Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
If you're feeling overwhelmed numb afraid, exhausted by what you're seeing in the news and you're wondering how do you hold on to hope when the world feels so scary and uncertain.
Well, today I want to put my arm around you and I'm going to tell you, you're not alone.
I'm feeling it too.
I don't know about you, but when things feel so terrifying, when it's hard to know what to do or to say, or doing anything matters, I always look to my heroes.
And Bryan Stevenson, he is one of them.
If there's one person that can convince you that right now you need to keep hope alive, to stand up, to be brave, to challenge the injustice that you see and understand that your voice, your actions matter.
They matter in a moment like this.
It is Bryan Stevenson.
Brian Stevenson is a world-renowned constitutional law and civil rights attorney, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the author of the generation-defining New York Times bestselling book turned award-winning film, Just Mercy.
Now, I wanted you to hear from Brian today because I'm just as upset as you are.
And if you're looking for answers, I have been too.
And so, just a couple days ago, I went back over the almost 400 episodes that we've released, And this, this is the singular one that I re-listen to.
See, there's just something about Brian's voice, the way that he shares his remarkable life, the wisdom.
It's the reminder that you need right now.
That's why I wanted to share this again with you.
See, this isn't the only time in history where things have felt this way.
Brian will teach you how to find hope when all hope seems lost.
He will inspire you to show up in moments of injustice.
And that standing for something, fighting for fairness, believing in due process and constitutional rights it matters.
Your compassion isn't weakness.
It's strength.
It's courage.
And that's where hope begins.
It begins in choosing to believe that together we can change things for the better.
But it starts within each and every one of us.
It starts within you.
It's not somebody else's responsibility to fix this.
Don't forget that a country is not defined by this current moment.
It's defined by its people, you and me, and how we respond to it.
The fact that this is upsetting you means you value justice, dignity, and fairness and compassion.
So it's on all of us, as Mahatma Gandhi said, to be the change you wish to see in the world.
And I know listening to Brian today is going to stir something inside you to be part of the change that we all wish to see.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
It's such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you.
And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this with you, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
I'm so happy that, in a moment like this, when the headlines are so discouraging, upsetting and the world feels very scary, that you chose to hit play in a conversation that will give you hope.
Because in times like this, I'll admit, it feels very hard to hold on to hope.
But that's what we all need to do.
You know, just a couple days ago I was looking back through the almost 400 episodes that we've released on this podcast, and it was this conversation that you're about to listen to with world-renowned civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson that I turned to.
I felt so moved as I listened to it again that I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to share with you today.
Because Brian says hope is what will sustain you when things look bleak and difficult.
And he also says we cannot succumb to hopelessness right now.
Because hopelessness is the enemy of justice and compassion and kindness and courage.
And there's just something about the way Brian communicates the tone of his voice.
That put me at ease.
And I know it's going to put you at ease too, but it will also awaken something inside of you in a reassuring, soul-stirring way.
See, Bryan Stevenson puts words to what you're feeling right now, and he also reminds you of what you know to be true.
His life, his work are evidence that, even in the hardest moments, your voice and your actions make all the difference.
Bryan Stevenson is a world-renowned civil rights attorney.
He's a Harvard Law and Harvard Kennedy School graduate.
He has argued and won multiple landmark cases before the United States Supreme Court.
His mega best-selling book Just Mercy was named one of the most influential books of the decade by CNN.
It was then turned into an award-winning feature film starring Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx that went on to win four NAACP Image Awards.
Brian has received some of the highest honors that any human being can be awarded.
The MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, the American Bar Association Medal and the National Medal of Liberty from the ACLU.
He is also the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that, for over 30 years, has provided legal representation to people on death row, children tried as adults, individuals with intellectual disabilities and others who have been unfairly incarcerated or abused by the legal system.
Under his leadership, the Equal Justice Initiative has helped has helped change laws across the United States and has won reversals or release for more than 140 death row prisoners, many of whom were innocent and wrongly convicted for crimes they did not commit.
That's not just 140 people.
That's 140 families and communities that were saved, too.
Grace is not one of those things you think about until you need it.
Hope is not something you think you need until you're in despair.
It's why this conversation matters right now.
Brian is here to show you how to look deeper within yourself and to stand up, even when the world is telling you to sit down.
And in doing that, he'll remind you that hope might just be the most powerful gift you can give to the world, to other people and to yourself.
So please help me welcome Brian Stevenson to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Brian, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here with us today.
It is an absolute honor to meet you and to sit down and learn from you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here.
My pleasure.
Could you speak directly to the person who's with us right now and tell them what they might experience that could be different in their life?
If they truly take to heart everything that you're about to share with us and teach us today.
I think if you embrace compassion as a way of life, it will make you feel strong and And it will make you feel beautiful.
And we underestimate the power of feeling beautiful as a human being and strong as a human being.
And, for me, embracing compassion, letting it guide us as we encounter people, as we navigate complex and difficult situations, as we try to overcome heartbreak and a lot of the things that just happen in life.
When we lead with compassion, I just think there's a beautiful return on that approach.
And it certainly has affirmed me, and I've seen it inspire people as well.
Brian, you have always inspired me.
Your work has fundamentally changed the laws in the United States.
Your work has saved people's lives.
You have written one of the most important books of this century.
It has been made into a movie and still the person who is with us right now might not know of your work.
They might be meeting you for the first time.
So what do you want them to know about the kind of work that you do and the things that you believe?
I want them to know that justice matters, that how we treat one another matters.
My work and the work of the Equal Justice Initiative is about doing justice for people who are experiencing injustice.
It's about valuing mercy as a way to recover from harm and hardship.
And I'm persuaded that a more just world is a more beautiful world.
A more just world is a world with less conflict and division and strife.
It's a world with more love.
And so my work is really about trying to increase the justice quotient in our nation and have everybody experience the beauty of justice.
What does that mean to you?
Like, what does the word justice mean?
I think justice is a constant struggle.
It's not a destination.
It's not a fixed place.
It's the way we navigate the inevitable conflicts and divisions that come in a world where there's a hierarchy of power.
Some people have less power than other people.
When people who have less power are harmed or victimized or mistreated, it's hard for them sometimes to have recovery for that.
And that's injustice.
And for people who have more power, it's important to appreciate the power you have and the obligation you have to use that power to make sure other people aren't being harmed anymore anymore than is necessary.
And so, for me, justice is this navigation of how we move through the world when there's difference, when there's not equality.
And how we recover from harm and wrongdoing and abuse.
It's something that I think essentially is the constant struggle we have to commit to.
Just like a relationship is not something you can say, I've got a relationship and now you're done.
It requires... nurturing.
It requires give and take.
It requires questioning.
It requires checking in.
I mean, injustice is in many ways the same way.
We have to constantly be thinking about was that just?
Was that right?
Is this the best we can do?
Is there something that's fairer?
Is there something that's going to lead to a better outcome than what we've done?
And the word mercy.
You know, I think for me for a long time, when someone did something remarkable to express their sorrow and regret, I used to think that's when they deserve mercy.
And that's when we should perhaps give them a second chance, because they're demonstrating so much remorse and regret today.
What I now believe is that mercy isn't something that is dependent on what someone else does.
I think it's dependent on who we are.
I think we should give it to people, even when we're not seeing the regret and the remorse that we'd like to see.
It's a way of moving through the world.
And to want mercy when we make mistakes, I believe, requires us to give mercy when other people make mistakes.
Doesn't mean that you don't demand respect and accountability when people do bad things.
It doesn't mean that you let people walk all over you, but it does mean that you're not looking for the worst in others.
You're not trying to create a world of us versus them.
You're not trying to build division where you're on one side of the wall and other people on the other side of the wall and they don't deserve mercy and you do.
It's the opposite of that.
It's the way in which we think about tearing down walls and creating less harm, less injury, less misunderstanding, by being willing to give as much mercy as we hope people will give us.
Brian, before we get into all the remarkable work that you do, your background and these transformational themes of hope and grace and compassion, Is there a story that you would want to share from your work with a person who's never even considered the idea of extending grace to somebody in prison or somebody condemned to death row?
Yeah, I think it's the beauty of a journey.
You keep learning things.
And I represented a man who was intellectually disabled.
He asked me to try to prevent his execution.
He'd already been through the appeals process.
Even though I knew it would be very hard to stop the execution.
You know, we jumped in because our courts have actually banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities.
So I went to the trial judge and said, he's intellectually disabled, you can't execute him.
