Last Thursday, Bryan Stevenson, a renowned human rights activist and public interest lawyer, was hosted by the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy in honor of his recognition as a 2025 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Citizen Leadership, the highest honor given by UVA in collaboration with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. These awards are presented to recognize “national and international leaders in the fields of citizen leadership law, and architecture.”
Stevenson’s career and notoriety skyrocketed after he successfully got Walter McMillian, an innocent black man put on death row before his trial began, exonerated in 1993. After that, he authored the New York Times bestseller Just Mercy, which was adapted into a motion picture in 2019.
Stevenson is also the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama, focused on exonerating innocent death row prisoners, fighting against unfair sentencing, and has argued and won multiple cases against the United States Supreme Court. Today, Stevenson is a professor of law at New York University School of Law and, with the EJI, also does work looking at the legacy of slavery, racial segregation, lynchings, and mass incarcerations tied to racial bias.
In the address hosted at Garrett Hall, Stevenson focused on the narrative of fear and anger prevalent in politics, yet he sees hope in his work. He steered the conversation towards the criminal justice system. He reminded the audience that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with one in eight defentants on death row being innocent. He attributed this to how many people “need a narrative to justify disorder,” leading to mass incarceration. Because of this, Stevenson has witnessed “competition in legislation over who could be the toughest,” whether it be giving the harshest sentences or passing the strictest legislation, which leads to his job often requiring him to go into prisons to defend children who are facing sixty-year sentences. Because of this injustice, Stevenson asserted that he needs to relentlessly push a narrative to show that “all children are children,” and the current narrative surrounding criminal cases needs to change.
Stevenson noted that the United States has a long history of racial injustice, and if we don’t talk about the harm it has done, it continues to manifest. The US has made progress in beginning to speak about these harms, but it needs to be more intentional in remedying them. Calling to mind current events, Stevenson said the intention of DEI, to allow the most qualified equal job access, has become a narrative of fear and anger, so that DEI is now considered harmful. This narrative of racial inferiority is an infection. Native genocides, the Holocaust, and slavery were all justified by a narrative. “The greatest evil of slavery,” Stevenson uttered, “was the narrative we used to justify it.”
Stevenson briefly paused and invited everyone in the hall to visit the EJI’s Legacy Sites. These sites serve as a truth-telling place in America about racial injustice because we as a country won’t get anywhere if we’re afraid of DEI and silent about these issues.
“And what’s incredibly remarkable is that formerly enslaved people chose America and citizenship after the Civil War, not revenge. They said ‘we’re going to build a better America,’ which is truly remarkable.” He then delved into the lawlessness, the lynchings, and the terror that persisted despite the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments. He described how the Great Migration of the twentieth century left millions of black people as refugees from terror in the South.
Stevenson concluded his speech by reminding the audience that powerlessness teaches us to move through the world with hope. We will not recover if we assume that something terrible will happen if we have conversations about racial injustice. He told a story about his most poignant memory: when he sat with Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr, both in their eighties at the time. They never spoke about what they had accomplished, but focused on what they still needed to do. “We’re in the early days of a post-apartheid Virginia. We must learn this history, develop a new vocabulary, and begin to understand why these issues still weigh on us,” said Stevenson. Even in old age, the fight for justice is never-ending.
The first question Stevenson received from the floor asked how he gains strength, especially when he isn’t taken seriously as an attorney due to his race. Stevenson responded, “It’s hard to be strategic when [you’re] being oppressed,” yet he “appreciates what generations of people have done for [him].” Stevenson told the audience he remembers his great-grandparents, who were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia, and their “resilience, courage, and bravery and learned to love under such oppression.” Stevenson believes they would be ashamed of him if he said equality was too hard to accomplish. “I can do more than I sometimes think I can do. It’s easier to govern through fear and anger than through hope, but just because it’s not economic or militaristic doesn’t mean it’s not powerful,” he stated.
Stevenson ended his address by asserting, “There’s no one I’m against. They’re doing problematic things that need to stop, but I don’t hate them. People are more than the worst thing they’ve done,” followed by a standing ovation. His assertiveness and eloquence reminded us that narratives are ever-changing and that it’s our collective responsibility to own up to all aspects of our past.
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