made myself laugh because I didn't want to disadvantage my client. And then my client came and a young white kid I was representing, and I did this hearing, and uh, but afterward, I thought, do I think that judge is going to be fair to people? Do I think that Judge is burdened by this history? And I do, and that plays out all the time. But I think even more significantly, Brian, is that we haven't actually acknowledged this history of race. You know, I live in Alabama. In Alabama, Uh, Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday in this state. Jefferson Davis's birthday is a state holiday. We don't have Martin Luther King Day in Alabama. We have Martin Luther King slash roberty Lea Day. The landscape is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy. When I moved to Montgomery, there were fifty nine markers and monuments to the Confederacy and not a word about slavery. Nothing. And what that says to me is that not only have we not actively addressed this history. We have proactively tried to create a new narrator, a false narrative. We think things were glorious in the nineteenth century. We think the good old days were the forties and fifties. We think the best days with the turn of the century, precisely the time when black and brown bodies were being suspended and hanged from trees. And that disconnect doesn't allow us to actually confront the challenges of contemporary racial biased and we're not going to be free until we do that. Let's talk about the memorial landscape. I know we discussed this for my documentary, but you believe that these Confederate monuments and statues of people like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee should in fact be removed. Um, tell me why you think that's an important step for reconciliation. Brian Well, I don't think the whole of their lives is something that we should honor. They were the architects and defenders of slavery at the time, they were viewed as insurgents traders to the American government, and we created a narrative about them, and by we, I mean white Southerners created not uh not African Americans called the Lost Cause narrative of course costs, and it was a way to basically reject racial equality. You know, we committed to emancipated people that they would be free, that there would be equality, that they would be protected. And the American and the American government in the white South in particular, said no, we're not going to have that. And they started talking about this effort to preserve slavery as a noble effort, a romantic, glorious effort. And it was that narrative that was created, and many of these markers and monuments were erected in the nineteen fifties when the United States Supreme Court was saying you have to racially integrate your schools. We've got Robert E. Lee High here in Montgomery. They didn't put the statue of Robert E. Lee in front of that high school until nineteen when elected officials were saying, we're never going to allow integration to come to our schools. I think that's a misconception that a lot of people have. They think those statutes have been there for you know, over a hundred years, or since the eighteen fifties or whatever. But that's one of the things I pointed out in the documentary that the two big spikes, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as you know, Brian, were right at the height of Jim Crow in the early nineteen hundred's, well after the end of the Civil War, and then the other big spike, as you mentioned, right after Brown v. Board of Education. And I just think we're not being honest about what these things represent. I mean, no one thinks it would be appropriate for the German government to start erecting statues of Adolf Hitler. In fact, it would be unconscionable. We don't think it would be appropriate for any nation to put up a statue honoring Osama bin Laden. We regard him as a terrorist who did destructive things, who did horrific things to undermine confidence and well being in this country and across the world. And I just think we need to have a consciousness about the agony, the horror, the brutality of slavery, and if we have that consciousness, we cannot celebrate anyone who actively tried to defend it, who actually created an event where thousands of people died in support of it. And I just think that's the disconnect and I I really do believe that there are ways of recognizing people who did heroic things, including many white Southerners. There were white Southerners who were abolitionists, who actually said in Alabama, we should not enslave other human beings. There were white Southerners who were trying to stop people from being lynched. There were white Southerners who said that segregation is wrong. And what frustrates me is that too few people know the names of any of those white Southerners. And I think we should name some streets after them. I think we should name some schools after them, and then we could all be proud of what they represent, because they represent a commitment to truth and fairness and equality and human rights. Sometimes though it's not so black and white. You know, there are Confederate generals and officers and their principal legacy maybe perpetuate the institution of slavery. And then there are other white historical figures, for example, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who