TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. In his second term, President Trump has been trying to erase parts of American history that he considers corrosive ideology or disparaging to other Americans, alive or dead. He ordered the Secretary of the Interior to take down sculptures, markers and displays in federally funded places like the national parks. So down came references to slavery, Jim Crow segregation, lynchings and other forms of racism, brutality and inequity. At the same time, my guest, Bryan Stevenson, has been doing the opposite. He was opening an exhibition on the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the violence and degradation faced by Black people that led to the movement.

The exhibit begins in 1955 with the boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses and ends 10 years later with the marches from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. The third of those marches, the one that was successfully completed, arrived at its destination, Montgomery Square, 61 years ago today. “Montgomery Square” is both the location and the name of the new exhibit. It’s part of the Legacy Sites, which includes sites in public places in Montgomery about slavery, lynching and Jim Crow, as well as the Legacy Museum. The larger intent is truth and reconciliation by facing the past. The project was founded and is led by Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal organization founded with the mission of representing children and adults, unfairly convicted, unfairly sentenced, subjected to brutality in prison or facing execution. He’s argued six cases before the Supreme Court. You may know him through the movie adaptation of his memoir, “Just Mercy,” in which he was portrayed by Michael B. Jordan, who just won an Oscar earlier this month for his role in “Sinners.” The Equal Justice Initiative also has a new book called “Legacy Sites: A History Of Racial Injustice.” Bryan Stevenson, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

BRYAN STEVENSON: My pleasure.

GROSS: What was your reaction when President Trump decided to selectively ban history from public places, and then some school boards started banning books by Black authors, also by LGBTQ authors, and banning some African American history classes?

STEVENSON: Well, I think it really marked the beginning of a truly tragic era in our history. For so much of our history, we’ve never really been honest about the legacy of slavery and the consequences of racial bias and racial bigotry. We’ve only recently made a commitment to start being more comprehensive, being more thorough in the telling of our history. And so, so short into this process to have the administration come along and say, no, we don’t want that anymore, I think it is really tragic, and I regard it as a move that will make us less healthy, less capable of developing the kind of democracy that most of us want, and really problematic.

I mean, we don’t tell doctors that you can’t tell people if they have high blood pressure or diabetes or cancer because if we do that, then people won’t know they have a disease and they won’t get the treatment that they need. I regard this similarly. We have a long history of racial bigotry, racial injustice that we’ve only started to try to confront.

GROSS: Trump said that the statues he’s trying to remove, the plaques he’s trying to remove, that it’s because these things disparage Americans or promote corrosive idiology. And I wonder what you make of that.

STEVENSON: I think it actually gives us an opportunity to see the strength of our country to overcome these unbelievable challenges. We enslaved Black people for 246 years. Ten million Black people endured constant sorrow and immense suffering. And despite that horrific treatment, at the end of the Civil War, most chose America. They didn’t choose retribution and revenge against the people who enslaved them. They chose to build schools. They chose to build churches and families. Black people ran for office. We had Black people going to Congress.

It was a glorious moment, and then it collapsed because our fear and our anger and our court prioritized states’ rights over constitutional rights. And then all of these terrible things happen – mob violence, lynching, segregation, codified racial hierarchy. And we didn’t learn from that moment in the way that we could have learned. The reason why we educate people about this, we want people to understand this is because we believe that if you actually understand the history of failure, the history of mistakes, you can do things to prevent that.

GROSS: You live in Montgomery, Alabama, and then that is where the Equal Justice Initiative, which you created, and the Legacy Sites, which you created are based as well. Montgomery was central to the Civil Rights Movement. From the bus boycott of 1955 to 1965 and the marches – or the attempted marches – from Selma to Montgomery – the second march was disrupted by state troopers who beat the marches, including John Lewis. And the third March finally made it through to Montgomery. My impression is that Montgomery was so central to the Civil Rights Movement because things were so bad for Black people there. Can you talk about what made Montgomery stand out?

