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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.

Bryan Stevenson

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Bryan Stevenson
Age: 64
Born: 1959
Born: November 14
Jurist
Lawyer
Organizational Founder
Professor
Writer
Milton
Delaware
Think
Slavery
Involuntary
Thinking
Created
Servitude
Differences
Dealt
Greatest
Evolved
American
Legitimate
Rather
Racial
Evil
Ended
Never
Narrative

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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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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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Why do we want to kill all the broken people?
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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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Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
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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.
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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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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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Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.
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If we want to be proud of our country, if we want to be proud as Americans, if we want to be proud of our history, then we can't talk about the things that are inconsistent with pride, about which we can have no pride.
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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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Montgomery's unique role in the domestic slave trade was that it was the first community that had a rail line that connected the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic region.
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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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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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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 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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Always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing
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Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent.
Bryan Stevenson
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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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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.
Bryan Stevenson