Public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson lives in Alabama and is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to combat injustice in the U.S. legal system. The new movie, Just Mercy, is an adaptation of his 2014 memoir of the same name. He says that the fact that his state honors Lee at all — let alone on the same day as King — is a sign that America has not acknowledged the evils of its past.
"In the American South, where I live, the landscape is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy," Stevenson says. "We actually celebrate the architects and defenders of enslavement. For me, that has to change if we're going to get to the kind of healthy place I think we need to get to."
Stevenson has traveled the world, observing how other cultures address the injustices of the past. He notes that Johannesburg has a museum and monuments that "talk about the wrongfulness of apartheid." In Berlin, he says, "You can't go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones placed next to the homes of Jewish families that were abducted during the Holocaust."
"But in this country," he says, "we don't have institutions that are dedicated and focused to making sure a new generation of Americans appreciates the wrongfulness of what we did when we allowed lynching to prevail and persist, what we did when we created racial apartheid through segregation."
In 2018, Stevenson and his organization opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., both dedicated to the legacy of slavery, lynching, segregation and mass incarceration in the U.S. For Stevenson, the museum and the monument are an effort to address the past — and to change the future.
"I just felt like we had to introduce a narrative about American history that wasn't [being] clearly articulated," he says. "We need to create institutions in this country that motivate more people to say 'Never again' to racial bias and bigotry."
You can listen to it here or read excerpts here:
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/20/796234496/just-mercy-attorney-asks-u-s-to-reckon-with-its-racist-past-and-present
No comments:
Post a Comment