have a much a decidedly mixed record, and you know, who have done extraordinary things and are responsible for the phrase all men are created equal, and and yet they own slaves and I struggle with this myself. Admittedly, the idea of just wiping the entire slate clean because people cannot pass some kind of purity test seems to be it's hard for me to wrap my head around. Can you help me with that? Sure, I think that we have a history where lots of people did dishonorable things. It doesn't mean that they couldn't also do something honorable. Look, I represent people who make mistakes all the time. I'm committed to the notion that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done one. But it doesn't mean that if you've committed a capital murder that we should erect a statue to you because you are something more than that. And the legacy of Jefferson Davis, the legacy of Roberty, Jeff Stewart, you, all of those folks is very different than the legacy of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. I don't think it's actually a close question in my mind, and so I think when people invoke those figures, I think it really undermines Look, there were people who were silent during the Nazi era but nonetheless did extraordinary things. Uh. Not everybody was as vocal as they should have been. It doesn't mean that if they are world renowned scientists who did something noble, that they can't be celebrated for that. And I just think in many ways it's a continuum. Uh, but it doesn't make sense to get to that end of the continuum where people are talking about figures like Abraham Lincoln or George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, when we're selling adding these figures down here. Believe me, there are no Lincoln statutes in Alabama. There are no Washington statutes. We have a very particular purpose that we are trying to advance with the erection of some of these monuments and memorials, and I think that purpose is to advance this idea that there is no shame. We don't have to apologize for slavery. We didn't do anything wrong during the era of lynching. We we shouldn't feel any remorse about decades of segregation. And that mindset, to me, is what we're trying to challenge. And I don't think that's the same condition or circumstance when you talk about some of these other figures, you know, I interviewed State Senator Gerald Allen who introduced the bill that became the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which said any statue that was erected or a monument before nineteen seventy seven cannot, by law be removed. He introduced that legislation, by the way, right after Mitchelandrew removed those four monuments in New Orleans. But Senator Alan I have a quote from him. He didn't say this to me in the piece, but he said, there is a revisionist movement of foot to cover over many parts of American history. Our national and state history should be remembered as it happened. This politically correct movement to strike whole periods of the past from our collective memories divisive and unnecessary. What would your rebuttal be, Well, I'd say I totally agree, but for different reasons. Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't think anybody could credibly claim that we have told the truth about our history of slavery in the American South. To be so preoccupied with mid nineteenth century history and to never talk about slavery the landscape reveals a very disconnected consciousness. Nobody has talked about the history of of lynching. You know, it shouldn't be a group of lawyers in eighteen that finally say, you know, we should do something about this era of lynching. We haven't confronted the legacy of segregation. The state constitution in Alabama still prohibits black and white kids from going to school together there, and we can't get it out of the state constitution because every time they have a statewide referendum to remove it, the majority of people in the state boat to keep it. That is so outrageous. It is outrageous, but it is a consequence of the kind of history that we have been teaching people. And that's why there is a profound need uh to talk more honestly about this legacy of slavery and lynching and segregation. We don't actually feel burdened by it, and I think that's part of the problem. It's time for us to take another quick break. We'll be right back. Thank you to everyone, as always who called, in, an emailed, and even texted us this week. Let's take a listen to a voicemail that really stood out to us. And by the way, this caller did not leave a name. Hi. I'm calling about the Confederate statues. I'm a Southerner, by birth. I went to Robberty Lee High School. Um, I'm in my late sixties. I'm retired from DuPont. Just to give you a little background. When this whole thing came up about the Confederate statues, I have to say, and I have to admit that I've never even given it a thought. I've grown up around them, I've never I've visited towns that had them. I just looked at him as historical markers. I wasn't offended by them. I'm a white person. I mean, you know, I just had never really thought about it, and I've been thinking about it. Um with all the publicity, There's been a lot of um discussion in my hometown here of Jacksonville, Florida about it. Nothing specific has been done