There is certainly no denying that racial tensions are still present in America. With mass incarcerations, #blacklivesmatter (and its opposition), the fact that the Civil Rights Act was passed not even fifty years ago, along with many other factors, shows that the Land of the Free does not live up to its name.
Bryan Stevenson, for the majority of his life, has been fighting to achieve justice for black people. He went to Harvard Law School on a full scholarship. There, he found his calling in life: to serve as a lawyer for convicts on death row. He works in Alabama which “has an elected judiciary, and candidates compete to be seen as the toughest on crime. It’s also the only death-penalty state in which judges routinely overrule juries that vote against imposing death sentences. (In their campaigns, judges boast about the number of death sentences they’ve imposed.)” (Toobin, 2016).
Stevenson has founded the Equal Justice Initiative which “is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic justice, and to protecting basic human fights for the most vulnerable people in American Society” (Source). Stevenson works to find justice in a nation “where you’re 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white” (Stevenson, 2012). The E.J.I. headquarters is in Montgomery, Alabama, a city where “the two largest high schools in Montgomery are Robert E. Lee high and Jefferson Davis High. ‘Both overwhelmingly black’” (Toobin, 2016). These schools are named for a general who fought for the Confederate States and the president who led them.
E.J.I.’s latest project is a memorial dedicated to lynching victims and a museum that focuses on African American history. These sites are expected to open next year. The memorial, called the Memorial to Peace and Justice, will be the first memorial in the United States that recognizes and pays tribute to lynching victims. Lynching does not refer to just those that were publicly hanged. These victims are people that were killed in public without a trial. Over 4000 black people were lynched between 1877 and 1950 (Source). The end of slavery did not guarantee the safety of African Americans.
The Memorial to Peace and Justice will be made of columns that have the names of the over 4000 lynching victims. There is a column for “each county in the United States where racial terror lynchings took place. Counties across the country will be invited to retrieve duplicate columns with the names of each county’s lynching victims to be placed in every county” (Source). This will allow the memorial to display both the counties that will own up to their past and the ones that deny it.
Stevenson continues to work to achieve justice for the prejudice, segregation, discrimination, hatred, and violence that African Americans have faced for so many years. It is amazing to see how much effort and heart he has put into his work.
