Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Bryan Stevenson - Page 2

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.

Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.

If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.

You can be a career professional as a judge, a prosecutor, sometimes as a defense attorney, and never insist on fairness and justice. That's tragic and that's what we have to change.

In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it.

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.

When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.

Living in Montgomery, I've been antagonized by the emergence of a narrative about our history that I believe is quite false and misleading, and actually dangerous. And the narrative that emerges when you spend time in the South - places likes Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana - is that we have always been a noble, wonderful, glorious region of the country, with wonderful, noble, glorious people doing wonderful, noble, glorious things. And there's great pride in the Alabamians of the nineteenth century.

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.

Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that's how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space.

In a landscape littered with all of this imagery about the nobility of the Civil War and the Confederate effort and struggle, the absence of markers says something really powerful.

Why do we want to kill all the broken people?

I say this thing about how I've never had to say my head is bloodied but not bowed, like everybody who came before me had to say. And that tells me that I can do a lot more than I think I can.

I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.

I talk about my grandmother a lot, because she's an amazing person - not in some dramatic, distinct, unique way, but anybody who is the daughter of enslaved people and who has found a way to be hopeful and create love and value justice and seek peace is a remarkable person.

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.

Sometimes the facts of the crime are so distracting - there's been some tragic murder or horrific incident, and people aren't required to think as carefully and thoughtfully, and directly, about this legacy of racial inequality and structural poverty. And what it's contributing to these wrongful convictions.

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.

Embracing a certain quotient of racial bias and discrimination against the poor is an inexorable aspect of supporting capital punishment. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment.

I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.

The landscape in Montgomery and in the South is just saturated with imagery. Markers are everywhere. There's a marker for the first Confederate post office, there's a marker for a ball that Robert E. Lee hosted, there's a marker for where Jefferson Davis had a meeting. We love reminding people about all that was going on in the mid-nineteenth century.

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.

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.

There were people in the South who were ardently opposed to slavery. And maybe, if we get into truth and reconciliation, those will be the people we want to name schools and streets after.

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?

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.

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.

I do talk and think a lot about the legacy before me. I feel like if I didn't know that people had been in Montgomery sixty years ago trying to do similar things that I'm trying to do, with a lot less, with fewer resources, with less security, with less encouragement, with less opportunity - if I didn't know that, then I think doing what I do would be much, much harder.

Because my great-grandparents were enslaved people, the legacy of slavery was something that didn't seem impersonal or disconnected. That's what motivated me to get into law.