STEVENSON: Yeah. I think it actually begins with the history of slavery. Most people in this country don’t appreciate that many of the states where 90% of the Black population lived at the end of the Civil War were relatively new. Alabama didn’t become a state until 1820. The Congress banned the trans-Atlantic trade, the importation of Africans to this country, enslaved, in 1808. So for most of the 19th century, the domestic trade of enslaved people shaped the lives of African Americans, and Alabama’s population of enslaved people went from 40,000 in 1820 to 400,000 in 1860, and most of those people live in Montgomery and the counties surrounding Montgomery, which were known as part of the Black Belt, this range of counties from coastal Virginia through the Carolinas through south-central Georgia and Alabama up into the Mississippi Delta and Arkansas Delta. And because of that, white settlers brought thousands of enslaved people to labor.

The development of the cotton gin made cotton this very, very prosperous product. And it created wealth for so many people. After the Civil War, then we had a very large population. Montgomery County was two-thirds Black, and that terrified many of those former enslavers, those people who regained power after the collapse of Reconstruction. And so they created a whole system for subordinating Black people, terrorizing Black people. Our Constitution, created in 1901, expressly is designed by their own words to maintain white supremacy. And so laws were passed, segregation statutes were passed.

We denied Black people access to public spaces. We made Black people use separate toilets, different water fountains. And that day-to-day humiliation absolutely impacted people in Montgomery, like it did many other parts of the South. The one place where you couldn’t create separation, though, was our city buses, which were primarily used by Black women to get to work. So leading into the 1940s, you had a population of Black people who had endured enslavement, who endured lynching, who had endured decades of humiliation and segregation, which made this community ready for something new, something different.

GROSS: As part of the Legacy project, there’s a long research paper that was done that uncovers new things about the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery and also reiterates, you know, some of the history. And I learned something, like, really basic that I think I should have known about what the buses were like in Montgomery, which is that if you were Black, you had to board the bus in front and buy your ticket and then leave the bus and…

STEVENSON: Yeah.

GROSS: …Actually board in back where, you know, Black people were allowed to sit. And what would sometimes happen is that then as you were exiting the front, before you got onto the back, the bus would pull out without you. So you’ve paid your money, you faced the humiliation of having to leave and then the bus leaves without you.

STEVENSON: It was one of many things that just made riding the buses so perilous. You’re exactly right. Black people had to pay in the front, get off the bus, go to the rear and then enter there. And some bus drivers would just take off. They wouldn’t wait until you got clearly into the bus, and so people got injured. And then there was just the way the buses and segregation worked. The first 10 seats were reserved for white people. And even when there were no white people on the bus and the bus was filled with Black people, you had Black people who had to stand after working 12 hours next to empty seats because those seats were reserved for white people. And this whole system just created lots of conflict, lots of opportunities to be degraded, lots of opportunities to be harmed. Hilliard Brooks paid his dime at the front of the bus and then was told, oh, the bus is too full. And he said, well, give me my dime back. And the bus driver refused. And when he kept arguing, he called the police. A police officer was summoned, and that police officer shot this unarmed, Black World War II veteran to death on the bus. Two other Black men were killed similarly. And so these buses were places of real peril, but Black people couldn’t avoid them because they had to get to work.

GROSS: One of the people who faced, you know, boarding the bus in front so you could pay then having to leave and board it through the back, that’s something that Rosa Parks faced. Now, she’s famous for saying – or so the story goes – that she wasn’t going to go to the back of the bus ’cause her feet were tired. But tell us about this incident where she had to, like, leave the bus and board through the back and things did not work out.

STEVENSON: Well, regular bus riders got to know which drivers were more challenging and more likely to create issues. And so the driver of the bus on the day she was arrested in December 1955, James Blake, was the same driver she encountered years earlier who mistreated her and forced her to get off the bus, and she tried really hard to stay off of his bus. And that was true for many, many Black women, and complaints were being made. The Women’s Political Caucus was organizing and presenting petitions to the city about changing the conduct of these drivers. It’s really important for people to understand this was not about momentary fatigue. Black women had been refusing to give up their seats for a decade. The Women’s Political Council had been petitioning to change these practices. What Ms. Parks would tell me and tell many others that that day, she was just grieving the death of Emmett Till. It was the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and hearing from people in Mississippi about all of the hardships, that was seeing those men get acquitted, despite their brutal murder of Emmett Till, that just caused her to say I’m not going to cooperate with this anymore. And she was the fifth woman in just those seven months to do it. Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat in March of 1955. Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, Sophia McDonald refused to give up their seats between March and December, and the pressure was building, and on December 1, Ms. Parks said I’m not going to move, and that was the trigger.