But the trial judge again said, too late, somebody should have filed that motion years ago.
The appellate court said too late.
The federal court said too late.
And I did the hardest thing I have to do, which is to pick up the phone and talk to this man.
I said, I'm so sorry, but I can't stop this execution.
And then he did the thing that I dread.
He started to cry.
He became very emotional.
And he was literally sobbing on the other end of the phone and I just gave him space and I was holding the phone.
And then he said, please don't hang up, Mr. Stevenson.
There's something I want to say to you.
I said, of course.
And then he tried to say something to me.
But, in addition to being intellectually disabled, when he got overwhelmed, when he got distraught and challenged,
He had a speech impediment and he would really struggle to get his words out.
So he began stuttering terribly.
He could not get out a single word.
And I was standing there holding the phone and tears were literally running down my face.
It was so challenging that my mind wandered.
And I remembered when I was a little boy.
My mom had taken us to church and I was talking to my friends and there was this little skinny kid I'd never seen before.
And I remembered on this night, turning to that kid and saying, hey man, what's your name?
And this little boy tried to answer my question but he also had a speech impediment and he couldn't get his words out and he stuttered terribly.
And then I remembered that I did something really ignorant.
When that little boy couldn't get his words out right, I laughed.
And my mother saw me laughing and she gave me this look I'd never seen before.
And she came over and grabbed me by the arm and pulled me aside.
She said, Brian, don't you ever laugh at somebody because they can't get their words out right.
And even at 10, I was a little bit of a young lawyer.
And I was like, Mom, I wasn't laughing.
I couldn't hear.
There were lights going on.
There were things happening all around me.
And my mother said, no, Brian, you know better than that.
And then she looked at me.
She said, now you go back over there and you tell that little boy you're sorry.
I said, okay.
And I took a step and my mom wasn't satisfied.
She grabbed me by the arm.
She said, wait, after you tell that little boy you're sorry, I want you to hug that little boy.
And I kind of rolled my eyes.
I said, okay, mom.
And I took a step and then she grabbed me by the arm again.
She said, wait, after you hug that little boy, I want you to tell that little boy you love him.
I said, mom, I can't go over there and tell that little boy I love him.
She gave me that look.
I said, all right.
I remember going over to that little boy saying, look, man, you know, well, I'm sorry.
And then I lunged at him and gave him my little boy version of a man hug.
And then I remember trying to say as insincerely as I possibly could.
I said, you know, well, I don't know.
Well, I love you.
And what I'd forgotten was how that little boy hugged me back.
Nice.
And then he whispered flawlessly in my ear, he said, I love you too.
And I was thinking about that while my client was trying to get his words out.
And finally, my client got his words out and he said, I just want to thank you for fighting for me.
And the last thing that man said to me.
He says I want you to know that I love you for trying to save my life.
He hung up the phone, they pulled him away, they strapped him to a gurney, and they executed him.
That moment was the moment when I said, I just can't do this anymore.
It just seemed too much.
And I think it was because I realized with great intensity how broken he was.
And the question I had in my mind is, why do we want to kill all the broken people?
What is it about us that when we see brokenness in other people, we want to hurt them for it, kill them for it?
I represent the broken.
All of my clients have been broken by poverty, broken by trauma, broken by addiction, broken by illness.
Broken by disability, broken by despair.
And then I realized I work in a broken system because the people with power won't get proximate.
They don't have hope.
They're unwilling to be compassionate.
And I was sitting there just thinking about why do I do what I do?
And that was the moment when I had this realization.
I don't do what I do because I've been trained as a lawyer.
I don't do what I do because somebody has to do it.
I don't even do what I do because it's about human rights or justice.
That's part of it.
But what I realized that night that I'd never realized before is that I do what I do because I'm broken too.
I am not unflawed.
I am not unblemished.
I am not uncomplicated in the same ways that the people I represent are.
But I do believe in the power of redemption.
I do believe in grace.
I do believe in mercy.
I do believe in restoration because I have been the beneficiary of so much grace and so much mercy.
That man, before he was executed, gave me something so powerful, so beautiful, so affirming.
And that's why I think we should do better for the broken. that we encounter.
We should think better of the broken that we encounter, because just as we can give to them, they can give to us.
And it does, for me, become important to talk about the fact that we can't create a perfect world, but we can create a world that's filled with more grace, more mercy and more love.
Brian, I would love to go back and have you share a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today.
I'm grateful that I am the heir of so many hopeful people, people who had to do things much harder than I've had to do.
By living in Montgomery, Alabama, I have a vantage point that I feel really privileged by.
The generation of people who came before me in that community would have to put on their Sunday best.
They'd go places to push for the right to vote, push for the right to be treated fairly.
They'd be on their knees praying and they'd get beaten and battered and bloodied.
And they'd go home and change their clothes and wipe the blood off, and they'd go and do it again.
And I haven't been beaten and battered and bloodied as the people who came before me.
I stand on the shoulders of people who did so much more with so much less.
It's their hope that shapes my hope.
My great-grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia.
Know, when i went to harvard law school, you know they tried to make everybody feel uh welcome on the first day and you know they took out groups of 13 students and my group leader just asked everybody in the group why are you in law school?
And the people in my group started invoking these familial connections.
They were all talking about how they were the son or the daughter or the grandson, the granddaughter, the nephew, the niece of a lawyer.
And after the fifth one, I started to squirm a bit because I knew I wasn't related to a lawyer.
And then, after the seventh or eighth person had made that same invocation of a family relation, I really started to feel diminished.
And then I realized that not only was I not related to a lawyer, I realized, I'd never even met a lawyer.
And by the time they got to me, I just felt so out of place that I didn't answer the question.
I told a joke.
I tried to distract people.
And as soon as that meeting was over, I called my mom.
I said, mom, I don't belong at this law school.
And I had one of those kind of mothers.
My mother said, what are you talking about?
You belong wherever you go.
You're the smartest person in the world.
You can do anything you want to do.
And then she said, now you need to go find those kids and tell them why you're really in law school.
And I felt better after talking to my mom, but I didn't think I could actually pull those kids together.
Two weeks into law school, I still felt off.
And I finally did what she encouraged me to do.
And I found as many of the kids in my little group as I could.
And I said, I didn't tell the truth on the first day of law school.
I need to tell you why I'm in law school.
And I told them that my great-grandfather I said I'm in law school because my great-grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia
And despite the fact that it was against the law for an enslaved person to learn to read or write.
My great-grandfather risked his life to learn to read and write.
He could have been sold, he could have been killed, but he had a hope of freedom so great that he was willing to risk his life.
And this was the 1850s.
He didn't know a civil war was coming the next decade, but he still had that hope of freedom.
And after emancipation, my grandmother told me that my great-grandfather would sit on the porch of their home and read the newspaper to people who were formerly enslaved, who didn't know how to read, because he wanted them to know what was going on.
And she loved the fact that he knew how to read and she would push her siblings out of the way when he started reading and she would wrap her arms around his leg when he started reading because she wanted to learn to read.
And she thought you learned to read by touching somebody while they read.
And he figured out what she was doing.
He said, no, Victoria, that's not how you learn to read.
I'll teach you how to read.
And he taught her how to read.
And my grandmother worked as a domestic her whole life, but she was a reader.
She had this hope.
That reading could create a better world, a bigger world, a more fulfilling world.
And she gave it to her children.
My grandmother had 10 children.
My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids.
I'd go visit my grandmother and sometimes she'd stand on the porch and before she would let you in you would have to read something from a book.
That's how committed she was to reading.
As I said, we grew up in this poor world.
A lot of people didn't have a lot of things.
There were people who had outhouses.
They didn't have running water.
Most of the people worked in poultry plants.
You didn't see a lot of hope outside the door.
But when I was a little boy, my mother went into debt. and bought us the World Book Encyclopedia.
She bought us these books and you could see so many beautiful things in these books, the things you couldn't see outside the door.
And she had this hope that this investment in books that she couldn't afford would do something for her children.
And I can't claim to have always understood that, because when you're 10, Christmas comes along.
You go outside and your friends are like well, I got a bicycle, I got a baseball, I got a basketball.
And I'd have to say, well, I got volume G of the World Book Encyclopedia.
But I told my classmates at Harvard Law School I'm here because there are generations of hopeful people who have positioned me here.
It's the hope of my enslaved great-grandfather.
It's the hope of my grandmother who had to flee the South because of terror, violence, and lynching.
