Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Allen Stevenson (born November 14, 1959) is an American lawyer, social justice activist, and law professor at New York University School of Law. He is also the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, he has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped achieve United States Supreme Court decisions that prohibit sentencing juvenile offenders to death or to mandatory life terms without parole.[1] Stevenson was depicted in the 2019 legal drama film Just Mercy, based on his 2014 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. In the memoir, he recounts his work defending Walter McMillian, who had been unjustly convicted and sentenced to death. Stevenson initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which honors the names of more than 4,000 African Americans lynched in the twelve states of the South from 1877 to 1950. He argues that the history of slavery and lynchings has influenced the subsequent high rate of death sentences in the South, where it has been disproportionately applied to minorities. A related museum, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, offers interpretations to show the connection between the post-Reconstruction period of lynchings and the high rate of incarceration and executions of people of color in the United States. Bryan A. Stevenson was born on November 14, 1959, in Milton, a small town in southern Delaware.[2] His father, Howard Carlton Stevenson Sr., had grown up in Milton, and his mother, Alice Gertrude (Golden) Stevenson, was born and grew up in Philadelphia.[2] Her family had moved to the city from Virginia in the Great Migration of the early 20th century.[3] Stevenson has two siblings: an older brother, Howard Jr. and a sister, Christy.[4] Both parents commuted to the northern part of the state for work, with Howard Sr., working at a General Foods processing plant as a laboratory technician[2] and Alice as an equal opportunity officer at Dover Air Force Base.[2][3] She particularly emphasized the importance of education to her children.[3]