GROSS: Did you get to work with Rosa Parks?

STEVENSON: I did. When I moved to Montgomery in the late ’80s, there was an amazing woman named Johnnie Carr who was the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and the Montgomery Improvement Association was the organization that was formed in 1955 to sustain the boycott. It continued for decades later. And when Ms. Carr heard that I had moved to Montgomery and I was a lawyer, she called me up, and she said, oh, Bryan, I understand you’re a lawyer who just moved to town. I said, yes, I am. She said, well, if you’re a lawyer, I’m going to call you up, and I’m going to ask you to go some places and speak. And then she said, I’m going to call you up and ask you to go some places and listen. And she said, when I call you up, you’re going to say, yes, ma’am.

GROSS: (Laughter).

STEVENSON: And so I said, yes, ma’am, and Ms. Carr would send me places to speak and send me places to listen. And then one day, she called me and she said, Bryan, Rosa Parks is coming to town. You want to come and spend time with us? I said, I do. And I went to the home of a white woman named Virginia Durr, whose husband, Clifford Durr, had represented Dr. King. And I sat on the porch for two hours for the first time with Mrs. Parks. And what was remarkable was that these three older women all talked about the things they were going to do. None of them talked about the things they had done, the things they had achieved. They just had this desire to do more. And after a couple of hours, Ms. Parks turned to me and she said, OK, Bryan, tell me what you’re trying to do. And I told her about our work trying to represent people on death row. I said, we’re trying to challenge wrongful convictions. We’re trying to challenge this legal system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. We’re trying to represent children. We’re trying to do something about bigotry and poverty and people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to change the way we operate these jails and prisons. I gave her my whole wrap, and when I finished, she looked at me and she said, that’s going to make you tied, tired, tired.

GROSS: (Laughter).

STEVENSON: And that’s when Ms. Carr leaned forward and she put her finger in my face. She said, that’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave. And Ms. Parks grabbed my hand and said, will you be brave? And I said, yes, ma’am. I learned a lot from her. We were in Tallahassee. She was getting an honorary degree at Florida State University. It was a whole auditorium filled with people, and I was just kind of escorting her into the space, and they didn’t have me sitting next to her. I sat behind her. And when the band began to play “We Shall Overcome” at the beginning, nobody moved. And Ms. Parks turned to me, and she just winked and she gave me a nod, and I knew I was supposed to do something. And she stood up ’cause she felt like people should stand up if they’re going to honor this movement that so fundamentally changed America. And when she stood, I stood, and then the whole auditorium stood. And when we left later, she said, OK, you did good, you did good. She was an amazing human being, and she was a fighter. She had the heart of a warrior and the grace of the extraordinary woman she was.

GROSS: There’s lots more to talk about, but we need to take a short break first. So let me reintroduce you.

My guest is human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE INTERNET SONG, “STAY THE NIGHT”)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which represents children and adults unfairly convicted or sentenced. He also founded and leads the Legacy Project, a museum and series of sites and public places in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to educate and reflect on the harsh truths of American history. From slavery to Reconstruction, Jim Crow and lynchings, the new site is about the Civil Rights Movement.

One of your larger goals is to arrive at a process of not just truth, but truth and reconciliation. What would that look like to you?

STEVENSON: Well, I think the first thing is that for truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair – I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is those things are sequential. You can’t get the beautiful R words, like redemption and reconciliation and restoration and repair, unless you first tell the truth. As a lawyer, I can tell you that you got to have the truth of what happened at the crime scene. And the state understands, as they want to put all of the evidence in because that’s what’s going to allow the jury to make an informed decision about culpability. And we’ve never really done that.

