Just Mercy: A
Story of Justice and Redemption
by
Bryan Stevenson
***
I barely found a
seat at the back of Southern Methodist University’s McFarlin Auditorium to hear
Bryan Stevenson talk about his bestselling memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. His appearance was the highlight of the university’s
Common Reading program for incoming students, which this year featured his
book, the story of a 30-year legal career advocating for the poorest and most
desperate inmates of American’s prisons – many of them African-Americans like
Stevenson.
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| Bryan Stevenson |
I expected
students and faculty to attend, maybe some members from the Dallas community
like me and members of my book group. I wasn’t really prepared for the crowd
filling the nearly 2,400 seats in McFarlin. Or for the power of soft-spoken
Stevenson’s presentation, even though he’s a man who has sat down with late
civil rights doyenne Rosa Parks, has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme
Court, and helped save dozens of wrongly-convicted death row prisoners from
execution.
What I also wasn’t
prepared for was the show of hands at the beginning of Stevenson’s talk from
listeners whose friends or family members have been homicide victims. And
although I knew the rate of incarceration in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the
last few decades, I also was astounded by the numbers – a more than 600 percent
increase in incarceration since the 1970’s. The numbers, however, were no
surprise to the numerous African-American student and community leaders in the
audience.
Despite daunting
statistics – that one in every 15 born in the United States in 2001 is expected
to go to jail or prison, including one in every three black male babies born in
this century – Stevenson told the audience they have great opportunities for
change. And he offered four fundamental suggestions for making those changes:
getting close to the problems, working on the narrative behind the issues,
staying hopeful, and being willing to get uncomfortable.
“You need to get
closer to the parts of your community where there is poverty and despair,” he
urged. “There is power in proximity.”
His first contact
with a death row inmate occurred early in his career, while he was still a law
student/intern. He was charged with delivering a simple message: that the man was
not in danger of being executed for at least one year. As he drove to the
Georgia state prison, all he could think about was how inadequate that message
must seem. Instead, the man grabbed his hands and thanked him. Stevenson and
the prisoner, who were exactly the same age, were scheduled to talk together
for an hour. They talked for three. “I hadn’t realized how being proximate with
this man would change my life.”
At another, less
happy encounter, a condemned prisoner marveled at how kind everyone around him
had been on his final day of life. Guards asked if they could bring him coffee,
offered stamps so he could mail his letters. “More people have asked what they
could do to help me in the last 14 hours,” the prisoner said, “than in the
entire rest of my life.”
Why, Stevenson
wondered, hadn’t anyone offered to help when the man was an impoverished child,
when he was a victim of sexual abuse, when he was an addict. “I began to think
about the narrative: not do people deserve to die for their acts but do we
deserve to kill. . . We’ve got to be willing to stay hopeful and to meet the
challenges.”
But meeting those
challenges also entails a willingness to move outside our comfort zones, a
lesson he learned from Rosa Parker herself. When he spoke to her late in her
life, explaining his work, “The thing she told me was, you got to do
uncomfortable things to change things.”
For more about
Stevenson, the Equal Justice Initiative he founded, and ways to become
involved, see his site.
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