Can one person change the criminal justice system?

it's not because I'm smart or anything like that. It's because I got proximate to a condemned man and heard him sing about higher ground. And that's why I talked about proximity, because I think there's power when we get close to the poor and excluded in the condemned. There's knowledge, there's wisdom, there's insight, there's inspiration, there are portals that

can change the world. And later I'll speak with the man who plays Brian in the new movie Just Mercy, Michael b Jordan's and Jamie Fox, who portrays the client whose case put Brian Stevenson on the map. Brian Stevenson has been fighting this fight in the shadows for years, so that's why this movie is so important. My next question, what made the real Brian Stevenson the man he is today.

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Brian, one of my personal heroes, at a dinner for the Aspen Institute in New York City. Hi, everyone, good evening, It's such an I began by asking him about his childhood. He grew up in a small rural town in southern Delaware, poor, isolated and marginalized, but surrounded by family that taught him the values that have guided him his entire life. I was born at the end of the Jim Crow era, but you could still see the signs that said white

and color. And I watched my parents trying to shield me from that. I mean, we don't realize that that signage wasn't They weren't directions, They were actually assaults. They created real injuries. My parents were humiliated every day of their lives, and yet they had enough hope that they actually believed that they could raise us to enter a

world that would be better and more just. And I think it was that sense that you have to believe things you haven't seen that I was constantly being taught. You know, I was a young person and I became a church musician, and when I first started to play, you know, they didn't want me to play during the services.

I had to play during the testimonial and people would come in and they'd give their testimonies, and sometimes they'd say these heartbreaking they tell these heartbreaking stories about what had happened. They didn't have a food to feed their family, or something had happened and something terrible. But during those testimony services, they would always in their testimony by starting

to sing a song. They'd start singing something like wouldn't take nothing for my journey now, And there was this hopefulness And I think for me, that has been the greatest gift. I live in Montgomery, Alabama now, and I think about the people who were there sixty years ago trying to do what I do, and I realized I'm standing on their shoulders, and they did so much more,

so much less. One of the people who did so much more was so much less was Brian's grandmother, a woman who was born in the eighteen eighties in Virginia, who had ten children and was the matriarch of the family. She was tough and strong, but Brian says her love was so expansive that she had a way of making each of her grandchildren feel special and seen. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. Her parents

were born in slavery. My great grandfather learned to read as an enslaved person, even though he knew he might be sold or even injured, because he had that skill. And she would talk about how when emancipation came, all of the uh formerly enslaved people would come to their house and he would read the newspaper every night, and she would sit next to him, and she would be so proud that he had that ability. And even though she couldn't go to school, she learned to read, and

she taught her daughter, my mom, how to read. And we were poor and we didn't always have the things that we needed. But my mother went into debt to buy the World Book Encyclopedia because she wanted us to have this entry into the world. And when you see people making those kinds of sacrifices, affirming those kinds of values, it sustained you. It energizes you. And then the last thing, my my, I feel really fortunate to have been given

was a commitment to loving people. My my, my grandmother told me, always stay on the side of love, even when people treat you bad, even when people hate you, even when people mistreat you. You have to stay on the side of love because once you leave the side of love, you give away the most important parts of yourself. You become vulnerable to all of those emotions that will destroy you. So you have to stay on the side of love. My people, my parents, my grandparents, despite the

brutality and the mistreatment, didn't hate anybody. And it's a precious gift that they have given me. And I've tried to hold on to that gift, and it's the gift I want to give to my clients and the people I work with, and it has very much centered the work that I've done throughout my career. So both hope

and love, hope and law. Yeah, and you would think that a little eight year old Brian Stevenson knew he wanted to be a public interest lawyer, you know, but you didn't actually figure that out for quite a while. You went to Harvard Law School, but you weren't particularly jazzed about going and once you got there, you really felt like an outsider. So at what point did you feel like this is my calling, this is where I'm going to commit my time and energy. Yeah, I mean

it was funny. I was so excited because nobody in my family had gone to college. I was so excited just to be in college, and I didn't think much about what came next. And I was a philosophy major. And it was really at the beginning of my senior year that somebody came up to me and said, you know, nobody is going to pay you to philosophize when you graduated from college. And to be honest, that's how I found my way to law school. It was very clear to me, you don't need to know anything to go