And so I think this process of truth-telling has to shape what we do. In South Africa, after the collapse of apartheid, they committed space for the victims of apartheid to give voice to their harm. They even created space for the perpetrators to give voice to their regret. You go to Germany, the villain of the 20th century, and you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and monuments and memorials dedicated to the harm of the Holocaust. They’ve made truth-telling a necessity. No student in Germany can graduate without demonstrating a detailed knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. They require it. And the result of that is, is that there are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments or memorials to the Nazis. We’ve never done that in this country. In fact, we’ve done the opposite.

And so the truth-telling becomes the first part of it. And when you tell the truth about the harm, then you think differently about the remedy, about what we should do. I think if we really committed to truth-telling about all of the harms of disenfranchisement, we might have said to these states that disenfranchised people for 100 years, you know what? You all should automatically register Black people when they become of age, just as a way of repairing this harm, of acknowledging this harm. Maybe you should go into the Black community in the 1960s and get their votes ’cause you made going to polling places so treacherous and so terrifying.

And if we had done that, maybe 50 years later, we could say, oh, we don’t need to do that anymore because we’ve gotten to a different place in America. But we did the opposite. We actually allowed prosecutors to begin prosecuting and persecuting Black people for voter fraud. And that mindset has continued, which is why today you still see all of these maneuvers being undertaken, which ultimately undermine full political participation for Black and brown people in this country.

GROSS: The march from Selma to Montgomery that was finally successfully completed, with people being beaten by the police – those marches led to the Voting Rights Act. Was this – was voting especially difficult in Montgomery or Alabama in general? Like, even more difficult than other Southern states?

STEVENSON: Well, throughout the South, you had this intense commitment to minimize Black political participation. And it was certainly intense in South Central Alabama, Dallas County, where Selma is. Only 2% of eligible Black people were registered to vote, and that wasn’t because they hadn’t tried. They’d been trying for decades, and they would be turned away. They would limit the hours when Black people could come in. States across the South created these poll tests.

One of the exhibits in our museum is we took all the questions from some of these various poll tests and we put it in the exhibit, and people can come in there and try to answer the questions. And the questions are things like, how many bubbles in a bar of soap? How many windows at the White House? We have a jar of jelly beans. How many jelly beans in the jelly bean jar? And people get the absurdity of that. And only Black people had to answer these questions, and so very few Black people had been registered to vote and participated and allowed to vote throughout the South. But it was very, very intense in South Central Alabama, where in places like Dallas County, only 2% of the Black people had been allowed to register after decades of activism, of trying to get people registered.

GROSS: Well, we need to take another break here, so let me introduce you again. If you’re just joining us, my guest is human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He also founded and leads the Legacy Project, a museum and series of sites and public places in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to educate and reflect on the harsh truths of American history. We’ll be right back after a short break. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THELONIOUS MONK’S “CRISS CROSS”)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Let’s get back to my interview with human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which represents children and adults unfairly convicted or sentenced. He also founded and leads the Legacy sites, a museum and series of sites in public places dedicated to educate and reflect on the harsh truths of American history from slavery to Reconstruction, Jim Crow and lynchings. The new site is about the Civil Rights Movement as it played out in Montgomery, Alabama, from the bus boycott to the marches from Selma to Montgomery. The Legacy sites are based in Montgomery. Before we continue the interview, a heads-up – we’ll be talking about lynching in this section, and in about eight minutes, the discussion will include some relatively graphic details.

The latest site in the Legacy sites that you created is about the Civil Rights Movement. And that includes the march from Selma to Montgomery, which culminated not long after in the Voting Rights Act. What did you learn about any of the attempted marches or the finally successful march from Selma to Montgomery that you didn’t know before that added something really important for you to the larger story?

STEVENSON: I think what I learned was just how much more courageous people were than I think has been previously acknowledged. People like Lynda Blackmon Lowery, people like Joanne Bland started getting arrested when they were 8 and 9 years old because they wanted their parents and grandparents to be able to vote. They knew they couldn’t vote. They were too young. And we’ve got photographs at our site of children holding up signs saying, let our parents vote. And these children would be rounded up and taken to jails, where they’d be abandoned for two or three days.

