Dialog reporter
Attorney, social-justice activist Bryan Stevenson talks injustice and how to make changes in Del. visit
WILMINGTON — To make a difference in bringing social justice to the world, today’s young people must be prepared to take certain actions, a prominent attorney and social-justice activist said at Salesianum School on Sept. 15.
Bryan Stevenson, a Delaware native who now lives and works in Montgomery, Ala., returned to his home state to speak to students, local officials and members of the Salesianum board of trustees. This year, Salesianum students are using Stevenson’s acclaimed 2014 memoir, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” for the school’s “One School, One Book” project.
Stevenson’s leanings toward social justice stems partly from his upbringing in Milton, in Sussex County. Now 57, he attended segregated schools in his earliest years, and he saw how African Americans were forced to use separate entrances and public facilities. By the time he attended Cape Henlopen High School, it was desegregated, and he graduated from Eastern University, Harvard Law School and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
(Photo courtesy of Salesianum School)
He said he was honored to speak at Salesianum, the first school in Delaware to admit African American students, although he couldn’t resist reminding the school community that Cape Henlopen defeated the Sals for the state basketball championship during his sophomore year in 1975.
Stevenson reeled off some sobering statistics for his audience before advising them how they could make a difference. There are 2.3 million people in jails and prisons in the United States, making ours the most punitive nation on earth. A criminal record, or even an arrest without a resulting conviction, hurts those looking for jobs and applying for loans, for example. It is estimated that one in three black male babies in the U.S. will go to jail, he said, as will one in six Hispanics.
“But I don’t want to talk about problems this morning,” Stevenson said. “I want to talk about solutions.”
To find solutions, he listed four things people need to do. The first is to “get proximate.”
“You need to get close to the poor and the excluded. There is power in proximity,” he said.
At both Harvard Law and at the Kennedy School, no one talked about the human cost of his subject matter. So he went to Atlanta and worked with lawyers who represented death-row inmates. There, he met with inmates and learned their backgrounds and about the legal representation they had during their trials. He advocated for men who were grateful that someone had taken an interest in their lives, even when the lawyers Stevenson worked for were unable to stop their executions. His experience there continues to influence his life.
“If you get closer to the places where there is a lot of abuse and suffering, you will get power,” he said.
He founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1994 after Congress eliminated funding for the death penalty defense for lower-income people. It guarantees representation for anyone in Alabama sentenced to death.
The second thing that needs to be done is to change the narrative that sustains suffering and injustice, Stevenson said.
Drug addicts, he said, are described as criminals, not sick, but alcoholics have a disease. A politics of fear and anger has resulted in hundreds of thousands of men and women going to prison. If you allow yourself to be governed that way, you will accept a life of fear, he added.
Stevenson went on. A generation of young people has been labeled “super-predators,” some as young as 7 years old. Thirteen states have no age minimum for trying children as adults.
“We’ve created a world where we throw away children,” he said. “We have to change that narrative.”
A history of racial injustice in the United States “has created this smog, and we breathe it in.” Slave owners wanted to feel moral, so they made slaves less than human, equal to three-fifths of a human until the passage of the 14th Amendment. Slavery as we know it may have ended in 1865, but it has evolved, Stevenson said.
Third on his list is staying hopeful.
“Don’t let anybody take away your aspirations,” he told his audience. “You’ve got to hold on to your hope. Your hope is your superpower.”
If you don’t have hope, you have problems, he added.
Lastly, Stevenson urged the students, they must be willing to do uncomfortable things, which goes against our internal inclinations. In his work, he has seen very positive outcomes, where executions are stayed or the wrongly convicted go free, but also painful ones that have him questioning himself. But if those in power are unwilling to do these four things, who will?
Society’s broken people show us the path to justice, he said. “It’s in brokenness that we understand our humanity.”
