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My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.

Bryan Stevenson

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Bryan Stevenson
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: November 14
Jurist
Lawyer
Organizational Founder
Professor
Writer
Milton
Delaware
School
Open
Lawyers
Remember
Public
Eastern
Still
Came
Shore
Community
Schools
Poor
Lawyer
Black
Lived
Kids
Parents
Segregated
Stills
Parent
Rural

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If you're just the person with power, exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you're going to be an operative of injustice and inequality.
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Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
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But simply punishing the broken--walking away from them or hiding them from sight--only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.
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My parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone.
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If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.
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We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.
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That's what's provocative to me - that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.
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I think there is a contempt for the human dignity of people who were enslaved. You couldn't see them as fully human and so you didn't respect their desire to be connected to a family and a place. That was the only way you could tolerate and make sense of lynching and the terror that lynching represented.
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You ultimately judge the civility of a society not by how it treats the rich, the powerful, the protected and the highly esteemed, but by how it treats the poor, the disfavored and the disadvantaged.
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We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
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Are you the sum total of your worst acts?
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When you come to Montgomery, you see fifty-nine monuments and memorials, all about the Civil War, all about Confederate leaders and generals. We have lionized these people, and we have romanticized their courage and their commitment and their tenacity, and we have completely eliminated the reality that created the Civil War.
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You can't demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth - people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.
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Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.
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You don’t change the world with the ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.
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The opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.
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Why do we want to kill all the broken people?
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Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.
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I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.
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The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.
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