And we’ve been doing this project where we interview people. And some of the people who were beaten and battered – Lynda Blackmon Lowery said she got hit, and she passed out. And for 40 years, she assumed that she passed out because she hit her head on the ground. And then when they uncovered documentary footage, she realized that she passed out, and she was in that condition because after she fell, she was beaten by state troopers over and over again on the head. But she insisted on getting out of the hospital and being ready for the next march.

You know, we recently lost Dr. Bernard Lafayette, an extraordinary leader who was tasked with organizing much of what happened in Selma. And he told me – he said, Bryan, we were prepared to die. And he says it, I think, really, really honestly. He said, we were prepared to die. And I don’t think people appreciate the extraordinary courage it took. To confront that kind of threat with no protection, without an army, with no weapons takes an extraordinary courage, and I think that’s the discovery that I’m really inspired by.

GROSS: If I have my number right, the Legacy sites research was able to document for its lynching site 800 more lynchings than had been previously documented. How did you find those other 800? What sources did you use?

STEVENSON: Yeah,. We went through archives and newspapers in every county across the American South. There had been research done by Monroe Work, African American sociologist at Tuskegee. There were some other sociologists that had tried to add to that work, but the detailed work of going into these communities and uncovering archive references and newspaper references was something that no one had undertaken. And so we spent five years combing through these records. And since the time of that report, the number of new lynchings that we’ve documented has actually grown to over 2,000. We now have identified 6,500 lynchings of Black people in this country between 1865 and 1950.

And I do think it says something, again, about how we have failed to investigate this really important period of American history. Most people in this country can’t name a single Black person who was lynched between 1877 and 1950. Most people don’t know that 6 million Black people fled the American South during the first half of the 20th century. They don’t even appreciate that the demographic geography of our country was largely shaped by terror or violence because the Black people in Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit and Los Angeles went to these communities not as immigrants seeking economic opportunities, but they went to these communities exiles from terror and violence. And so we think this research is key to understanding America in the 20th century – understanding our tolerance of mob violence, understanding our comfort with torture and violence.

GROSS: I’m wondering if you recontextualize some of the sources who told the researchers about lynchings that had previously not been documented on a national scale. And by that, I mean, like, were there lynchings reported in newspapers that put it in a narrative that was positive? Like, so and so, who, you know, raped so and so, was lynched, and now justice has been done.

STEVENSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, first of all, a source that we used that hadn’t been explored were the whole network of Black newspapers that existed in the first half of the 20th century. And that’s where you could get information that you wouldn’t get in other publications. But there’s no question that the mainstream newspapers frequently celebrated these lynchings. The lynching of John Hartfield in Mississippi was scheduled, and the newspaper said, Hartfield to be lynched tomorrow evening at 6 o’clock. And thousands of people showed up for that lynching, and we have that headline on our wall.

And, yes, I think media and journalism was complicit in a lot of this. When we opened our site, the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser was very critical, because he said, oh, you’re going to talk to The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and you’re going to do interviews. But you never talk to us. And I said, well, that’s because I have some concerns about whether I can trust you. And I said, the Montgomery Advertiser celebrated lynchings. You were complicit. You advertised them, and you’ve never acknowledged it.

And to his credit, they went and looked through their files, documented all of the things that they did. And on the day we opened our national memorial, their headline said, we’re sorry. We were wrong. This paper was an active participant in creating an environment that fed racial terror. And for the next week, they did all of these reports exposing the ways in which their coverage had failed. And I was so energized by it.

GROSS: You know, in the example that I gave when I said a newspaper might have put lynchings in a positive light, I mean, there’s two problems with that. One is that the person was probably never tried who was lynched and might have been totally innocent. And two, no matter what that person did, lynching is not the way it’s supposed to be done in the United States with a justice system.