to law school, you know. Uh, And so I signed up for that. But I didn't have a real appreciation of what lawyers did. I didn't I'd never met a lawyer until I got to law school. And it was very disoriented because I was concerned about racial inequality and social injustice, and it just didn't feel connected to the things I cared about, and I was really in the

middle of this kind of existential angst. Everything changed in when Brian took a course that required him to spend a month with a human rights organization providing legal services to people on death row. He headed down to Atlanta and into the prison system, and it was that experience that really became transformative. I I went to death row, I met people literally dying for legal assistance, and I write about this in my book. The first person I

met was this condemned man. I had just been sent down there to tell him that he wasn't at risk of execution. And when this man came into the room, he was burdened with change. He had handcuffs on his wrist, he had a chain around his waist, he had shackles on his ankles, and by the time they unchained him, I was so nervous. I just started apologizing and I said,

I'm so sorry. I'm just a law student. I don't know anything about the death mod And I finally said, but I'm here because you're not at risk of execution any time in the next year. And he was so stunned by that statement. He said, wait, say that again. And I said, you're not at risk of execution any time in the next year. And then he said, wait, wait, wait, wait, say that again. I said, you're not at risk of

execution any time in the next year. And this man grabbed my hands and he said, thank you, thank you, thank you. Said, you are the first person I've met in the two years i've been on death row who's not a death row prisoner or a death row guard. He said, I've been talking to my wife and my kids, but I haven't let them come and visit because I was afraid i'd have an execution date. He said, now, because of you, I'm going to see my wife. I'm going to see my kids. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And I couldn't believe how, even in my ignorance, being proximate to that man was so transformative. And we started talking. And one hour turned into two hours, and two hours turned into three hours, and the guards were waiting for me to finish, and they got angry that I didn't finish the visit after an hour, and they came bursting into the room and they couldn't do anything to me,

but they were mad. And they threw this man against the wall and they pulled his arms back and they put the handcuffs on his wrist so tightly I could see the metal pinching his skin. They wrapped the chain around his waist. They put the shackles on his ankles. They were treating him so roughly, and I begged them to be gentler, but they ignored me, and they pushed the man near the door. And when he got near

the door, I saw this condemnment planted his feet. And when he planted his feet and the guards tried to shove him, he didn't move. And that's when this man looked at me and he said, Brian, don't you worry about this, You just come back. And then that man did something I've never forgotten. He stood there and he closed his eyes and he threw his head back and he started to sing, and he started singing as hymn

I hadn't heard. He started singing, I'm pressing on the upward way, new heights, time gaining every day, still praying as I'm onward bound. And then he said, Lord, plant my feet on higher ground. And everybody stopped. The guards recovered. They started pushing him down the hall way, and you could hear the change claiming, but you could hear this man singing about higher ground. And when I heard that

man sing, everything changed for me. That was the moment that I knew I wanted to help condemned people get to higher ground. But more than that, I knew that my journey to higher ground was tied to his. And I went back to Harvard Law School completely radicalized. You couldn't get me out of the law school library. I needed to know everything about federalism and comedy and the doctor in the jurisprudence. And that's how it happened for me.

I went to death Row and I met a condemned man and he sang to me, and it changed my orientation, It changed my path, it changed my life. Let's talk about Just Mercy just for a moment, because it's coming out on December, and of course that is the case at the center of the your two thousand fourteen book, when you defended Walter McMillan played I think so incredibly. I was lucky enough to see the film Jamie Fox, and I thought he did an amazing job. Michael B.