It's the hope of my parents.
And their hope is what sustains me.
And all of a sudden, I didn't feel diminished at Harvard Law School.
In fact, I felt like maybe I had something that other people might not have.
Did you know you wanted to work with people on death row?
Did you know you wanted to do constitutional and criminal justice work and social justice work?
When you went to law school, what did you think you were going to do, Brian?
That's a great question.
No, I had no idea.
I knew I wanted to help the poor.
I knew I wanted to give back in the ways that people had given me as a child of the civil rights movement.
I knew I wanted to do something about the justice quotient in this country, but I didn't know where that would take me.
And, to be honest, I was kind of frustrated in my first two months at Harvard because nobody seemed to be talking about the poor, or equality, or justice.
I finished my first year and I went over to the School of Government to get a degree in public policy.
And I remember the day, two months into that program, when I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror and I thought wow, I'm even more miserable here than I was at the law school, because they were teaching us how to maximize benefits and minimize costs.
But it didn't seem to matter whose benefits got maximized and whose costs got minimized.
And I went back to the law school and was really in the Until I took a course that required me to get proximate.
That's when things came together for me.
My law school professor, Elizabeth Bartholet, who I'm forever grateful to, taught a course where she allowed her students to spend one month working with a human rights organization somewhere in the country.
And I went to Atlanta Georgia, to work with what was then called the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, this group of lawyers who represented people on death row.
And they seemed so mission-driven.
They seemed so purposeful.
They got up early.
They had a clarity of purpose that I just loved.
And after I'd been there a week, one of them said oh Brian, we want you to go to death row and meet somebody we haven't had time to meet.
Just explain to him that he's not at risk of execution anytime in the next year.
We're worried he may not know that.
So, of course, I said yes.
I got in my car.
I started driving to Jackson, Georgia.
But then it hit me that I was just this law student.
I didn't know anything.
I'd never been to death row.
I'd never been.
Had you been inside a prison?
I had not been in a maximum prison.
I'd done some work at a low-level prison in the Boston area, but first time in any kind of secure maximum prison.
And I just started to feel completely unprepared.
And I parked my car and I went into the prison.
The guards were not very nice.
They sent me to the back in this visitation room.
And I was so anxious that I tried to rehearse exactly what I was going to say.
And then they brought this condemned man into the room.
And I remember being struck by how burdened with chains he was.
He had handcuffs on his wrist.
He had a chain around his waist.
He had shackles on his ankles.
It took them 10 minutes to unchain him.
And he walked over to me and I was so overwhelmed.
I just started to apologize.
I said, I'm so sorry.
I'm just a law student.
I don't know anything about the death penalty.
I don't know anything about criminal procedure.
I don't know anything about appellate procedure, civil procedure.
And then I remembered what I was supposed to say.
I said but they sent me down here to tell you that you're not at risk of execution anytime in the next year.
And when I said that, the man said, wait, wait, wait, say that again.
I said, you're not at risk of execution any time in the next year.
And the man said, wait, wait, say that again.
I said, you're not at risk of execution any time in the next year.
And that's when this man hugged me.
And he said, thank you, thank you, thank you.
He said you're the first person I've met in the two years I've been on death row who's not a death row prisoner or death row guard.
He said I've been talking to my wife and kids but I haven't let them come and visit because I was afraid I'd have an execution date and I don't want them to have to deal with that.
He said, now because of you, I'm going to see my wife.
I'm going to see my kids.
And I couldn't believe how, even in my ignorance, just being proximate could have an impact on the quality of someone's life.
That man and I, it turned out, were exactly the same age.
We had the same birth date, same month, same day, same year.
He started asking me questions about my life.
I asked him questions about his life.
And we just fell into this conversation.
And I forgot I was a law student.
I forgot he was a condemned person on death row.
We were just two people talking.
And the visit was only scheduled for an hour, but we kept talking.
I just lost track of time.
And one hour turned to two hours, two hours turned to three hours.
The guards were waiting for me to finish.
And after three hours, they got angry and they couldn't take it anymore.
So they came bursting into the room and they grabbed this man and they threw him against the wall.
They pulled his arms back.
They put the handcuffs on his wrists really tightly.
They wrapped the chain around his waist.
They were treating very roughly.
They put the shackles on. back on his ankles, and I begged them to be gentler.
I said, look, it's not his fault, it's my fault.
He didn't do anything wrong, but they ignored me.
Then they started shoving this man toward the door, really pushing him, and it upset me.
I said, please, you don't have to do that.
He didn't do anything wrong, but they ignored me.
And they got that man near the door.
And I'll never forget how when he got near the door, he planted his feet.
And when they tried to shove him through the door, he didn't move.
And then he turned to me and he looked at me and he said, Brian, don't worry about this.
You just come back.
And then he did this thing I'll never, ever forget.
I stood there and I watched him close his eyes, throw his head back, and then he started to sing.
And he started singing this hymn.
He started singing.
I'm pressing on the upward way, new heights I'm gaining every day, still praying as I'm onward bound.
And then he said, Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.
Everybody stopped.
And then the guards recovered and they started pushing him down the hallway.
And you could hear the chains clanging as they pushed him down the hallway.
But you could hear this condemned man singing about higher ground.
And when I heard that song, when I heard him sing, that's when everything changed for me.
That was the moment that I knew.
I wanted to help condemned people get to higher ground.
But I also knew at that moment that my journey to higher ground was going to be tied to his journey.
And when I went back to Harvard Law School, I was completely changed.
You couldn't get me out of the law school library after that because I needed to know everything about federalism and comedy and appellate procedure and criminal procedure and habeas corpus and all of the procedural doctrines.
I needed to become a master of the law.
Because I wanted to help condemned people get to higher ground.
And now 40 years later, sometimes people say, well, how have you helped all these people get relief?
How have you won these cases at the Supreme Court?
And I know they want me to say it's because I'm hardworking.
We try to be smart.
We try to be tactical.
And we do try to be tactical and smart and work hard together.
But the truth is is that if I've helped anybody during my 40 years as a lawyer, it's not because I'm hardworking or smart or tactical.
It's because I got close enough to a condemned man to hear his song.
And I believe that there are songs still being sung in jails and prisons all across this country.
I think in places where there's poverty and despair and oppression, there are songs still being sung.
And when we get close enough to hear those songs, Those melodies, teach us something about what being human is about.
They teach us something about what justice is about.
And I think we should get proximate not just to help other people, I think we should get proximate to help ourselves.
Because it's been the greatest gift that someone could give to me to be in the midst of justice and condemnation, to stand next to the condemned and the hated and disfavored, and to see the power of love create something beautiful, which is what happens sometimes.
When we are committed to proximity, when we're committed to seeing the humanity and dignity of every human being.
One of the things that your grandmother said is that you can't understand important things from a distance.
You have to get close.
What does that mean to you?
I do believe that when we are proximate to the poor, to the excluded, to the marginalized, we hear things we won't otherwise hear.
We see things that we won't otherwise see.
And I don't think it's just the way we deal with poverty and injustice.
I think in life... to be a good leader, to be a good parent, to be a good teacher.
We have to be close to the people we are trying to serve.
We have to understand what they're seeing, what they're hearing.
And when we're distant, we can't do that as well.
We judge.
We judge.
To get proximate.
We have to sometimes choose to get closer to people who are struggling, people who have fallen down a problems in the world that need our attention.
We don't shield ourselves from the world's problems, but we have enough character and enough generosity and enough courage that we will actually go places where people are suffering and struggling and help, if we can help.
I think it is our better nature.
It absolutely is.
I think it is our hardwiring.
And one of the things I love about you is, every time I listen to you or every time I read something that you write, you remind me of my better nature, of our collective better nature.
I am so glad that you're here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brian.
This feels like a really good time to hit the pause button and give our sponsors a chance to share a few words.
And I also want to give you a chance to share this with people that you care about.
I mean, what a remarkable conversation to experience.
And we're just getting started.
So don't go anywhere.
After this short break, Brian Stevenson and I will be waiting for you.
We'll see you there.
Welcome back.
It's your buddy Mel Robbins.
Today you and I have the extraordinary honor of getting to sit with and learn from Bryan Stevenson.
You know, in your book you have this beautiful, beautiful thing that you write on page 309.
I remind people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
The woman's accusers retreated and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more.
But today, our self-righteousness, our fear and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion.
I told the congregation that we can't simply watch that happen.