STEVENSON: Yeah, it’s illegal. It is unconscionable. It is – you cannot reconcile that with a democracy. These mobs would go to jails and pull people out and burn them alive, torture them, cut off their body parts. And the other thing that is not well understood – and we emphasize this at our National Memorial – people were lynched, not for accusations of a crime, a lot of times, people were lynched for social transgressions. We’ve got instances where a man was lynched because he didn’t call a police officer sir. Somebody didn’t step off the sidewalk when white people walked by. A Black man went to the front door of a white person’s house, not the back door. So many people were lynched because they passed a note. They were Black men passing notes to white women. Mary Turner was lynched in Georgia because she complained about the fact that her husband had been lynched. One Black woman in Kentucky was lynched because they couldn’t find her brother, so they used her as a proxy for this Black man who had been accused of something.

And when you understand that this practice, this terror violence, was about tormenting and traumatizing and reinforcing this racial hierarchy, you begin to think of this differently. It wasn’t punishment. They could have just buried the bodies of lynching victims to try to hide it, to try to get more people lynched to minimize it, but they didn’t want to do that. That wasn’t the purpose of it. They left people hanging on telephone wires, on trees. Sometimes they wouldn’t even let the family come and cut the person down. Why? Because they wanted to terror and traumatize and torment everybody in the Black community. So it wasn’t just 6,500 people who were lynched who were the victims, it was millions of Black people who had to deal with this terror, this trauma, this torture. They would sometimes drag bodies through the Black community after they had been lynched. They’d make Black people come out to witness the spectacle of this horror. And when you understand that, you begin to see this as a fundamental problem in the American experience, in the American psyche. This isn’t just a problem for Black people. This is a problem for everybody. And that’s what we’re hoping people will begin to think about as they think about how we now navigate an era where we’re beginning to see mobs act in violent ways, when we’re beginning to see rhetoric that tries to minimize the harms of history.

GROSS: Well, I need to reintroduce you again.

If you’re just joining us, my guest is human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RED HEART THE TICKER’S “SLIGHTLY UNDER WATER”)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which represents children and adults who have been unfairly convicted or sentenced. He also founded and leads the Legacy Sites, a museum and series of sites in public places in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to educate and reflect on the harsh truths of American history. The new site is about the Civil Rights Movement.

When you were growing up in a segregated part of the state of Delaware and you were going to a segregated school, what’s the narrative your parents gave you to try to help you understand what segregation really meant?

STEVENSON: You know, it’s interesting. People just didn’t talk about it. We grew up in this poor, racially segregated community. The people around me, most of whom didn’t have high school degrees, not because they weren’t smart or hardworking, but there were literally no high schools for Black people in our county when my dad was a teenager and his generation came of age. And so we wanted something better. They wanted something better. And so when the lawyers came in and said, we’re going to push for integration, they were very enthusiastic. I think we were told that, OK, if we get you into this school, you have to represent not just yourself, but you have to represent everybody. You have to prove to people that these narratives of racial inferiority are false. You have to prove to people that this fear of Blackness is something that is completely misguided.

And so I really did believe that when I got an A, it wasn’t just my A, it was my mom’s A and my grandma’s A and my community’s A because I knew they were cheering for me to overcome this presumption of dangerousness and guilt and incompetence that had so denied them so many opportunities. So it was less that people said things to me. It’s just that they showed up. They were there to celebrate you. And to be honest, Terry, that continues, you know? Sometimes when I have a hard day, it’s always the miracle of somebody who just shows up. I did a hearing a few years ago. And the hearing didn’t go the way I wanted it to, and my client got sentenced harshly, and it just broke my heart. It was a young, 14-year-old person who had been sentenced to a really harsh sentence. And when he called me later, I just got emotional, apologizing to him. I said, I’m so sorry. They should not have done it. So sorry. And I started crying. And my client – my young client, said, oh, oh, Mr. Bryan, please don’t cry. I know you’re going to get me out of here. I don’t want you to feel bad. And, of course, when your young client is comforting you, it made me feel worse. I felt like a really…

GROSS: (Laughter) Yeah.