Jordan of course plays you. How weird was that to watch that? It's pretty weird? Um, you know, I'm just I'm really I feel really good about the film. I was very apprehensive because Hollywood oftentimes will take a story and they'll do something formulaic, and I didn't want that to happen. But Michael B who's a producer on the film,

was really committed to doing it right. The director, Deston Creton was also committed, and the whole cast came together and we're really committed to doing this in a way that would honor the people that I've represented. And they really put their heart into it, and I feel really good about the film. Why are you doing this? Why am my lawyer? I don't know why? As you lowering it down here in Alabama taking these cases that ain't

nobody gonna pay you for. When I was a teenager, my grandfather was murdering over a black and white TV. We kept waiting for someone to show up to help. And that's when I realized that outside my community, nobody cared because to them, he's just another black man killed in the projects. I know what it's like to be in the shadows. It is surreal, uh, to to have a film come out and and and Michael B is obviously so so popular and so wonderful, and and he

was very committed. We spent a lot of time together and I just wanted to do everything he could to get it right. And he asked me, is that, Is there anything I need to do to kind of get ready? I said, no, you've got it. I said, there's just one thing you don't need to do. And I told him the one thing you don't need to do is to lose the black panther creed body when you play me. Uh. Uh, you should keep don't go on a lawyer diet, don't

try to you know. Uh and so uh and so I appreciate him holding on to all of those assets that he brings his other roles. Uh. But no, it's it's been great and I'm really excited for people to see the film, and for me, it's just a way of getting people exposed to these issues. I've always believed that if people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would respond the same way. And I when you see unfairness and abuse in this conduct, people have an

instinct to respond to that. We just have not been exposed to it, and I hope the film changes that. It is a case study and persistence. When you represented Walter McMillan, I mean it was years of injustice that he had to deal with, and and of all places, Monroeville, Alabama, the birth where Harperle and Truman Capode grew up. Of course, the setting for To Kill a mocking Bird that must

have been strange too. It is and I think one of the reason why I focused on that case in the book because I do think there's an irony in the way we tell stories about who we are, and there's a disconnect. And people love the story of To Kill a mocking it's a beautiful book, and yet and yet, uh, there's a truth that we haven't dealt with. You know, the character in that story, Tom Robinson, dies of hopelessness.

He doesn't get justice. And we probably have about two hundred awards in this country that are named after the fictional lawyer Atticus Finch. And the question becomes, what are we celebrating because we didn't achieve justice for the poor, We didn't achieve justice for the person who was condemned. And it's not enough to just try in a world where justice requires something more. And I think that's the disconnect.

And when I went to Monroeville and started working on this case, everybody would say, oh, have you been to the Killa mocking Bird Museum? And I would say, well, no, I haven't had time because I'm representing this innocent black man who's been wrongly convicted in this facing execution and I'm trying to help him. And they said, well, you need to go to the Dikilamdian Bird Museum. And we

have romanticized that story. While we have tolerated a criminal justice system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty then if you're poor and innocent, we have tolerated racial bias, while we have celebrated this fictional characters resistance to some of that bias, but not their effectiveness and confern that bias and breaking down that kind of romanticized narrative and actually engaging with the actual story for me has been really important because we won't get to justice

if we live in this fantasy world, in this romanticized world that is so evident in many places in this country. When we come back the actual story of Walter McMillan, as told in the new film Just Mercy, we'll talk with Jamie Fox and Michael B. Jordan's. The movie Just Mercy is based on Brian Stephenson's memoir. It tells the story of a black man in Alabama named Walter McMillan, wrongfully convicted of killing a white woman he didn't know

in a town he'd never been to. Despite the egregious lack of evidence, in McMillan was sentenced to death risk one from Harp. You don't know what it is, and you're guilty from the moment you're borne. And you can buddy up with these white folks and make him laugh and try to make him like you whatever that is, and he say, yes, no man, But when it's your turn, they ain't got to have no fingerprints, no where evidence and all the witness that God the whole thing up,

and none of that matter. When all y'all think is is that look like a man who could kill somebody. Walter McMillan is played by Jamie Fox. It's so familiar because as as black man, the perception of us is, yeah, he probably did it so easily. He's put on death row with no trial. And there he sits in a hopeless place because I visited death row before for another movie, and the worst thing you can give a person and

death row is is hope. And there he sits, and as he sits, all of a sudden, he doesn't know it at the time, but his Angel walks in and as Brian Stevenson, played wonderfully by Michael B. Jordan in the movie and Uh, they set out to do something remarkable. Michael B. Jordan not only plays Brian Stevenson, the lawyer who successfully overturned Walter McMillan's death sentence, but he's also a producer on the film and had a big hand

