In the United States today, African Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard University-trained lawyer, works every day to right this wrong. He has argued five cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court; won reversal, release, or relief for 115 wrongly committed death row inmates; and also won a Supreme Court case affirming it unconstitutional to deliver life-without-parole sentences to children 17 and under. I met Stevenson on an August afternoon in Atlanta, where he was the keynote speaker at Georgia State University's freshmen orientation. His talk, delivered to a largely African-American audience at an indoor sports arena, was met with a capacity crowd and a standing ovation. One high point was when he passionately urged students to "get proximate to the problem." As the founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based non-profit dedicated to achieving racial and economic justice, Stevenson, 58, has done just this. His extensive laundry list of accolades includes a MacArthur "genius" grant, 29 honorary degrees, and a book, Just Mercy, that became a New York Timesbestseller and one of Time magazine's 10 Best Books of Non-Fiction in 2014. Stevenson and I met in a small, quiet room at the student center, with a table of fruit and bottled water between us. When we finished, he grabbed a bottle for the drive back to Montgomery, where there was much work to pursue.
[For more on this story by JAMES MCWILLIAMS, go to https://psmag.com/magazine/bry...evenson-ps-interview]
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