STEVENSON: …(Laughter) bad lawyer. And I went through the whole rest of the day just feeling miserable. And then that night, I stopped in this little restaurant to get some food. I was trying to get home. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. And I walked into this restaurant, and there were five older Black women sitting at a table. And when they saw me, they recognized me, and they started waving. And I waved back, and I went over and I got my food, and I was just trying to get out of there. But as I was walking out, one of the older Black women shouted across the restaurant. She said, hey, come over here. And I went over to this older Black woman and she said, bend down. And I didn’t understand what she meant, so she said it again. She said, bend down. And I bent down. And when I bent down, she leaned up, and she kissed me on the forehead, and she said, you keep on keeping on. She didn’t know anything about my day. But I just was transfixed. And I just stood there. She said, go home. Go home. Eat your food. But when I got in my car and when I got home, I felt differently. And I feel like that’s what my community said to me. They said to me, in this very kind of silent but important way, you keep on keeping on. That was critical to how we were going to move forward.

GROSS: That’s a beautiful story. So Trump has appointed three Supreme Court justices, giving the court a supermajority of conservative justices. And I’m wondering if you’re seeing more conservative judges now and how that’s affecting your work and your view of the criminal justice system.

STEVENSON: I don’t think there’s any question that the nature of the work has absolutely shifted. I mean, this court has basically abandoned any oversight of the death penalty, and so you’re now seeing executions taking place. Florida’s executed just dozens of people. The court hasn’t granted a stay of execution in years, and so that has allowed lower courts to kind of step back. And so, yes, it does change the disposition of judges.

I think in some states, it’s always been that way. We have a lot of states where judges are elected. And so when you have a jurisdiction where they elect judges, they’ve always been more attentive to popular ideas about things than what we expect from the federal courts. The power of the federal courts is that with life tenure, they’re supposed to be immune from the political preferences. They’re going to do what the Constitution requires. That’s how we got Brown v. Board of Education. That’s how we got Miranda in the early 1960s. That’s how we got Loving v. Virginia to end these bans on interracial marriage. They knew that those decisions were not going to be popular, but they decided that that was their obligation.

And so with a more political court, you see a court that’s more responsive to majoritarian preference. You see a court that’s more responsive to the will of the powerful, the will of the many. And I’ve always regarded the court to be the refuge of the powerless, the refuge of those who are the minority whose rights are being challenged. I haven’t given up on the court. I haven’t given up on the rule of law. And this court has made some important decisions that have been corrective to this political moment, but there’s no doubt that we’re in an era where we are more vulnerable.

GROSS: So one of the voting rights issues before the Supreme Court now might lead to further gutting of the Voting Rights Act. And I’m wondering if you can share what your concerns are about that.

STEVENSON: Well, I just think that America became a different country in 1965 when we passed the Voting Rights Act, and we finally allowed millions of people who had been disenfranchised and excluded to participate in this political process. The legal, social, economic and cultural landscape of America changed. We became a healthier democracy, a better nation. And rather than complaining about the Voting Rights Act, it should be celebrated. And so these efforts to gut it, to restrict it, to undermine it cause me a lot of pain because I worry about a future where we are not doing everything we can to facilitate full political participation. We’re once again going to try to marginalize people and silence people and disempower people.

I think that John Lewis, before he died, was committed to trying to reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act, and Congress failed to do that. I think we’re going to need Congress to step up and reassert their commitment that in this country, we want everyone who is part of this American experience to participate by voting. And I think that’s the hope.

GROSS: My guest is human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He also founded and leads the Legacy sites, a museum and series of sites in public places in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to educate and reflect on the harsh truths of American history. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MILES DAVIS’ “BYE BYE BLACKBIRD”)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

The church was central to the Civil Rights Movement. Is the church still seen as, like, a safe place and a place to organize, the way it was in the ’50s and ’60s in Alabama, in Montgomery, where you live?

STEVENSON: Oh, absolutely. And there are other institutions – academic institutions, cultural institutions – that are doing things. But I don’t think you can replace the power and the spirit of people who come together. You need a space where that tradition of using everything you have to find your strength and your courage is important. So I do think faith institutions have a critical role to play and will continue to do that.

