Early in the morning of Martin Luther King Day, 19 January, I walked up Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama, to the Baptist church where Dr King had been the pastor. The plain red-brick building is in the shadow of the state capitol, a grand colonnaded white house at the top end of the broad avenue. Walking up there at a chill, cloudless 7am took me past some of the stations of the cross of the civil rights movement. At the bottom of the hill is the stop at which Rosa Parks stood 60 years ago waiting to take her fateful seat on the bus home. Near the top of it is a simple stone monument that commemorates the end of the Selma to Montgomery march led by King 10 years later (and now celebrated in a Hollywood film).
This morning the path between these singular turning points of history is closed to traffic and bristling with state police and Swat teams. Surveillance helicopters judder overhead. The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert J Bentley, has chosen this day for his inauguration to his second term and a parade is planned; a red carpet is being unrolled on the capitol steps. I’m vaguely disconcerted to realise that as I walk I can measure my progress up the street, the only non-uniformed sign of life, on the crackle of police radios (“white male advancing up left side of avenue with laptop shoulder bag”… “I see him”).
At the top of the hill it takes me a few moments to discover Martin Luther King’s church. There is no statue to him in Montgomery. His church is looked down upon by a lofty bronze of Jefferson Davis, last president of the confederacy, white supremacist and owner of 100 slaves. In Alabama, as I’ve been politely corrected a couple of times already this morning, this particular national holiday is named not only after the civil rights leader but also after Davis’s fiercest general: it is, by statute, “Martin Luther King/Robert E Lee Day”. Later, a traditional birthday cake will be served at the capitol building in the general’s honour.
I’m in Montgomery to talk to Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who established the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery 25 years ago, and for whom such symbolism has long been crucially important. Stevenson, who grew up black in segregated Delaware, and graduated from Harvard Law School, first came here to offer his services as the pro bono defender of inmates on death row in Alabama. The EJI has subsequently saved 115 men from the death sentence. Stevenson has also petitioned successfully in the Supreme Court to end the legal incarceration of children as young as 13 to sentences of life without parole in adult prisons. Along the way, in the heart of the heart of Dixie – his office stands next to the Hank Williams museum – he has been a tireless advocate of the pressing need to confront racial bias at every point in the American justice system.
In his work, in Alabama and beyond, Stevenson has made many enemies, but quite a few significant friends. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man who knows a good deal about struggle and justice, calls him, without qualification, “America’s Nelson Mandela”. President Obama, in the wake of the violent reaction to the police killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, appointed Stevenson in December to a taskforce that will report on the state of law enforcement in the union (they had their first public meeting in Washington DC last month). Stevenson has been awarded just about every honour that international justice can bestow, from an Olof Palme award in 2000 to a $350,000 Lannan grant last week (each time he receives a prize he puts the money into EJI’s always stretched coffers). He is also the recipient of more informal accolades. His 2012 TED talk, “We need to talk about an injustice”, is said to hold the record for the longest standing ovation given to any TED speaker.
Over the weekend in Montgomery I have been reading Stevenson’s powerful, profoundly affecting memoir about his ongoing campaigns, Just Mercy. The book will be published in Britain this week. He frames it with the story of Walter McMillian, his first and highest-profile death row acquittal. McMillian, a black man with his own timber business, was wrongly convicted of the murder in 1986 of a white 18-year-old shop assistant, Ronda Morrison, in Monroeville, Alabama, the town made famous for a comparable fictional miscarriage of justice in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Despite apparently incontrovertible alibis that placed him at a barbecue at home when the killing took place, McMillian, who had been known to be conducting a love affair with a married white woman, was found guilty of the murder and given a death sentence by a judge named Robert E Lee Key. He lived for seven years on death row before Stevenson’s intervention eventually resulted in a retrial. At that trial the state’s key witnesses admitted on oath that they had, under severe police pressure, entirely fabricated their eye-witness statements against McMillian, and he was eventually freed. Stevenson’s role in the case, and its detail, saw him widely compared to Atticus Finch, the lawyer in Lee’s novel. He did not welcome the comparison, not least because Finch’s client, Tom Robinson, was found guilty and killed in prison.