I told them we have to be a stone catcher.
What does it mean to walk through life as a stone catcher?
It can feel challenging and exhausting, but it's also really empowering.
If we have the ability to catch a stone, to exercise that ability and to know, we're not only helping the person who would have been the target of that violence, but we're also helping the person who threw the stone.
Because what they don't realize yet is that to get to redemption, to get to grace, to get to the, the beloved community that we talk so much about, we can't throw stones at one another because we're angry and afraid.
And sometimes people get overwhelmed and they can't remember that until they pick the stone up and they throw it.
And I not only want to help the person they're throwing the stone at, but I want to help them have the opportunity to recover from the mistake of harsh judgment, of violent judgment against someone in a way that's less consequential.
And, you know, one of the things that I'd like to believe is that if you catch one stone, it becomes easier to catch the next one, even though it's bigger.
It becomes a way of life.
It becomes a way of moving through the world.
And...
And I'm grateful that people have caught stones for me.
You know, growing up in a poor, racially segregated community.
You know, I started my education in a colored school when I was a little boy.
They didn't let black children attend the public schools.
There were no high schools for black people in our county when my dad was a teenager, so he couldn't go to high school.
So I was raised in this poor community where most of the adults didn't have high school degrees, not because they weren't smart or hardworking, but there literally were no high schools for black people.
And then lawyers came into our community and made them open up the public schools.
And because these lawyers got proximate to poor kids like me, I got to go to the public schools.
Now, how old are you, Brian?
I am 65.
Wow.
See, I think it is shocking to just consider that there are people in the United States.
You're only 65 years old.
That's right.
And when you were in elementary school, you're just 10 years older than me.
Yeah.
You were in an elementary school segregated for colored children.
Yeah.
I mean, that is, it is so...
Which is shocking to me how we have forgotten the history that is even so recent and the ways it's playing out to this day.
Yeah, I think that's so true, Mel.
And I do think one of the failures we have tolerated is our unwillingness to remember, to confront honestly this history.
There are people in other parts of the country who were 15 years younger than me who didn't experience integration in education until the 1970s late 1970s because there was so much resistance to this.
And the thing that even in my county, which was 80 white and 20 black, if you had a vote on whether to let Bryan Stevenson into the public schools, we would have lost the vote because the majority of people didn't want that integration.
It took a commitment to the rule of law that these lawyers enforced for those school doors to open, which is why I ultimately became a lawyer, because there was a power in using the rule of law to help disfavored people, to help marginalized people, to help people who people wanted to exclude.
And when i finished law school in the 80s, this population of people being sent to jails and prisons and, most specifically, the people who were being condemned to death, facing execution, were the people who i felt were most in need of the rule of law And justice.
And justice.
And compassion.
All of that.
Because they hadn't gotten it most of their life.
That's exactly right.
And for me, stone catching is like embracing people who are struggling, who are falling down, who are not sure they can do it.
And it's the gift we all get.
I mean.
One of the things I'm persuaded is that, no matter what your education level, no matter where you live, no matter how old you are, no matter what you think about this or that, we all have the capacity to get close to someone who's fallen down, who's suffering, who's struggling, who's overwhelmed, and wrap our arms around them and affirm their humanity and their dignity.
For me, that's what stone-catching is all about.
It's about affirming the humanity and the dignity of the people whose humanity and dignity is being questioned, who have become hopeless and despairing about their humanity and dignity.
And as the recipient of that kind of stone catching and that kind of affirmation, I don't feel any choice but to participate in sharing that with the people I encounter.
It has been extraordinarily transformative for me to move through my life with this lens of understanding that, judging somebody from one paragraph in the book of their life, there's no way you can get the whole story.
And that it's easier to give people mercy and compassion and understanding and grace when you put it in the context of everything that this person has had to endure or experience.
Does not justify what people do, but it certainly makes you a person that has more compassion and grace.
And it brings me to something that you often say, which is each of us is more than the worst thing we've done.
What does that mean to you?
It means that if someone tells a lie, they're not just a liar.
If someone takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief.
I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer.
And we shouldn't be judged by just that one bad act.
I think we all don't want to be reduced to the worst thing we've ever done.
No human being wants to be imprisoned by one mistake, one falsehood, one bad reaction.
We desperately yearn to be seen as something more than that.
And I think it's worth committing to a worldview that allows that to shape our thinking.
And in so many of our institutions, in so many places, we've not done that.
Our criminal justice system is a system that seems very much rooted in this idea that you can only be the crime you've been accused of.
And I think that leads to a lot of injustice.
It leads to a lot of misjudgment about who people are.
I mean.
For me, it's been important to commit to this concept that we're all more than the worst thing we've ever done, because I don't want to be judged by the worst things I've done.
But I also realize I have to share that with other people.
It's interesting in this country for a long time we had legislators that, when you listen to them, talk about creating new sentences and punishments.
They talk as if they can put crimes in prison.
I hate that crime, so I want to give that 20 years.
I hate that crime, I want to give it 50 years.
And they're talking as if they have the ability to put a crime in prison, to put it in there for life and all of these other things.
But we don't have the ability to put crimes in prison.
We can only put people in prison.
And people are not crimes.
They can commit crimes.
And we could want to hold them accountable for the crimes they've committed.
But there's a difference between a person and a crime.
And when we focus on the person, the conversation tends to shift.
We tend to think differently.
A woman who's been abused for 20 years and suffered just unimaginable pain and humiliation at the hands of someone who just thought they could do whatever they want, who finally reacts, even violently, is not just a violent offender.
She is someone who is trying to manage decades of abuse and mistreatment.
And if our laws and our policies don't reflect the fact that she is more than that moment of of violence, that moment of reaction, then we're going to do something unjust.
We're going to put her in prison for life without parole.
We may even sentence her to death.
We have reduced her to this worse act.
I've never represented anybody who was only the crime they've committed.
And that's the difficulty of not being more explicit about this concept that we are all more than the worst thing we've ever done.
You know, and the other thing that I think is really important because I think about this a lot which is it's not even that you're more than the worst thing you've ever done.
I also believe you can become more than the worst thing you've ever done.
And I love the distinction because I've never really thought about it that way that we are trying to put a crime in prison that all we've focused on is the punishment and containment piece.
We have not focused on the person piece and making someone whole so that if they are released after serving their sentence, they have been rehabilitated so they can step back in to life.
I mean.
I also am horrified by how we then put up so many obstacles and continue to judge and punish people after they have served the sentence for the crime and made it even harder for them to live a life where they can contribute and be somebody that has done the time.
They have changed who they are.
Because clearly, if you listen to this show, you know that I am a person who believes that absolutely anybody can become a better person.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And I think what's been very gratifying about my work is that I see that play out every day in the clients that I represent.
I represent a lot of children, and when you're 13 or 14 and you end up being sentenced to life in prison in an adult facility, there's a presumption that you must be awful and irredeemable.
And I just think that's a mistake.
I think what distinguishes children from adults is that they're in a constant state of change.
They are not who they are going to be In a decade.
Physically emotionally psychologically, biologically we change as we go through adolescence.
And in many states, we don't permit that change to take place.
We have 13 states in the United States that have no minimum age for trying a child as an adult.
So I represent eight and nine-year-old kids sometimes who are facing 50- and 60-year prison sentences.
Eight and nine-year-old kids?
Eight and nine-year-old children.
We have these 13 states where there's no minimum age.
When these laws took effect about 40 years ago, I started getting calls from parents saying of five- and six-year-old children who were being put in handcuffs in kindergarten for behaviors.
And it was this kind of zero tolerance, this mindset that children can just be crimes.
And I think what you're saying about the capacity for change is most dramatic in that population for me, because one of the things I quickly learned is that when I represent young kids, I can't just be a lawyer.
I've got to be a parent. and a brother, and a counselor, and a friend.
Because children in these really hostile, violent environments are still yearning for affection.
They're still yearning for something that makes them feel valuable.
And so one of the things I quickly realized is that my young plants were constantly wanting me to visit them, like every week.
And they'd be in prisons hundreds of miles away.
So I started doing this thing where I would say, I'm going to send you a book.
When you read the book, I will come and see you to talk about it.
And my clients, who were many of them very reluctant readers, some of them not good readers, started this whole reading thing.
And I would send them harder and harder books.
And I would pick the books.
And then I started letting them pick the books.
A client who was sentenced to life when he was 14, and I've now represented him for 30 years.