I also think that they’re supposed to know things about what truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration looks like. At least in my church, you can’t come in there and say, I want heaven and salvation and all the good stuff, but I’m not going to confess anything. The clergy in my community will say, oh, no. It doesn’t work like that. You got to be willing to repent. You got to be willing to confess. But then they’ll say, but don’t fear it, because repentance and confession – acknowledgment – is what opens up your heart to grace and mercy. And grace and mercy is what yields redemption and reconciliation and restoration. It is a moral opportunity to do something that uplifts.

GROSS: So finally, I have to ask you about Michael B. Jordan because…

STEVENSON: (Laughter).

GROSS: He played you in the movie adaptation of your memoir, “Just Mercy.” I imagine you saw him recently win an Oscar for “Sinners”?

STEVENSON: Yes.

GROSS: What was it like for you to watch the actor who played you get the Oscar?

STEVENSON: (Laughter) I’m so…

GROSS: But not for playing you – for “Sinners”?

STEVENSON: Yeah. No, I’m so proud of him. You know, I made a little video and sent it to him just because I think it’s really remarkable. First of all, he did an amazing job in “Sinners” playing those dual characters who had just dreams of being loved and having fulfillment and wanting to be free and not being able to achieve those dreams ’cause the boundaries and borders created by racial bigotry. I think that’s what Ryan and the cast put together in that film, “Sinners,” that was so powerful. So I was enormously proud of him.

It did create a moment of just bizarreness for me because one of my clients on the road called me and said, hey, Bryan, I heard you became a vampire.

GROSS: (Laughter).

STEVENSON: I don’t know if I want you to come and see me. I was like, no, man, I haven’t become a vampire. That’s Michael B. You know, and he’s in a movie. So don’t worry about that. And I could not be prouder of Michael B. And the entire cast. Ryan has done an amazing job with the films he’s created, but I thought it was a really important story. And I love that it was a story that told something atypical. Yes, it was entertaining. It was scary, but it’s situated in truths about our history that are important for people to understand. And so, yeah, I was incredibly proud of him.

GROSS: Bryan Stevenson, it was really just such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for your work and for coming back on our show.

STEVENSON: My pleasure, Terry.

GROSS: Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the founder of the Legacy Sites. He wrote the introduction to a new companion book called “The Legacy Sites: A History Of Racial Injustice.” You can find an extended version of our interview on our podcast. Stevenson’s memoir was adapted into a 2019 film called “Just Mercy.” It starred Michael B. Jordan, who just won an Oscar for his performance in “Sinners” as Stevenson. Here’s a courtroom scene from the film.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “JUST MERCY”)

MICHAEL B JORDAN: (As Bryan Stevenson) It’s easy to see this case as one man trying to prove his innocence. But when you take a Black man and you put him on death row a year before his trial and exclude Black people from serving on his jury, when you base your conviction on the coerced testimony of a white felon and ignore the testimony of two dozen law-abiding Black witnesses, when any evidence proving his innocence is suppressed and anyone who tries to tell the truth is threatened, this case becomes more than the trial of just a single defendant. It becomes a test of whether we’re going to be governed by fear and by anger or by the rule of law.

If the people standing in the back of this courtroom are all presumed guilty when accused, if they have to leave here and live in fear of when this very thing will happen to them, if we’re just going to accept a system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent, then we can’t claim to be just. If we say we’re committed to equal justice under law, to protecting the rights of every citizen, regardless of wealth, race or status, then we have to end this nightmare for Walter McMillian and his family. The charges against him have been proven to be a false construction of desperate people, fueled by bigotry and bias, who ignored the truth in exchange for easy solutions. And that’s not the law. That’s not justice. That’s not right.

GROSS: Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, America’s first AI war is unfolding right now in the war with Iran. The Pentagon’s secret campaign to build America’s AI warfare capabilities is called Project Maven. Our guest will be Bloomberg reporter Katrina Manson, the author of a new book about that project and the obsessive Marine Colonel behind it. I hope you’ll join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT’S “EGYPTIAN FANTASY”)

GROSS: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Today’s interview was recorded by Charlie Kyer (ph) with additional engineering from Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I’m Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT’S “EGYPTIAN FANTASY”)

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