yet, but I suspect at some point something will and maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we should take these statues down. But I have to say that I've it's I've had to come go through a process to come to this decision. Um. You know, as a Southerner. Over the course of my career, I worked with a lot of from all over the country, and from time to time I would hear people make remarks that were derogatory about Southerners, So you know, I have this little element of defensiveness and also pride in the South. But I think bottom line is it's probably time to take these statues out of places where they are exalted or looked at as some wonderful thing, and preserve them in some fashion and put them in a museum. Thank you, well, I'd like to thank that caller for such a thoughtful voicemail. I really appreciate it, and I think she explained sort of the process you have to go through. You know, sometimes I have felt defensive about things, and much of my family is from the South, and I think that you have to have a better understanding of the full picture of this Confederate iconography to come up with an opinion. It was a beautiful voicemail in my opinion, Brian, because I also think we have to feel liberated to admit that we had to struggle to get someplace and that it was a process. And so I just want to say thank you to that caller so much for sharing her experience and her thoughts. You know, Brian Stevenson uses the phrase truth and reconciliation to talk about where we need to go as a society, and I think that caller is a good example of the kind of thought process and introspection that needs to happen. I think people need a little bit more hand holding and education to get through the process of understanding why it's probably the right thing to take these things down, and a little more patients, right, And um, I know that's probably an athetical to people who have been fighting for social justice for centuries, and anathetical, unfortunately, to the media culture we live in, which tries to reduce this stuff, you know too very sort of plaistic, not only simplistic, but also ways that will elicit outrage, right and push us into our corners, as opposed to trying to bring us together, right because compromises boring, Brian, Right, let's face it anyway, Thank you so much for that thoughtful voicemail. Of course, we'd like to keep hearing from you as we continue to explore these thorny issues from my national geographic documentary series called America Inside Out. Thank you Ellie Monahan for coming up with that title. I thought that was a good Yeah. Her check is in the mail, right, Yeah, her checksman in the mail for twenty six years, but go ahead. So the next episode of the series is called The Muslim next Door and it airs on April eighteen, and it's pretty terrific as well. So here are some questions we'd love for you all to answer. For our Muslim American listeners, what are some of the joys and challenges you face with regard to your religious identity? For everyone else, we're curious to hear. Did you grow up with a Muslim community in your area, you spent time with Muslim families? Are you still wrapping your head around what being Muslim even means? Yes, all experience levels are welcome on this show, so call and leave us a message at nine two to four four six three seven, or right to us at comments at current podcast dot com. Hey everyone, I want to tell you about a podcast I think you really enjoy. It's called The James Altiture Show. But I have to say this is not your average business podcast. The host has an incredible story. He started and run more than twenty companies. He's currently an advisor and an investor to over thirty. But at one point, James lost everything. In a matter of months, his bank account drain from fifteen million dollars to a hundred and forty three dollars, and that's when he realized he had to make a change. He stopped living by someone else's definition of success and he started to choose himself. And now James interviews hundreds of people, self made billionaires, best sell authors, thought leaders, astronauts, athletes, rappers, and more. They all have incredible origin stories how they got past their fears, ditched their cubicles, and started a living with more everyday fulfillment. Check out The James Alter Show and subscribe now wherever you get your podcast. And now back to the show, Brian. We got this text message about Confederate statues from a listener of ours named Ashley, and I wanted to discuss it with you. Here's what she wrote. I'm from New Orleans and as you know, the mayor had four statues removed, some in the middle of the night. There is still a year later, no plan to replace what was removed, and just empty pediments left. Landrew wants to spend more money to study what should be done. Many people here wish they had been left up and new descriptions, new plaques made to re contextualize why they were there, their importance, and the issues and problems surrounding the statues, Ripping them down just made people angry and was unthoughtful when he claims he was being thoughtful about his actions. How would you respond to Ashley Bryan? Well, I think we have to ask people, and I would ask Ashley, why do you want that statue up? It's not because you want to remind people about the brutality of slavery. I