in getting it financed. As a black man in America, I thought it was really important to be involved at the story. Learning about Brian Stevenson at such a late age, I felt I was shocked that he wasn't more of a household name. When I found out about his work, had a chance to listening and watch his ted talk, read his memoir, I was blown away by the work that he was doing behind closed doors without any real

true support. So I felt like I could lend myself my platform, my medium to help telling the story and getting his story out to the masses. The first time I visited Death Row, I wasn't expecting to meet somebody the same age as me, grew up on the same music from a neighborhood just like ours. Could have been me mama, but stepping into the role of his real life hero Brian Stevenson, who's also soft spoken and restrained, took a different set of acting skills for the Black

Panther star. I think emotionally, the positions that Brian Stephen has been in throughout this movie, throughout his his time as being a defense attorney, you know, especially in the the Deep South, the obstacles he had to encounter, I naturally would have reacted much different. So to know that he is such a reserved person that he did take his pride and his ego and put it to the side

for the betterment of his clients. Knowing that, you know him, emotionally reacting wouldn't wouldn't get anything done in that type of way. So he's so strategic and it's so so methodical and how he moves Uh. You know, it was a challenge to go again sometimes your natural reaction at the things uh and uh and and and play a more reserved and right And you're right. He did it because he knew that was the means to the end he wanted to achieve. Meanwhile, how did Michael convince you

or did did it take any convincing? It was no convincing. I've known Mike for for a long time. His mentor I've watched and grow up. So I was humble and honored to get that call from him. And there was some personal things that we talked about. But the one thing that I could tell you that in our business

is hard to find people that stand up people. And he says, I want you to be in this film, And basically he was giving my u my artistic integrity back in a sense, and and I said, hey, I'm in with both feet because I think, what what what What I'll say about Michael b is that it's the biggest start in the world and he could do anything

he wants to. But I think what was amazing, what is amazing about his career is when he laid the DNA of narratives like this in Fruitvale Station, where he took all of our hearts and uh and emotions and and just and just wild us. And then to take that same narrative to the biggest movie ever, uh, Black Panther, where he plays kill Monger, which is supposedly the villain.

But if you listen to what he was saying, even as a villain, his narrative for us on the biggest stage, We're still talking about our culture and what we needed. So now, to me, this completes an artistic sentence of many paragraphs that he's gonna write. But Just Mercy is the most important movie that I've ever been involved with because of the fact of the introduction of Brian Stevenson.

Because Brian Stevenson says and deals with and talks about every day everything that we everything that we talk about on social media but don't know where to go. You know, there'll be things where you're looking on social media and you'll be so mad about I see this black team or I see this person. These attrocities happens, and we'll get on and we'll will comment about it. But this gives us an opportunity to come see a movie which is not only art, uh, but it's educational. It's inspirational.

So much perspective, doesn't he Janie, He has so much perspective and it's so listen. I get. I would get upset when people would say about a black man that he speaks so well, But then I found myself saying this about Brian Steveson, that he speaks so well, but not speaking so well. It's what he's saying. He's telling us about our past. He's telling us about what we need to get, what we need to get to, and how how bad things are. But he's saying it in

a way that everyone could be inclusive. These events happened thirty years ago, but against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter, and I think a modern reckoning of all these issues and the genesis of the problem, you must feel like this is more relevant than ever before. To really explore how we got here, and that's what I think Brian does so beautifully. He kind of connects threads in history from reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation to what is modern day

segregation really de facto segregation. What the thing is that you can see it now. You know, years back we don't have social media, and now you can actually go on your your phone and see atrocities today modern day two thou nineteen in the twenty of something going bad because of a person who's uh color of skin. You see a young uh, you see a black man being treated a certain way or shot and killed for a traffic stop started off as your blinker was out something

small and he ends up dead. And then you see someone who's not black, white carry out a crazy atrocity and they apprehend them, they take them to get something to eat. Brian Stevenson has been fighting this fight in the shadows for years. So that's why this movie is so important. Is a want. It's important for everybody rarely behind it because I always say, what happens in the hood usually gets to the suburbs. So eventually these types of things will will will, We'll touch you in some

type of way. So, like I said, the movie does something and I haven't seen a movie do, especially when people get a chance to watch it with other people. What are the qualities you admire most about Bryan Stevenson? His humility, his drive, his focus, UH, his strategic way they were in which he moves and thinks, um, his selflessness, his um, his heart, his compassion, his persistent his unwavering persistence.