And a couple of years ago, he called me late at night.
And I was a little kind of provoked because he's not supposed to call that late.
But I picked up and I said, why are you calling so late?
He says, it's an emergency.
I said, what's the emergency?
He said, I finished the book. that you sent me and you have to come and see me."
I said, I don't even remember what book I sent you.
And then he told me that he had just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, my favorite book in college.
It was a book that just changed my thinking.
And when he started talking excitedly about all of the things he wanted to discuss that he read in this book, It just moved me so much.
And here I was talking to someone who people think is beyond redemption, beyond hope, beyond restoration.
And he's talking about how much he loves the characters in this book who are constantly being compassionate, who are navigating difficulty.
And I think that's the gift of believing that we can become better.
Brian, you wrote about him in your book and I want to read the poem that he wrote while he was in prison.
This is page 147 from your remarkable book, Just Mercy, and the poem's entitled Uncried Tears.
Imagine teardrops left uncried from pain, trapped inside waiting to escape through the windows of your eyes.
Why won't you let us out?
The tears questioned the conscious.
Relinquish your fears and doubts and heal yourself in the process.
The conscience told the tears.
I know you really want me to cry, but if I release you from bondage in gaining your freedom, you die.
The tears gave it some thought before giving the conscious an answer.
If crying brings you to triumph, then dying's not such a disaster.
That's by Ian E. Manuel, Union Correctional Institution.
You know, when we talk about grace, it's often easier to give a child grace, right?
But not in the criminal justice system.
Can you describe what it's like to walk into a prison system that has been built for and designed for adults and find yourself sitting across from an eight, nine or 10 year old child?
Yeah, I think one of the most tragic things that's happened over the last half century is this false idea that some children aren't children.
And it was spread by criminologists and a lot of policy people in the 1980s who were going around arguing about that some kids look like kids and sound like kids.
They said, but these aren't children.
And they actually came up with this term.
They said, these are, quote, super predators.
And that label was applied to a lot of children.
And we started doing very unhealthy things.
We created pipelines from schoolhouses to jailhouses.
We started lowering the minimum age for trying children.
As adults, we created this zero tolerance mindset.
And we added to the stress that hundreds of thousands of kids are living with because they're growing up in violent families and violent communities.
They're not being embraced, they're not being hugged, they're being associated.
Ian, whose poem you read, was 13 years old when he was arrested and ultimately convicted of a crime.
It was a non-homicide offense.
It took place in Florida.
He was so small that they had to cut the legs off of the uniform to get him something that would fit him.
They decided not to put him in general population because children in adult facilities become targets for a lot of sexual abuse and violence and mistreatment.
So they put him in solitary confinement, where they deprived him of any contact with other human beings.
And of course, they didn't change the rules for this 13-year-old child.
They just, they applied the adult rules.
So to get out of solitary, he had to never make a mistake.
He had to never complain, never be loud, never do this, never do that.
And as a young kid in that environment, he was never able to do that.
So he ended up spending 18 years in solitary confinement.
18. years?
Is that legal?
It is something we are constantly challenging, but there are no restrictions currently in our law that would prohibit something like that.
And so the first time I met him, I couldn't even be in the same room with him, because they didn't allow him to touch another human being.
And so his poetry comes out of a kind of isolation, a kind of anguish that is heartbreaking.
And what was really frustrating was the person who he robbed and shot was absolutely appalled that he was being treated that way.
And she was actually advocating for him to be released or to have a different sentence.
And we worked on his case for a very long time and ultimately won his release.
I'm so proud that now he's living in New York, he's doing poetry, he's speaking to young people, he's doing things.
But yes, we've done horrific things to children in this country and we've allowed that mindset of fear and anger to cause us to do some really destructive things.
And I do believe, when you allow yourself to be governed by fear and anger, when you root your decisions in fear and anger, you're going to make bad decisions.
You're not going to do the things you should be doing.
Until the 1970s, we had a relatively... small number of people in jails and prisons.
It was fewer than 300,000 people in jails and prisons in this country.
And then that shifted radically in the 1970s, when elected officials from all political parties began arguing that people who are drug addicted or drug dependent are criminals who should be punished for their addiction and dependency.
And we were angry and we were afraid.
And so we put hundreds of thousands of people in jails and prisons for addiction and dependency.
Now, if we weren't being governed by fear and anger, we would have said oh no, those people suffering from addiction and dependency.
They have a health problem.
And we need a healthcare response, not a punitive response.
But we didn't do that.
And now we have...
Two million people in our jails and prisons.
We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
We've destroyed so many communities, so many families, and we still have one of the highest rates of opioid addiction in the world.
We still have families devastated by drug overdose and all the violence and dysfunction that addiction can create.
And we haven't helped families.
We haven't helped children and mothers recover.
We've just punished people.
But it was rooted in this fear and anger.
And that's what has shaped so much of our thinking about putting kids in adult jails and prisons.
And it's tragic.
I write in the book about meeting one of my clients who was 14, living in a household where his mother had a boyfriend.
And when he would start drinking, he'd get violent.
And one day he came home and he walked into the kitchen and punched the boy's mother.
And she just fell.
She didn't even say anything.
He just punched her.
She ended up on the floor bleeding and unconscious.
Her son came running into the kitchen to try to help his mom, but she was non-responsive.
And that little boy thought his mom was dead.
She wasn't dead, but he thought she was dead.
After 10 minutes, he got up to go into the bedroom to call the police.
And then he remembered that this man kept a handgun in the dresser drawer.
And he goes over to the drawer.
He pulls it open.
He pulls out the gun.
He goes over to where the man is sleeping.
And he points the gun at the man's head.
And the man is snoring at this point.
And at some point, the man stops snoring and jumps.
And when the man jumps, the little boy jumps.
And when the little boy jumps, he pulls the trigger and shoots this man in the head, killing him instantly.
This child was very small for his age.
It was under five feet tall.
He weighed less than 100 pounds.
He'd never been in trouble before.
No prior juvenile adjudications.
He was a decent student.
He was the kind of kid that might have been tried as a juvenile, but for the fact that the man that he shot and killed his mother's boyfriend well, that man was a deputy sheriff.
And because he was a deputy sheriff, the prosecutor insisted that this child be tried as an adult and the judge immediately placed this child in an adult facility.
I got involved three days later and I went to the jail to see this kid and I was struck how, when he walked into the room, he seemed to be so terrified.
And he sat down and I started asking him questions, but no matter what I asked him, he wouldn't say anything.
He just stared.
And I remember getting up and going around the table and pulling my chair close to him.
I said, come on, you got to talk to me.
I can't help you if you don't talk to me.
He wouldn't make eye contact.
He was just staring straight ahead.
And I couldn't figure out what to do.
And at some point, I just leaned on him.
And when I leaned on him, he leaned back.
And when he leaned back, I put my arm around him.
I said, come on, you got to tell me what's going on.
And this little boy started to cry.
And through his tears, he began talking to me.
Not about what happened with the man, not about what happened with his mom, but what had happened at the jail.
And he told me on the first night several men had hurt him.
He told me on the next night he'd been sexually assaulted by several people.
He told me on the night before I'd gotten there so many people had hurt him he couldn't remember how many there had been.
And I remember hugging this boy while he cried hysterically for almost an hour.
And I finally got him calm and I said, look, I'm going to get you out of here.
You stay right here.
And I'll never forget trying to leave the jail.
And that little boy grabbed me by the arm.
He said, please, please don't go.
Please don't go.
I said, no, it's all right.
It's okay.
You stay right here.
I'm going to try to get you out of here.
And when I left the jail, the question I had in my mind, of course, was who's responsible for this?
And the answer is we are.
We've allowed fear and anger to demonize whole generations of children.
I believe all children are children.
I don't think we show our commitment to children by looking at how well we treat talented kids and gifted kids and privileged kids.
Our commitment to children has to be expressed by how we treat poor kids, abused kids, neglected kids, kids that are disfavored, kids that are struggling.
These are the children that reflect our commitment to children.
And I just think if we took a trauma-informed response to these kids, not only could we help these children, but we could create healthier communities.
I hate violence.
I don't want to see any child commit a crime.
I don't want them to hurt anybody.
I don't want them to be part of gangs.
I don't want them to be part of things that create injuries and violence.
I want healthier communities.
But that means we have to help these kids who are being pushed in all of these unhealthy ways.
And we don't get to that when our policymaking is blinded by our fear and our anger, just like we don't get to healthy parenting.