don't genuinely hear that from people. The question is why what do you think we're giving away? And when people say we can't erase the past within what past do we think we are communicating by having these Confederate monuments memorials without saying a word about the degradation and brutality of slavery. And that's the problem that I have with this suggestion that we can just add a few words and make it okay. There's nothing debatable about the humanity of slavery. I don't think that should be something where we just give both sides of the issue. I don't think there's anything debatable about the outrage of racial violence and lynching. And when you try to give both sides, what you do is you end up legitimating. Uh slavery, you end up legitimating lynching. I don't think there's anything debatable about how unconscionable it is to say the black people, you can't go to school, you can't vote, just because you're black. It is a violation of basic human rights and dignity, and we allow that to be something that has quote both sides. There is no context for justifying slavery, there is no context for justifying lynching. So clearly, when it comes to some of these Civil War monuments, you are not of the mind that there should be a separate statue put up, say of African American Civil War soldiers who went and fought for the Union side, or an abolitionist statue that would counter the narrative expressed by the already existing one. I don't think that's enough. I don't think it actually advances the larger truth of what happened, and the truth of what happened is is that we allowed people to be brutalize is we allowed them to be tortured, we allowed them to be exploited, we allowed them to be victimized in a shameful way, and we've got to own up to that. We've got to recover from that, and we don't recover from that by muting that victimization, that horror, that in humanity. And I think sometimes people don't realize how important these statues are. First of all, they're usually on huge pedestals. The Roberty Lee statue in Emancipation Park. If you looked at the Lee Statue and Least Circle, it is on an enormous column looming large over the city. And what we put in our public spaces, I think those things say a lot of about us, who we are and what we're telling the world about our values. Yeah. You know what's interesting is we're we're about to issue report on segregation, and we've actually documented Confederate monuments and memorials, and we've documented what was said when these things were erected. And it's a really fascinating and I think necessary education that that people need to to embrace, because most of the time, when these monuments would be erected, you'd have elected officials saying things like we are erecting this monument as a commitment to white supremacy. That's not my word, that's their word. To symbolize our resistance to integration forever, to show that our claim and cause was true in preserving slavery, and you cannot disconnect the purpose, the intentionality, the context of these statutes. And that's why I just think we need to question what is it that we think we're giving up when these statutes come down, What is it that we think we're losing. And what a lot of people I believe think they're losing is uh this confidence that there has never been anything about which shame is appropriate. There has never been something about which you need to apologize, and that I understand is challenging to confront that. You know, we were wrong to tolerate this, we were wrong to permit this, but it is necessary if we're going to make progress. You cannot, you know. We I talked about this in the context of domestic violence because fifty years ago we did not have a very evolved consciousness about domestic violence. We allowed women to be abused and brutalized in their homes. If they called the police, the police would show up. They would never arrest the man. They would calm him down. They didn't want to make an arrest because that would be too much. And then our consciousness change. We actually began to appreciate how unacceptable it was to allow people to be victimized, and today we take a very different approach, and we should be a shame that for decades women were brutalized and had no recourse in law enforcement. And I just think until we have that consciousness, we don't turn a corner, we don't make progress, and we haven't made the progress that I think we can make on issues of race in this country if we'd start talking more honestly about this street and confront the legacy created by these statutes and memorials. President Trump opened his campaign by talking about Mexican rapists and criminals. He talked about the Central Park five being guilty even after it was proved that they were innocent. Racial animus, I would argue, has been a key feature, not a bug, of his political career. How much of a role do you think racial backlash played in his election because you know, sixty three million Americans voted for him and continues to play and how people are are addressing the very issues we've been discussing. Yeah, I don't think we can discount that that connection. I mean, um, when somebody starts arguing that we should ban people because of their religious identity and get support for that. When someone characterizes all Mexicans as rapists and