Jamie says all the time, he just doesn't fatigue. You know, the guys NonStop from Supreme Court case at the Supreme Court case, back to set, back to Supreme Court. You know, he's constantly exactly what do you think me that I just I just think his his his courage, you know, being a young man from the South, you know, sometimes it makes you tuck your blackness in sometimes, Like I've been in situations where I was like, man, I don't know.

And to see someone who lives in the South and able to speak truth to people who who don't have a fondness of you, I think it's amazing. And I think it's amazing too, uh that he does it, like you told me pro pro bone on that he does it sometimes. Um uh even now he said, he goes through things that you know, he showed up to the court room and the and the judge thought he was actually you know, he thought he was on trial. He

was on trial and you're over there. So the things that I think that that his his patience, his patience with with the system that is flawed when it comes to African Americans, I think it's amazing and we we all benefit from his patients. Well, I have been such a huge fan of his for many years, and I'm just so happy that the two of you are going to hopefully make him a household name. Thanks to just mercy.

Thank you, Thank you both. Up next, we'll have more with Brian Stevenson, his latest battle against the death penalty and how he's trying to reframe this country's historical narrative by exhuming the ghosts of our past. Brian Stevenson is the director of the Equal Justice Initiative. The goal of e j I, in addition to representing the most unrepresented, is to help people understand the true history of our country, including its darkest chapters, through the Legacy Museum in Alabama.

But first I asked him about the recent news from Attorney General William Barr that the Trump administration will resume executing federal death row prisoners. You know, it's interesting is that the federal death penalty is not well understood. Some of the most extreme racial disparities in the death penalty actually exists in the federal system, and we just haven't done a very good job of creating reliability and fairness.

I think that, you know, the question of the death penalty in this country can't be answered by asking do people deserve to die for the crime safe committed? I think the threshold question is do we deserve to kill? And we have a system that is very unreliable, that is very unfair, that is biased, that doesn't treat people of color the same way they treat other people, that

doesn't provide people with the resources that they need. You know, at the end of the film, I'm I'm really pleased to have a statistic that everybody is going to see when they see this movie, and it's a shocking statistic. And the statistic is is that, um, we've now proven innocent a hundred and sixty four people on death row. That means for every nine people who have been executed in this country, we've identified one innocent personal death row.

And when you think about that, it's completely unacceptable that we're still trying to execute people. If we learned that one out of nine apples in the store would kill you if you touched it or bit into it, we would stop selling apples. Nobody would get on a plane if for one out of nine planes goes up and crashes, and everybody does. But we're accepting it in the context

of the death penalty. And I think what's disappointing about trying to resume the federal death penalty is that we haven't done the hard work of making that death penalty reliable and fair. And so I know that there are lawyers who are going to be fighting against that, and I hope this becomes just a moment in this effort, we've seen a lot of states reject the death penalty.

There's a moratorium in California right now. The numbers of death sentences has decreased dramatically in the last decade or so. I think the progress that we're making will ultimately happen. I think in a generation fifty years from now, people will look back and say, why were they executing people in this country fifty years ago? Let's talk about the Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery.

The New Yorker compares the Legacy Museum to a great legal argument, and that it relies on both emotion and a precise accumulation of evidence. There's so many powerful things in Montgomery that I hope everyone will get an opportunity to see. But Brian, why was this such an important project for you? You know? I talked about the fact that I'm a product of Brown versus Board of Education. I wouldn't be sitting here if lawyers hadn't come into our community and made it possible for me to go

to high school in college. And I think it was about twelve or thirteen years ago when I began to think about that and I had this really chilling um thought, And the chilling, scary thought that I had was, um, I don't think we could win Brown versus Board of Education today. I don't think our court would do something that disruptive on behalf of a disenfranchised, dis empowered group.

