Bryan Stevenson

It was 1993, in Alabama.

A man walked out of prison. His name was Walter McMillian. He had been sentenced to death, and his conviction had just been overturned.

His lawyer's name was Bryan Stevenson.

Bryan Stevenson had been born on November 14, 1959, in Milton, a small town in southern Delaware.

As a child, he started school at a school for Black children only. Even after segregation ended, the old rules stayed. His mother protested. She wanted the best possible education for her children.

As a teenager, he lost his grandfather, murdered in Philadelphia. Bryan believed the police had not made the case a priority, because the victim was poor and Black.

He studied philosophy at Eastern University, in Pennsylvania. Then he went to Harvard, on a full scholarship.

During his studies, he did an internship in Atlanta, with lawyers who defended people on death row. It was a turning point.

In 1985, he left Harvard with a law degree and another in public policy. Then he went back to Atlanta, to defend people on Alabama's death row.

In 1989, he took charge of a legal office in Montgomery, Alabama. That is where the Equal Justice Initiative was born. He became its director, without pay.

One of his cases was that of Walter McMillian.

He was a 45-year-old Black worker. In 1988, he had been sentenced to death for a murder committed in Monroeville two years earlier.

Bryan Stevenson studied the case. Testimony was questionable. Evidence had been hidden.

The television program 60 Minutes told the story.

In 1993, the conviction was overturned. Walter McMillian was set free.

In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the United States Supreme Court ruled mandatory life without parole for minors unconstitutional.

In 2014, he told the story of his fight in a book, Just Mercy. A film was made from it in 2019.

In 2018, his team opened a museum and a memorial for peace and justice in Montgomery. There, 800 steel columns hang. On each are engraved names of lynching victims.

About 4,400 lynchings are documented there.

By 2022, the Equal Justice Initiative had saved more than 130 people from the death penalty.

Bryan Stevenson summed up his conviction this way:

His way of seeing echoes Ubuntu, without being the same: no one is reduced to a single day of their life, and a society is judged by how it treats the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated.

In Montgomery, the memorial's steel columns carry names. Each name was a person.