We don't get to healthy education, we don't get the healthy relationships with one another if we're blinded by our fear and our anger.
When we don't see the humanity of the people even that we care about, we do things that can be really destructive.
You know, when I was a public defender, I would always get those questions.
How can you defend people like have done bad things?
And I would always say, because bad things have been done to them.
And we don't want to look at that.
We just want to look at the bad thing.
And oftentimes the things that people have been accused of they actually didn't do.
What gives me some comfort is that I meet very few people who wouldn't want to do exactly what I did when I met that little boy.
I think if most anyone listening to this, if they had been in that room and held that little boy while he was crying, talking about these things, even knowing what he has been accused of, I think almost everyone would leave there saying we've got to get that child out of that environment.
And I think the power in that instinct, in that desire to not add suffering to suffering, not to add violence to violence, not to add wrongdoing to wrongdoing, is that that can yield something extraordinary.
It can yield something redemptive.
It can yield something that can feel healing almost.
So we were able to get him out of that facility that day and ultimately was able to get a resolution of the case where he got released.
After he got out, he got his high school degree, his GED.
Then he went to college.
He actually became an engineer.
He got married.
He has a beautiful family.
And I know the day of his release it's the 11th because on the 11th of every month for the last 18 years, at 8 am exactly, This young man calls me and he says hey, Mr Bryan, just want you to know I'm doing great and I love you.
Every month for 18 years.
And that's the beauty that comes out of reacting responding to injustice when we see it, abuse when we see it.
And I can't quantify that.
The value that gives my life, the joy that gives me, it's priceless as far as I'm concerned.
And I think when we hold our children that are struggling, that are in places of despair, that have been traumatized, and we look for ways to make things better, there's a return on that.
This feels like a good moment to take a quick pause and give our sponsors a chance to share a few words.
And while they do, please share this conversation with people that you care about.
I feel my heart expanding.
I feel my mind opening up.
I feel inspired and empowered and hopeful.
And I know anybody that you share this with is gonna feel that exact same thing.
And don't go anywhere, because Bryan Stevenson and I are gonna be waiting for you after this short break, so stay with us.
Welcome back.
It is such an honor to be here together with you and to get to spend time with the extraordinary Bryan Stevenson.
So Bryan, throughout the incredible book Just Mercy, you talk about this landmark case where, for years and years and years, you saw hope and possibility where no one else did.
You believed in a person who had been not just condemned but set up railroaded.
Every The case is so shocking.
And there's a level of arrogance and gaslighting that we do to ourselves.
As I was reading this and I'm thinking, this happened in 1988?
That's not a long time ago.
This was happening when I was in college?
For the person who hasn't either seen the movie Just Mercy or read your book.
Can you tell us a little bit about this case?
Sure.
It involves a man named Walter McMillan who was accused of killing a young white woman in Monroeville, Alabama.
And it is shocking in a lot of ways.
One of the things that was immediately fascinating to me about this case is that Monroeville Alabama, is the community where Harper Lee grew up and wrote the story To Kill a Mockingbird.
And so Monroeville... prides itself on being the birthplace, the home place of that story.
And so every year they put on a play, the streets are named after characters in the book.
It's a big deal.
You can go to the courthouse where they filmed the movie scenes from the movie and people will say oh, you can go stand where Gregory Peck stood.
They romanticized this story of To Kill a Mockingbird.
They couldn't solve the murder and after Several months the community was very frustrated with the police and the prosecutors for not solving the crime.
The young 18-year-old was killed in broad daylight in the middle of downtown Monroeville.
And the pressure was building, and we believe that led them to Mr. McMillan, not because they had any evidence of his guilt, but because Mr. McMillan had had an affair with a young white woman in the community, and word had spread about that.
And that caused them to focus on him.
Now it turns out that at the time of the murder, Mr McMillan was actually at his house raising money for his sister's church.
So he was surrounded by 30, 35 people.
So just to make sure as you're listening, there were 35 alibis.
Yes.
And in presence at his house during the time of the murder.
Yes.
Those alibis also included ministers, pastors, teachers.
A police officer who had gone to the place to buy.
They were having a fish fry and selling sandwiches.
So a police officer bought a sandwich and noted, bought a sandwich from Walter McMillan at almost the exact time of the crime, which was 11 miles away.
But the police arrested Mr. McMillan.
They coerced two people to testify falsely against him.
They put him on death row before the trial took place.
Is that legal?
It's completely illegal.
But this is also a state where there was no public defender system.
It was... appointed to lawyers who didn't necessarily want to take the cases.
That's right.
So the lawyers didn't complain about the fact that the newspapers were now saying death row defendant Walter McMillan will be arraigned next week.
Death row defendant.
They were already characterizing him. as someone who should get the death penalty.
The trial takes place and lasts for a day and a half.
These two witnesses give these false testimony.
Oddly, the jury comes back after convicting him and says we think he should be sentenced to life without parole.
I think they knew that there was no credible evidence against him.
Even though they convicted him.
Even though they convicted him.
And their compromise was to sentence him to life without parole.
But Alabama allowed its trial judges, its elected trial judges, to override jury verdicts of life and impose the death penalty.
So the judge immediately overrode that life sentence and imposed a death sentence.
So Mr. McMillan is sent back to death row.
And I got involved after he had been sentenced and quickly learned that about all of the problems with the case.
First of all, I went into the community the people who were with him, and they came up to me and they'd say Mr Stevenson, we feel like we've been convicted too.
We feel like we've been sentenced to death too.
We were with him.
It would have been better if he'd been out in the woods hunting by himself when this crime took place, because at least then you had to entertain the possibility.
But because we were with him...
And we quickly uncovered evidence about the coercion.
For some bizarre reason, when they coerced these two witnesses to testify falsely against him,
They tape recorded those interviews.
And they hid the tapes.
I found the tapes by going to another courthouse and doing some discovery.
And the first thing you hear on this tape from the witness is quote you want me to frame an innocent man for murder and I don't feel right about that.
And the police officer effectively says well, if you don't do what we want, we'll put you on death row.
And they put the witness on death row for three months until he agreed to testify falsely against Mr McMillan.
They present that evidence at trial, some other evidence.
But we found out all of this stuff.
We found the police officer's log that said he was at Mr. McMillan's house.
I think, though, it might surprise the person listening to know that this was years.
Yeah, absolutely.
In the making.
Like this was not you just found the tapes and then suddenly you walk them into a court.
That's right.
It was constant resistance from courts and from the police to actually present.
There's a story that you tell that is unbelievable, because you finally have the day in court and everybody that was at Walter's house that day, who had never been allowed to testify or, if they had, were just not believed, flood the courtroom.
Mm-hmm.
And they are there in support.
And this is for a hearing on a motion to just open up the case again because you found new evidence.
Right.
That on its face makes the case have to be thrown out and overturned.
Yeah.
But the second day of the hearing you show up and everybody that was there to support your client, largely a big community of African-American people
Yeah, had been told they couldn't enter the courtroom because the police had filled it with white people that supported them.
And you face this sort of bullshit, and yet you somehow have this grace about you.
You know, it comes...
From the people I got to represent.
You're absolutely right.
You know, for the six years we were working on this case... Six years?
Six years.
It took to get him... Yes.
And I would get death threats when I go into the community.
We had bomb threats.
We had to clear our office on multiple occasions because somebody had... made bomb threats.
I couldn't, you know, I would start using different names if I tried to stay in a hotel.
We used rental cars because I was constantly being followed.
There was so much resistance.
And then you know, the ultimate insult in many ways was, after having a good day in court as you described, coming back the next day and then simply not letting people into the courtroom.
And And I went over to the door and said I want to go inside because the community leader said oh, they won't let us in.
I said, what do you mean?
And I went over and I said, I want to go inside.
And the deputy there says, oh, you can't come in.
I said, well, I'm the defense attorney.
I think I have to be able to come in.
He said, well, let me go check.
And he came back and said, well, you can come in.
And I go in there and I see they've changed things around.
They've put a metal detector inside the courtroom door.
He'd already cleared one to get into the courthouse.
And then on the other side of the metal detector there was this huge German Shepherd doll, just kind of leering.
And I look into the courtroom.
It's been filled with people who are not sympathetic to Mr. McMillan.
I complained to the judge.
The judge said, oh, your people have to get here earlier tomorrow.
I said, judge, that wasn't the problem.
They didn't let them in.
Judge paid no attention, explained to the community what had happened.
They said, we will be here earlier tomorrow.
There were a few seats left and they identified this older woman.
And my relationship to this work is because of people like this older woman.
She was so proud to be given the responsibility of being one of the witnesses for the community.
And she fixed herself up, and she walked over to the door.
They let people in, and she walked through the door with such grace and such dignity.
She held her head up high.
She had this hat on.
She walked through the metal detector, but when she saw the dog, you could just see the fear paralyze her.
She stopped dead in her tracks.
And I watched her try to move, try to take a step, and she couldn't do it.
And her body began to shake, and her head...
I drooped and I saw tears start running down her face.
And then I heard her groan really loudly and then watched her turn around and run out the courtroom.
Painful thing to see.
Other people came inside.
We had a really good day in court that day.
I was heading home and she was still sitting outside.
And when she saw me, she came over to me and she said, oh, Mr. Stevenson, I feel so bad.
She said, I let you down today.
I let everybody down today.
I said, Ms.
Williams, it's not your fault.
They shouldn't have done what they did.
She said, no, no, no, no, no.
I was supposed to be in that courtroom.
I should have been in that courtroom.
And she started crying.
I said, Ms.
Williams, please don't feel bad.
They shouldn't have done what they did.
She said, no, no, no.
I was meant to be in that courtroom.
I should have been in that courtroom.
She said, but when I saw that dog, all I could think about was Selma, Alabama in 1965.
And I remember how they put those dogs on us.
And I tried to make myself move, but I just couldn't do it.
Her sister told me that night when they got home that Ms.
Williams didn't sleep, but they could hear her praying all night long.
And she was praying, Lord, I can't be scared of no dog.
I can't be scared of no dog.
And her sister told me the next morning that when they woke up she called the community leaders and begged for another chance to be a representative.
And on the trip from the house to the courthouse her sister said she kept saying I ain't scared of no dog.
I ain't scared of no dog.
And they had the same setup on the next day.
And I was inside the courtroom and they opened the door and there was Ms.
Williams.
And you could hear her saying audibly over and over again.
She was saying, I ain't scared of no dog.
I ain't scared of no dog.
And she walked through the metal detector and she walked up to the dog and she said I ain't scared of no dog.
And she walked past the dog, sat down on the front row of that courtroom and turned to me and said Mr Stevenson, I'm here.
And I looked at her and said, oh, Ms.
Williams, it's so good to see you here.
And then she said, oh, no, Mr. Stevens, and you didn't hear me.
She said, I'm here.
And I said, oh, Ms.
Williams, I did hear you, and I'm glad to see you here.
And courtroom got filled.
The judge walked in to start the hearing.
Everybody stood up.
But when everybody sat back down, Ms.
Williams remained standing.
And people were staring at her.
And then she said in one loud voice this last time to the whole courtroom, she said, I'm here.
And it became clear to me then what she was saying.
She wasn't saying I'm physically present.
She was saying I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I've got this vision of justice that compels me to stand up to injustice.
And I have the great beauty, the great joy of witnessing that kind of courage, that kind of strength.
When we ultimately won Mr. McMillan's release, there was a whole crowd of people there.
The first person he went to was Ms.
Williams.
He said, Ms.
Williams, I'm here because you were there for me.
She said, I'll always be there for you.
And so I feel like I can't be turned around by threats and violence by people who are angry and hateful.
Because, however vulnerable I am, I'm less vulnerable than a lot of people who have to deal with the reality of these problems in these communities.
And I want to be like, The people I meet, I want to be like Ms.
Williams.
I want to be somebody who, when there's inequality and injustice, when there's suffering and oppression, has the courage to say I'm here.
And to me, that's the most extraordinary thing we can sometimes do.
It's to position ourselves in places where people are struggling, where people are falling down, where people have lost hope, where people are worried that they can't make it.
Those two words are really powerful.
And just say, I'm here.
You don't even have to have answers after that.
I think just being present, that witness for a lot of people can be transformative.
Yeah.
We are all so glad you're here.
Thank you.
Not just here, but here on the planet.
Thank you.
You know Brian, one of the things that you've said is injustice prevails where hopelessness persists.
Yeah.
If we allow ourselves to become hopeless, we become part of the problem.
You know, one of the things that troubles me is that I feel like we are living at a moment where a lot of people feel very hopeless.
There is a lot of hatred.
There's a lot of violence.
There's a lot of othering, bigotry.
And I would love to know, how have you found hope even in the darkest and scariest places?
Our hope is what can sustain us when things look bleak and difficult.
And that is the reason why I believe that hopelessness is the enemy of justice.
Justice will prevail if we allow ourselves to give in to hopelessness.
Hope is our superpower.
It's the thing that will get some of us to stand up even when people say sit down.
It will get some of us to speak even when people say be quiet.
It's the thing that will get us to believe we can do things that maybe other people think we can't do.
I have to give it to my clients, and I can't give someone something I don't have.
And so for me, it's an orientation of the Spirit.
You know, Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about wanting all kinds of things during the time of Soviet domination.
And he said we wanted money and recognition and resources, but the only thing we needed, he said, was hope.
And Havel says the kind of hope you need is not a preference for optimism over pessimism.
It's not a pie-in-the-sky thing.
He says it's an orientation of the Spirit, a willingness to sometimes position yourself in a hopeless place and be a witness.
And that, I do think, is the gift I've been given by so many people who've come before me.
So many people who have done things with fewer resources, fewer opportunities, fewer supports than I have.
And it's what I want to give to the people who come after me is, you know, this idea that if we can labor long and save lives and change the law and create perhaps a slightly more just system, then we have to continue to hope we can do more.
For a person who's listening, who's really struggling with cultivating that hope for themselves.
Do you have anything that you would advise someone to do to help them cultivate it for themselves or someone else?
Yeah, I think learning about hope is a really important action item.
Sometimes I think we don't think of learning as an action item, but I do.
I think to learn is to do something.
And learning the stories of what hopeful people did despite the odds is one of the most important things we can do to prepare ourselves, to train ourselves, our minds and our bodies to do hopeful things in our lives.
Just like we have to train ourselves if we want to be fit or run a race.
I think we have to train ourselves, prepare ourselves to be hopeful in the midst of so many difficulties.
And the world is just filled of stories about hopeful people.
And I think we need to learn them and be shaped by them.
I never really talked much about my grandmother or my great-grandparents, who were enslaved, until I was in my 40s.
I didn't want to forget about it.
It just wasn't relevant in my head.
Now I talk about them all the time.
Now I see in their lives strength and knowledge and wisdom and power, and it shapes what I do.
And part of the reason why I'm so committed to reckoning more honestly with our history of injustice is because buried in that history are stories of hope and resilience that we need to know and we need to understand.
So Brian, I'm sure that the person who's been listening and watching and spending time with us together today is feeling this okay, I want to go out.
I want to be a stone catcher.
I want to make a difference.
Is there one thing that you would recommend they do, based on all of the lessons that you've shared today?
Yeah.
I mean, there's a long list.
I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of people coming out of jails and prisons that have no one to help meet their needs.
We don't do anything in this country to help people recover from five years, 10 years, 20 years of incarceration.
So we're going to need people to step up, to volunteer, to help the institutions in your community that are trying to provide support.
People coming out of jails and prisons with clothes, jobs, opportunities, counseling.
Many of the clients that I represent went to prison before the digital age.
They've never used an ATM.
They don't know anything about cell phones.
And just helping people recover is one of the things you can do.
And we all have skills that people need.
It doesn't matter how old you are or how much you've done.
That's a role you can play.
We have to take on the burdens of people who are most at risk.
And so learning is, I think, really, really important.
We have a website EJIorg, and it's just filled with all kinds of content that's designed to help people learn about what is important.
We started a decade ago asking prosecutors to create conviction integrity units that would review cases in their office where there were claims of innocence, because this shouldn't be the burden of a defense attorney or a journalist, but we should all care about making sure that people who are innocent.
If you care about justice, you should care about injustice.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And then there are hundreds of ways to become more active in dealing with the inequality gap that condemns so many children.
So many children aren't getting the support they need, the help they need, the resources they need.
I just think that everyone has something to offer there.
I think we should all care about educating kids who have fewer resources, who don't have the same opportunities, and there's nothing holding us back.
We just have to have the will.
And then finally, I am persuaded that we all have to learn more about our history.
That holds us back from a lot of these things.
I don't think many people in this country and across the globe have been taught the kinds of things we need to know to better prepare ourselves for creating a more just future.
We have something called a history of racial injustice.
It's a calendar.
We put out something every day, and you can sign up for it.
And each day we're going to teach you something about parts of our history that aren't pleasant, but we think they are necessary to understand and know.
And I hope we prepare people to be better informed, better citizens, better stewards of the opportunities we have to create a more just world.
Where can you sign up for that free daily email?
It's EJI.org, and we're on all of the social media sites, and so you can sign up there as well.
But yeah, particularly now when there's such resistance to honest education about some of these topics, I think it's going to become even more important to that we be informed, that we be aware of the lessons we can learn from the misery of history.
There are lessons we learn from the glory of history, but there are also lessons we must learn from the misery of history.
And the more I do this work, the more I've come to believe that memory is the justice we owe the 10 million Black people who endured the immense suffering and constant sorrow of slavery.
When we censor knowledge and understanding of that history, when we restrict and limit what people learn about it, what we do is not just dishonest, it's unjust.
And so if we're called to do justice, we have to find a way to embrace this.
You know, for a hundred years we pulled black people out of their homes and they were beaten and tortured and lynched on courthouse lawns.
And we've hardly talked about it.
That era of segregation that I was born into.
The humiliation and degradation of that should not just be the burden of the people who experienced that.
It should be all of our burden.
And when we understand that, then we commit to never again tolerating that kind of bigotry.
We commit to due process.
We commit to the rule of law because we know that mob violence and fear and anger will create destruction and harm and hardship to people who are othered.
And I think a consciousness about that is really key to how we move forward.
And so yes, I do believe that learning at this moment, all across the globe, is going to be a vital action item.
Yeah.
Well, there's no way you can learn from mistakes and misery if you don't acknowledge it, if you deny it existed, if you lie and say no no no, that didn't happen that way.
That's the only way you learn.
Absolutely.
And the beautiful thing is that on the other side of that learning, you get to understand what hope can yield.
We have an exhibit in our museum.
It's 800 jars of soil.
And we have a project where we're trying to put markers at every lynching site in America.
And when people go to these sites, we ask them to put soil from the lynching site in a jar that has the name of the victim and the date.
And they bring it back to the museum.
And so when you come to our museum, you see these jars of soil.
A couple of years back, an older black woman called and said oh, Mr Stevenson, I want to dig some soil for your museum.
Do you have a county where no one has done anything?
And we did.
So we asked her to go to this county.
And she told me when she got there that she had to pray before she got out of her car, because it was this really scary place.
It was a dirt road in the middle of the woods and we'd given her the jar with the name of the victim and a memo that talked about the lynching and an implement.
And she said she found her strength, got out of the car, crossed the dirt road, got to the spot where the lynching took place, got down on her knees.
And then she said this pickup truck came down the road and there was this big white guy in the truck and he stared at her as he drove by.
And she said she was afraid.
Then he stopped, turned his truck around, drove back by and stared some more.
And then she said to her horror, the man parked his truck, got out, and started walking toward her.
We tell people when they're digging soil that they don't have to explain what they're doing.
We say, look, if you want to just say you're getting dirt for your garden, that's totally fine.
And this man walked up to her and he said, what are you doing?
And she told me that she was going to tell him she was just getting some dirt for her garden.
She said, but Mr. Stevenson, all of a sudden, something got a hold of me.
And I turned to that man and I said I'm digging soil here because this is where a black man was lynched in 1937 and I'm going to honor his life today.
And she started digging and the man to her surprise said, does that memo talk about the lynching?
And she said, it does.
And then the man said, can I read it?
And she gave the man the memo and he started reading while she started digging.
And after a few minutes, the man finished reading the memo.
He put it down.
And then he really surprised her.
And he said, excuse me, ma'am, but would it be all right if I helped you?
And she said, yes.
And the man got down on his knees next to her.
And she offered him the implement to dig the soil.
He said, no, no, no, no, no.
You keep it.
I'll just use my hands.
And she said he started throwing his hands into the soil and putting it in the jar and throwing his hands into the soil with his whole body.
And she said there was something about the conviction that, with which he was putting his whole body into this, that just moved her.
And the tears started running down her face.
And the man looked at her and he said, oh, ma'am, I'm so sorry.
I'm upsetting you.
She said, no, no, no, no, no.
You're blessing me.
And she kept digging with the implement, and he kept digging with his hands.
And they got near the top of the jar and she looked over and she saw that the man had slowed down, that his face had turned red, that his shoulders had dropped.
And then she said she saw a tear running down his face.
And she put her hand on his shoulder, and she said, Are you all right?
And that's when the man looked at her and he said, no ma'am, no ma'am.
And then he said I'm just so worried that it might have been my grandfather who helped lynch this man.
And she said, both of them just sat on that roadside and wept.
After a few minutes, the man turned to her and he said ma'am, I really want to take a picture of you holding the jar of soil.
She said, okay, but...
I want to take a picture of you holding the jar of soil.
And so they took pictures of one another.
And she said, well, I'm going back to Montgomery to put this in the museum.
And the man said, would it be all right if I just followed you back?
And she said, sure.
And she called me on the way back.
She said, Mr. Stevenson, I want you to come to the museum and meet my new friend.
And I was there when these two people who met on a roadside in a place of bigotry and violence and hate, came in together and did something beautiful by putting that jar of soil in that exhibit.
I'm not naive.
I don't think beautiful things like that always happen when we tell the truth.
But I do believe we deny ourselves the beauty of justice when we refuse to tell the truth.
On the other side of truth is redemption, restoration, reconciliation.
I don't talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because I want to punish.
I talk about these things because I want us to be liberated from the harm, the burden, the weight that history will continue to carry until we confront it, until we continue to acknowledge it.
And so part of what we're trying to do with these sites is to invite people into a journey of learning that allows us to get to something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, which I think is waiting for us.
I do.
I think it's just waiting for us all across the globe.
I think we have an opportunity to get to something that feels more like freedom, equality and justice, but we can't get there if we're unwilling to be honest about the harms that hold us back.
I am just so moved by what a force you are.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And I think that story in particular and everything about it is a reminder.
Of our innate better nature.
Yes.
It's a reminder that we are more than the worst things that we've done.
Yeah.
Both in history and in our own lives.
Yes.
And that it's only when you're up close that you can truly understand.
Yeah, absolutely.
I just am grateful that you move through the world the way that you do.
Well, thank you.
It is just truly inspiring.
Appreciate that.
Brian, if the person listening today takes just one thing away from this, what do you think the most important thing is to take away?
To get proximate change narratives of fear and anger.
Be hopeful and be willing to do uncomfortable and inconvenient things.
Brian Stevenson, what are your parting words?
I'm grateful that there are people in the world that are curious about compassion, curious about how we increase the justice quotient, who are willing to be learners and then doers in building a world with more justice, more mercy and more love.
Well, I'm grateful for you.
Thank you for opening my eyes and opening my heart.
Oh, thank you.
Wow.
And I also want to thank you.
Thank you for choosing to make time to listen to this.
This is truly a transformational and life-changing and extraordinarily important conversation.
I hope you take everything that Brian shared with you and poured into you to heart.
I hope you share this with everybody that you care about who wants to learn, who wants to do better.
And embracing hope, embracing compassion and mercy and justice is certainly a way we all can.
And in case no one else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life.
And really taking these lessons to heart are going to help all of us do it.
And I think if we do that for ourselves and in our families and in our communities, we'll also create a better world.
Alrighty.
I will see you in the next episode.
I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment I stop crying and you hit play.
I'll see you there.
He shows you what it like.
Hold on a second.
Okay.
Probably good since my voice was cracking through the whole thing.
What an incredible life you have lived.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
I, um, I feel really privileged in some ways to have been able to do what I've done.
This is wonderful.
Thank you.
You really, really made this easy.
Oh, well, you, I think, make most things easy.
Well, thank you.
I cannot wait to put this out.
Oh, wonderful.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
Beautiful.
I couldn't agree more.
Yeah.
With absolutely everything.
Thank you.
Wow.
Holy cow.
Okay, if we all stop crying.
You're crying too.
Good.
Okay, great.
Well done, everybody.
Oh, and one more thing.
And no, this is not a blooper.
This is the legal language.
You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you.
This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.
I'm just your friend.
I am not a licensed therapist.
And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional.
Got it?
Good.
I'll see you in the next episode.
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