And the reason why I don't think they would do it is that we haven't created a narrative environment that actually pushes our institutions to never waiver when it comes to justice and fairness. And that's what made me think we have to start working outside the courts to create a healthier environment and environment that deals. Honestly, I don't think we're free. I think we're burdened by this history of racial inequality. I moved to Montgomery in the nineteen eighties.

There are fifty nine markers and monuments to the Confederacy in that city. Alabama still celebrates Jefferson Davis's birthday as a state holiday. A Confederate Memorial Day is still a state holiday. We don't have Martin Luther King Day in Alabama. We have Martin Luther King slash Robert E. Lee Day. The two largest high schools in Montgomery are Robberty Lehigh and Jefferson Davis. Hi, we've been practicing denial and silence, and we've created this false narrative about who we are.

And I just think we're at a point in our nation's history. But we have to change that narrative. We're going to have to commit ourselves to true telling. South Africa committed to truth and reconciliation after apartheid. They have an apartheid museum that's powerful. If you go to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, it's surrounded by emblems and symbols that are designed to make sure that no one forgets

the injustice of apartheid. If you go to Berlin, you can't go to hundred meters without seeing the markers and the stones have been placed next to the homes of Jewish families that were abductive during the Holocaust. The Germans actually want you to go to the Holocaust memorial. They're trying to change the narrative. They don't want to be thought of as Nazis and fascists. There are no Adolf Hitler statutes in Germany. But in this country, we haven't

talked about the native genocide. We haven't talked about slavery. We haven't talked about Lynchia, we haven't talked about segregation, and I think that has to change. And so we built these sites because I believe we need an era of truth injustice. And the thing we have to remember is that truth and justice. Uh I just I think that truth and justice, truth and repair, truth and reconcil lation. I think these things are sequential. You got to tell

the truth before you get to reconciliation. And for me, this is rooted in a desire. And I don't do this stuff because I want to punish us for our history. I really believe there is something that feels more like freedom, that feels more like a quality, that feels more like justice than what we have yet experienced in this nation. But to get there, we're gonna have to have these conversations.

We're gonna have to talk about these things. We're gonna have to build institutions like the ones we've hopefully built that will motivate people to go through those spaces and when they get to the end of the space, say never again. When it comes to tolerating bias and bigotry and hatred, that's the hope, and of course, the history of lynching in this country is something that has literally been buried from view. And that's one of the things that was so moving for me to see the mason

jars full of soil from various lynching sites. You have done a project where you bring the descendants of lynching victims to the site where you believe their relatives were killed, were murdered, hung, shot, burned, and then they collect the soil because these people never had a proper burial and the stories of those victims are so heartbreaking. And the different colors of soil representing all the different regions where these lynchings took place. I mean, it's just such a powerful,

powerful thing to see. It took my breath away, honestly. Well for me, it's about active truth telling and I and that's what I think, and it's sometimes hard you have to be courageous to do it, but I think that's the goal. I mean, we did one recently where middle aged black woman came and what we do is we send people to lynching sites. We give them an empty jar, we give them a little implement to dig soil,

and they put the soil in the jar. It has the name of the lynching victim and the date, and then we put it in our museum and we put it in our display. And this middle aged black woman came and she was nervous about doing this by herself, and her site ended up being a remote location. But she drove down to this dirt road and got out

of her car to go. I digged the soil. She found the tree, and she was about to start digging when a truck drove by and there was this big white guy in the truck and he drove by and he saw this black woman on the side of the road and he slowed down and he turned around and he drove back by, and she said he stared at her as he drove by, and then she said he parked the truck and he got out of the truck, big guy, and he started walking toward her, and she

was terrified. And we tell people you don't have to explain what you're doing when you're doing this. You can just say you're getting dirt for your garden. And that's what she was going to do. And this big white guy wrote walked up to her and he said, what are you doing? And she said she was about to say, I'm just getting dirt from my garden, and she said, something got ahold of her. And she told that man.