Stevenson meets me with a generous smile in his offices just round the corner from the Dexter Avenue parade. Despite the troubles he has seen, he looks younger than his 55 years. He speaks with the charisma and fluency of a trial lawyer, quietly and exactly. His speech is punctuated with aphorisms designed to make you stop and think. “The opposite of poverty is not wealth,” he will say, “it is justice.” Or, speaking about capital punishment, “The question is not whether these people deserve to die for what they have done; the question is whether, given our history, we deserve to kill them.”
Stevenson’s book came out in the States in the autumn, almost at the height of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. It documents, in a measured, anecdotal way, the inside story of the policy of mass incarceration, the barely credible inhumanity that has seen young boys kept in solitary confinement for years and decades, and the evidence of institutional racism at the heart of the American justice system. The statistics tell only a fraction of the story, but they are a good place to start. In 1970 America imprisoned 300,000 of its citizens. Now it imprisons 2.3 million people. A quarter of a million children have been sent to adult American jails in that time, including 3,000 sentenced to life without parole. One in every three black male babies born today can expect to be incarcerated (for the white population it is one in 15). In some states, including Alabama, a criminal record means disenfranchisement for life.
Given Stevenson’s personal insight into these figures, I’ve been struck, reading the (almost uniformly glowing) American reviews of his book, how the response seems nevertheless to have stopped short of confronting the magnitude of what he writes. The book has been read, it seems to me, as an examination of certain miscarriages of justice rather than as what he clearly hoped it would be: an indictment of the system as a whole. Was he surprised, I wonder, that – at this particular charged moment – it has not given rise to a wider conversation?
He smiles. “I wrote the book because I am persuaded that if most people in America saw what I see on a regular basis they would not be able to reconcile themselves with these realities,” he says. “But our instinct is to deny. We have the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world, and yet we don’t feel bad about it. I think we sometimes seem to feel that we give up too much power if we even recognise that we have made, and continue to make, colossal mistakes in this area. The press, to a certain extent, shares that attitude.”
Stevenson, in his affable, reasonable way, uses deliberately charged language in an attempt to shake his nation from that perceived complacency. He talks in particular of the crying need for “truth and reconciliation” in the post-civil rights era, of the kind that followed apartheid in South Africa and genocide in Rwanda – and he weighs his words carefully.
“When people sit around this table,” he says, “I sometimes ask: ‘What if someone came in the room and introduced themselves by saying they were a Holocaust survivor?’ Just those two words would make me stand up and give that person an honoured place at this table. I would be responsive to them, and I would let them talk as much as they wanted about the injury and trauma and hardship they had known. And rightly so. When it comes to the history of slavery and the terror that followed it right up to the 1960s, we have never done that. We do the opposite. You know, even me. I grew up in a segregated community, I couldn’t go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town. My grandmother was the daughter of slaves; she grew up in terror of lynchings, joined the great migration to the urban centres of the north to escape. But I never talked about that for the first 30 or more years of my life. It is only the last five, 10 years I have started to.”
In his TED talk Stevenson recalled giving a lecture in Germany about American capital punishment. A man stood up and said, “Well of course, given our history that could never happen here.” What he meant was that the state could never again sanction killing its citizens. Of course such a thing would be “unconscionable”, Stevenson agreed: imagine a world in which modern Germany not only imprisoned a vastly disproportionate number of Jews, but also executed them. And then, he suggested, think of America’s 19th- and 20th-century history. And ask just how conscionable is it to live in a state that locks up a vastly disproportionate number of black men and women, and sentences many of them to death.
It is Stevenson’s belief and contention that unless such deep “psycho-social” history is acknowledged and faced, “there is going to be more police misconduct, there is going to be more overincarceration, there are going to be more wrongful convictions. That, I guess, is really where I am right now.”
He apologises to me for the slight edge of weariness in these words. He is in person and in all his documented dealings determinedly a man of hope, not despair. But he has, he says, not been sleeping very much this week because he has been preparing the plea for the retrial in perhaps the longest-running case on his books. Anthony Ray Hinton was convicted of two murders in Birmingham, Alabama in 1985 after a perfunctory trial. He has been on death row for 28 years. Stevenson has established evidence that Hinton was clocked into work at a warehouse 15 miles away when one of the crimes took place. He was convicted almost entirely on flimsy firearms evidence that has been shown to be nonsense by some of the most respected ballistics experts in the country. “The state, I think, knows there is a massive problem with the case,” he says, “but they continue to fight us. We got the US supreme court to grant relief, and we got the case overturned and now we have a retrial. I had been expecting, given our evidence, that they would just drop the charges and finally let Anthony Ray Hinton go home. But they won’t do that. They won’t do it, I don’t think, not because they believe he is guilty but because it will make them look bad.”
