Attorney and activist Bryan Stevenson spoke to zakcheneyrice about how America’s racial sins live on in our criminal justice system — and his belief that a transformation is possible
Bryan Stevenson. Photo: Nick Frontiero/Courtesy of HBO Before I meet with Bryan Stevenson, I tour the museum he opened around the corner from his office. The heat in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, is more Arizona suburb than Gulf riverfront today, but thankfully, the Legacy Museum’s employees resist the impulse to blast subzero air conditioning to compensate. The museum has been operating for more than a year now.
“I appreciate your observations about the museum, because we were very motivated to make it first-person,” Stevenson tells me. We’re sitting across a table from one another in an eerily quiet conference room. Were he not dressed in funereal black and white, he’d look like a Buddhist monk: bald, clean-shaven, and serene, with a face that could be anywhere from 35 to 65 years old. Stevenson is one of the most accomplished defense attorneys in the country.
Stevenson’s knack for galvanizing narratives is as evident in these facilities as it is when he speaks in public. In talks to large audiences, he dances fluidly between the measured intonation of a therapist and the soaring rhetorical fervor of a preacher. He has a wealth of personal anecdotes to illustrate his expertise and advance his provocative arguments.
Barriers to such proximity abound — as evidenced in places like Stevenson’s own Legacy Museum. The testimony from prisoners showcased in the booths in the back corner are conspicuous, in part, because such testimony rarely sees daylight. That is by design. “That personal account is so powerful that there is always a reaction against, to limit it,” Stevenson says. In prisons today, such repression includes security crackdowns that target communication.
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