She says, I'm digging soil because this is where a black man was lynched in one and I want to honor his life. And she says. She got so scared that she started digging real fast, and the man just stood there. And then the man said, does that paper talk about the lynching? And she said it does, and he said, can I read it? And so she gave the man the paper and she kept digging while the man read. And then the man put the paper down, and he stunned her by saying, would you mind if

I helped you? And she said of course. And the man got down on his knees, and she offered him the implement to dig the soil. He said, no, no, no, no, no, you keep that. I'll just use my hands. And she said, this man started throwing his hands into the soil, and his hands were turning black with this when he kept throwing his hands, and there was something about the force with which he was digging this soil that moved her. And before she realized that, she had tears running down

her face. And the man stopped and he said, oh, I'm sorry, I'm upsetting you. And she said no, no, no, no, you're blessing me. And he used his hands and he dug the soil and put it in the jar, and she used the implement and they filled this jar and he got teared toward the top, and she said. The man started to slow down, and then she looked at the man and she noticed that his shoulders were shaking, and then she saw tears running down his face and she stopped and she put her hand on his shoulder

and she said, are you okay? And the man said no, no, no, I'm just so worried that it might have been my grandfather that lynched this man. And she said they both sat on the roadside crying, and they finished, and he stood up and said, I want to take a picture of you holding the jar. And she said, well, I want to take a picture of you holding the jar. And she brought this man back to Montgomery and they called me into the room and she she brought me over to him. She said, I want you to meet

my new friend. He helped me dig the sore, and we want to put the jar on the museum exhibit together. I said that would be beautiful, and I tell that story because beautiful things like that don't always happen when you do truth work. But unless we do the truth work, we deny ourselves the opportunity for beautiful things to happen. And that's what I hope our sites represent. I hope

that's what our work represents. It's hard, it's difficult, it's challenging, but I think something beautiful can come from this if we can find a way to lay down the burden of this long history of inequality, this long history of hatred and bigotry and racism. I really want to get to a different place, and for me, that means being willing to speak the truth. When it comes to talking

about his own legacy, Brian is characteristically humble. I really do believe that if I've had any impact as a lawyer, if I've helped anybody during my legal career, if I've made a difference of representing my clients, it's not because I'm hard working, it's not because I'm smart or anything like that. It's because I got proximate to a condemned

man and heard him sing about higher ground. And that's why I talk about proximity, because I think there's power when we get close to the poor and excluded in the condemned. There's knowledge, there's wisdom, there's insight, there's inspiration.

There are portals that can change the world. That word proximate has always stuck with me, because if we're not exposed to other people, if we don't step out of our own bubbles and see how others live and what they face, how will we ever learn to be more empathetic and make the world a better place. I know it may sound hokey, but as Brian Stevenson says, getting proximant is quote key to our capacity to make a difference. The movie Just Mercy, starring Michael B. Jordan's and Jamie Fox,

is in theaters this Christmas. I highly recommend it. And that does it for this week's episode, which is actually my last episode of our very first season. I hope you've enjoyed listening to this podcast as much as I've enjoyed doing it. We're gonna take a little break while we prepare for season two coming in early gosh, can you believe it's But don't worry, we have a few bonus surprises coming your way, so keep an ear to

the next question. Feed over the holidays, and if you haven't already, subscribe on Apple Podcast, the I Heart app or wherever you listen. And by the way, if you're overwhelmed by the tsunami of information coming at you from your phone every single day, check out my morning newsletter wake Up Call. Go to Katie Currek dot com to subscribe, and of course follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

And one more thing before I go, I'd recommend something else that can help you make sense of all that's going on these days. That's Cheddars Need to Know podcast. Every morning, host Jill and Carlo breakdown the biggest stories making headlines, and it's all under ten minutes, from politics and business to sports and entertainment. It's daily news with a little humor that will make you smile. If you haven't checked it out, you should. And so until next

time and my next question, I'm Katie Couric. Thanks for listening everyone. Next Question with Katie Curic is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media. The executive producers are Katie Curic, Lauren Bright Pacheco, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. Our show producers are Bethan Macaluso and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. Associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clemens. Editing is by Dylan Fagan, Derek Clements,

and Lowell Berlante. Our researcher is Barbara Keene. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie currek dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Curk. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows