Monday, February 6, 2023

Bryan Stevenson: Lawyer/Equal Justice Initiative/The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Shooting Azimuths)

 Biography:

New York University - School of Law

Website

Bryan Stevenson's Books

Activism/Work/Writings:

Adams, Tim. "Bryan Stevenson: America's Mandela." The Guardian (February 1, 2015) ["Bryan Stevenson has devoted his life to exposing racial bias in the US penal system, with cases including a 13-year-old boy sentenced to life and numerous wrongful death row convictions. Tim Adams meets him at his Alabama HQ."]

Capeheart, Jonathan. "Bryan Stevenson wants us to confront our country’s racial terrorism and then say, ‘Never again.’" Washington Post (April 24, 2018)

Equal Justice Initiative ["The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society."]

Evans, Richard and Bryan Stevenson. "How Germany Can Help America Remember." On the Media (July 3, 2020) ["It’s often said the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative. That’s why the battle still rages, and still takes casualties, every single day. To chronicle the opening of a new front in the war over the Civil War, Brooke and OTM producer Alana Casanova Burgess went to Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, to speak with public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson about his new civil rights museum and memorial. When it comes to honoring and learning from our historical ills, Stevenson says America should look to another conflicted capital city, Berlin, Germany. In this piece, Brooke also speaks with historian Sir Richard Evans, author of The Third Reich in History and Memory, about how vestiges of the Nazi regime have been carefully curated to remember the victims of the Holocaust without reverence for their oppressors."]

Lacy, Claudia and Jacqueline Olive. "A Modern-Day Lynching?: Always in Season Looks at 2014 Hanging in NC & Legacy of Racial Terrorism." Democracy Now (February 1, 2019) ["As we mark the beginning of Black History Month, we look at “Always in Season,” a disturbing new documentary that examines lynching in the United States both past and present. It interviews Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which built the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery to remember the more than 4,000 African Americans lynched in the United States. It also looks closely at the case of Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old African-American high school student who, on August 29, 2014, was found hanging from two belts attached to a wooden swing set in a largely white trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina. At the time of his death, Lacy was dating an older white woman. Local authorities quickly determined his death to be a suicide, but Lacy’s family and local civil rights activists feared authorities may have been covering up a lynching. We speak with Lacy’s mother, Claudia Lacy, and Jacqueline Olive, the director of “Always in Season.”"]

Landrieu, Mitch, et al. "Confronting the Legacy of the Confederacy." Best of the Left #1186 (May 29, 2018) ["Today we take a look at the legacy of the Confederacy, the monuments and white supremacy it left behind and the racial terror institutionalized in America based on upholding its values."]

"Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror." 3rd ed. Equal Justice Initiative (2017)

McWilliams, James. " Bryan Stevenson on What Well-Meaning White People Need to Know About Race." Pacific Standard (February 6, 2018)

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice ["More than 4400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Millions more fled the South as refugees from racial terrorism, profoundly impacting the entire nation. Until now, there has been no national memorial acknowledging the victims of racial terror lynchings. On a six-acre site atop a rise overlooking Montgomery, the national lynching memorial is a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy."]

Okeowo, Alexis. "A Devastating, Overdue National Memorial to Lynching Victims." The New Yorker (April 26, 2018)

Ramsey, Joseph. "Beyond Condemnation." Against the Grain (February 1, 2023) ["Throwing away the key is what the criminal punishment system – and, by extension, the U.S. public – does to tens of thousands of people behind bars. Why does the acclaimed public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson attend to and represent those serving extreme sentences? What does Joseph G. Ramsey mean by Stevenson’s “compassionate radicalism”? Ramsey talks about Stevenson’s transformative ideas, and his own."]

Stevenson, Bryan. "A Presumption of Guilt." The New York Review of Books (July 13, 2017)

---. "'Death Penalty is Lynching's Stepson': On Slavery, White Supremacy, Prisons & More." Democracy Now (May 1, 2018) ["Extended conversation with Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country’s first-ever memorial to the victims of lynching in the United States. The memorial opened last week in Montgomery, Alabama. Its centerpiece is a walkway with 800 weathered steel pillars overhead, each of them naming a U.S. county and the people who were lynched there by white mobs. The memorial’s partner site, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, also opened last week. For more, we speak with Bryan Stevenson, who says that acknowledging history is crucial to facing racism today. “Everybody wants to think that if they were alive during slavery, they’d be an abolitionist,” Stevenson says. “If we’re not prepared to act today, then I don’t think we can claim that we would have acted any differently during slavery and lynching and segregation.”"]

---. "On Challenging the Legacy of Racial Inequality in America: the Work of the Equal Justice Initiative." Slavery and Its Legacies (February 6, 2017) ["Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Mr. Stevenson has successfully argued several cases in the United States Supreme Court and recently won an historic ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief or release for over 115 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row. Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge the legacy of racial inequality in America, including major projects to educate communities about slavery, lynching and racial segregation. Mr. Stevenson is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law."]

---. "One Lawyer's Fight For Young Blacks And 'Just Mercy.'" Fresh Air (October 20, 2014)

---. "'Talking History is Way We Liberate America': : New Memorial Honors Victims of White Supremacy." Democracy Now (May 1, 2018) ["The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened last week in Montgomery, Alabama—a monument to victims of white supremacy in the United States. The memorial’s centerpiece is a walkway with 800 weathered steel pillars overhead, each of them naming a U.S. county and the people who were lynched there by white mobs. In addition to the memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching, its partner site, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, also opened last week. For more, we speak with Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country’s first-ever memorial to the victims of lynching in the United States."]

Teutsch, Matthew. "The Problem with Confederate Monuments in Public Spaces." Black Perspectives (July 26, 2017)

Toobin, Jeffrey. "The Legacy of Lynching on Death Row." The New Yorker (August 22, 2016) ["In Alabama, Bryan Stevenson is saving inmates from execution and memorializing the darkest episodes of America’s past."]









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