engages in that kind of racism or stereotyping and bigotry, that kind of consciousness would not be tolerable if if we had done the work that I think we need to do, I just don't think we would be allowed to support that kind of posturing, that kind of rhetoric, even the framework. And I'll be honest about this, I'm just confused when I hear people saying make America great again, I don't know what decade they think I should want to relive. What is the decade in American history that I, as an African American man should want to relive, Certainly, not something uh in the in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century. When is the part of our history when things were so grand and glorious for people of color or for women. And it is this kind of false idea that we used to be glorious and wonderful and now we're not. And I just think that consciousness is something you can maintain only because you haven't talked honestly about the past. And so yes, I do think that we have been very unevolved and our thinking about this legacy, and people exploit that, people take advantage of that. Uh, when somebody says, oh, you don't have to apologize when you make a mistake, you don't have to feel shame, it's very tempting, it's very attractive. But I don't think it's ultimately liberating. I don't think it's ultimately a path to justice or a healthy community. And closing, Brian, what do you think is the way forward? How can we make progress? How can we inch towards justice? Well? I think, you know, I think we have to be open. I mean I I am really intentional about how we're trying to do this. We want everyone to come to our memorial. We want everyone to come to our museum. It's not just for African Americans, it's not just for people who understand all parts of this history. UM. We want to reach people where they are to the extent that we can. I'm not interested in talking about America's history because I want to punish America. And I think that sometimes is the perception that causes people to say, no, I'm interested in talking about America's history because I want to liberate us. I think there's something better waiting for us if we can actually take a step to confront this history. When you teach your child that he or she is better than someone else because of their color, you actually are limiting the life of that child. You're you're actually abusing that child with a lie. Because the truth is that the world is beautiful. People are beautiful. There are these possibilities, and if you limit yourself from engaging with people, understanding people, loving people because of their color, or their ethnicity or where they were born, you're not actually experiencing all that I think God wants us to experience. And so I think we have to confront this topic. We have to pursue this topic, uh, not with a threat, but with an invitation, with an expectation that we can get someplace better. I think where we are is better than where we have been when we didn't allow inter racial marriage, when we didn't allow integration and public spaces. I think we've developed some things, We've experienced, some things, we've had. Some wonderful things happened because we got past that fear. I just think there's more fear to overcome. There are more challenges that we must meet. There will be a time when we can claim to be great in ways we've never been great before. But we won't achieve that if we're unwilling to confront the legacy of our history of racial inequality. And I just think we are all invited to that task and some wonderful things are waiting for us if we have the courage to meet that challenge. Amen. Amen, Brother Stevenson. Now you can see why I just love talking to Brian because both Brian's but especially this Brian and Montgomery, because it is uh you You just I think are so compelling in your arguments and it's really hard to argue with the really important points you make and make so well. Brian, thank you so much for talking with us. I hope people listen to this podcast from beginning to end because there's so many important things they need to hear and they need to talk about, and I'm hoping will help encourage and facilitate a conversation. Brian, Thanks so much. Thank you. Katie. A big thank you as always to our team behind the scenes, Gianna Palmer, Nora Richie, and Jared O'Connell over at Stitcher, Betamas, Alison Bresnik, and Emily Binge from Katie Kurk Media. Thank you, guys, and a special thanks this week to Kyle from Troy Public Radio and Steve and all of my friends at Hobo Audio. They're so nice here and they always have those little miniature Reese's cups, and thank you for that as well. Katie and I are the show's executive producers. Mark Phillips wrote, are very catchy theme music, and don't forget. We'd love to hear your thoughts on being Muslim in America, which is the next topic I'm covering in my national geographic series. The episode is called The Muslim next Door and it airs on April eight, eighth, So leave us your messages at nine to nine to four four six three seven, or as always, you can drop us a line at comments at Current podcast dot com. Brian is on Twitter at Goldsmith b I'm under Katie Curic on just about every major social media platform there is. That's our show for today. As always, thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.