It is such intransigence that he has tried to face down with fact and reason every day since he first came here. He started out with an office in a house behind a tyre factory, and one assistant. He now has an office of 40 – with 20 full-time lawyers, and a number of interns and graduates from the course in justice he teaches at New York university. His work rate is the stuff of legend. He has remained single, he has no children, he relies on contributions and grants to support the work, and makes no charge to the clients he takes on. It’s a different life, he suggests, to the one he imagined when he was at law school. But he doesn’t feel like he has made sacrifices. “Obviously there were ways to have made a lot more money and to have had more leisure,” he says with a laugh. “But I wouldn’t choose that. I feel rich in ways that are unique and that I would never trade for tens of millions of dollars in the bank. I have nephews and nieces who I am very close to. And I have a currency here. I am very plugged in.”
When he first came and started digging in old case files, visiting forgotten men on death row, there were death threats and bomb scares. There is still, clearly, a good deal of hostility to his mission. I wonder if he was ever fearful?
He turns the idea round in his head. “It’s a good question. But I think when you see that the status quo creates pain and anguish and suffering, what I am most afraid of is that things will stay the same. That the people I am trying to represent will suffer more, or be condemned or executed. Fifty years ago the people doing what I do would have said ‘my head is bloody but not bowed’. I don’t have to say that. I don’t think I can afford to be less courageous than they were.”
Stevenson had a direct line to that kind of courage in a friendship he established with Rosa Parks before she died. He used to visit “Ms Parks” when she came to town from her home in Detroit, in the company of her friends Ms Johnnie Carr, the driving force behind the Montgomery bus boycott, and Virginia Durr, wife of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks’s attorney, Clifford Durr. They would sit in the Durrs’ living room, or on their porch, and Stevenson would do as he was told and just listen to the three women, then in their 80s, “laughing, telling stories and bearing witness about what could be done”. On the first meeting Parks asked him what the EJI did, and he went into a long and tortured explanation about the extent of its aims, taking in the need to confront racial history in its broadest sense and the efforts to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors wherever it appeared.
When he finished his speech, he recalls in his book that “Ms Parks leaned back, smiling. ‘Ooooh honey, all that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.’ We all laughed. I looked down, a little embarrassed. Then Ms Carr leaned forward and put her finger in my face and talked to me just like my grandmother used to talk to me. She said ‘That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.’”
Speaking now, he recalls how he once took Parks down to Tallahassee for her to receive an honorary degree. “They started this ceremony with We Shall Overcome,” he remembers. “Everyone was seated. She whispered to me ‘When I hear that song I’m used to standing.’ She stood up and everybody hurriedly stood up too. She had a sweet way of doing things, but forceful, absolutely focused on what had to happen.”
When he embarks on some of his more arduous battles, Stevenson tries to keep that example with him, along with those of the other powerful women in his life, his grandmother and mother – who, he says, told him not what he should do with his life, but what he shouldn’t. (“Don’t go and work in that poultry plant!” she would say). He has tried to take their spirit of robust, polite intransigence into some of the more heartbreaking situations he has encountered. His book details his efforts, for example, to win some clemency for a young man named Joe Sullivan, convicted in 1989, aged 13, of burglary and rape on testimony given by two older “accomplices”, one with a long criminal record of sexual violence. Sullivan came from a violent and abusive home, and had severe learning difficulties and physical disabilities. Having admitted helping in the burglary, he vehemently denied the rape. He was nevertheless sentenced to life in an adult jail without parole. When Stevenson met him in Santa Rosa jail, Florida in 2007 he was being held in a four-foot square cage in a wheelchair. His jailers had to tip the cage on to its side to get him out. He had prepared some questions for his attorney to answer. Chief among them was this one: “Who is your favourite cartoon character?” Partly on the basis of Sullivan’s case, the EJI has fought to have the “life without parole” sentence for minors rendered unconstitutional. They won that battle in the supreme court in 2012, but Joe and hundreds like him remain in prison.
Recently, some of Stevenson’s battles have been of a different, cultural kind. In Montgomery he has tried for nearly 20 years to have the city make some public acknowledgement, in the form of signposts, of its grim history in the slave trade. The EJI’s research shows that Montgomery was the most active slave trading port in the south from 1850 to the end of the civil war. “On any given day on this street where we sit,” Stevenson says, “you would find hundreds of slaves being paraded for sale in chains. This building was the biggest slave warehouse in Montgomery. It was particularly notorious because in Alabama there was no burden on slave traders to prove that the people they were selling were actually enslaved. So they would kidnap free black people – as in [the film and book] 12 Years a Slave – and bring them to Montgomery to sell.”
Though there were 59 public markers and history trails in the city to commemorate the struggles of the confederacy, that other history was entirely invisible to the visitor. The EJI campaigned to put up four small signs documenting the slave past of the city. The Alabama historical association, though accepting their research, refused on the grounds that it was “too controversial”. Stevenson sat down with the mayor and told him “that every mayor of Montgomery had been on the wrong side of racial history since this was a city. You say no to this and you will be added to the list.”
Finally, in 2013, the city allowed three small bronze markers, not four, and none on Dexter Avenue where the slave market had been. “You think to yourself: ‘why? Why would they say no?’” Stevenson says.
He is planning to replicate the effort in Memphis, New Orleans and other former slave centres. The EJI has also been conducting research into the lynchings that took place here and in neighbouring states. They have documented about 4,000 in the years up to 1960. Stevenson laughs when he hears people say that until this decade America had not known terrorism within its borders. “People here like to pretend the civil war was not about slavery,” he says. “But I believe all the issues around social justice in this country have to start there. You can’t understand what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, you can’t understand what happened to Eric Garner in New York City, without understanding this narrative of racial difference that was created during the slave years.
“We were a slave society. We created an ideology about differences between races that made slavery legitimate, that even sought to make it moral. You could be a good Christian and a slave owner because these people were less than human, they were lazy, they weren’t smart, and you were doing something noble to civilise them.
“That narrative was never addressed by the legislation to end forced labour. We focus a lot on the exceptional courage and leadership of Dr King and Rosa Parks in making change happen – that is important – but if we only focus on that we forget how the great mass of white people in this part of America resisted that movement with enormous anger and violence.”
Isn’t he a bit surprised that it has fallen to the EJI to do this kind of work?
“We are a bunch of lawyers with a huge case load,” he says. “I’m not sure why this hasn’t been taken on by anyone else. But I increasingly think this is the necessary step that leads to a degree of humility around these issues.”
That humility, he believes, is the first step on the road to mercy, the quality that he sees as almost entirely absent in the excesses of retributive justice, the quality that makes us human. “We can’t insist on both truth and reconciliation because you cannot reconcile people to something they clearly don’t feel bad about. But we can insist on the truth.”
All the while I am speaking to Stevenson, the noise outside is that of marching bands, whistling Dixie up to the capitol. I wander up there again after I leave him. The governor’s supporters are lined up to enjoy the inauguration in the sun. Over the way, a congregation is filing into Martin Luther King’s church for a service of remembrance, so I follow them in. The service begins with the blind bluesman and civil rights campaigner Bobby Jackson singing What a Wonderful World. The sermon is delivered with authentic evangelical fervour by Dr King’s heir as pastor, the Reverend Cromwell A Handy. He talks in rising cadences of “feeling edgy” about the state of nation 50 years after the Selma march, feeling edgy about “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” in Ferguson, and feeling edgy about “I can’t breathe!” in New York. His theme, the order of service advises, is “hope for unity in a divided world”. That particular prayer, it seems to me, an interloper that morning, sitting at the back, might be best addressed to the offices of the Equal Justice Initiative just down the road.
Bryan Stevenson will be in London this week to speak about the legacy of Martin Luther King at a Guardian Film Club showing of the film Selma. The event takes place on Thursday 5 February from 7-10pm at the Tabernacle, London, W11 with tickets at £15.
