The Young Lawyer in Alabama
In 1989, Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama to do what almost no one else would: represent people on death row who could not afford attorneys. He was twenty-nine, a Harvard Law graduate, and he had turned down every lucrative offer to start the Equal Justice Initiative from a cramped office with no budget.
His first major case was Walter McMillian, a Black man sentenced to death for the murder of a young white woman in Monroeville, Alabama — Harper Lee's hometown. McMillian had been placed on death row before his trial even began. The key witness against him later recanted, admitting that law enforcement had coerced his testimony. Stevenson spent six years fighting the case through Alabama's courts. In 1993, McMillian was exonerated and released.
The Deeper Work
But Stevenson was not just fighting individual cases. He was dismantling a system. Through EJI, he challenged the sentencing of children to life without parole. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama — a case EJI had championed — that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children were unconstitutional. Hundreds of people sentenced as children were given the possibility of release.
EJI went on to challenge excessive sentencing, racial bias in jury selection, and the conditions of confinement in Alabama's prisons. Stevenson argued six cases before the Supreme Court and won five. Each victory reformed a piece of the system.
The Memorial
In 2018, Stevenson opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery — the first memorial in America dedicated to victims of lynching. Eight hundred steel columns, one for each county where a lynching took place, hang from the ceiling of an open-air pavilion. It is devastating and necessary. Duplicate columns wait to be claimed by each county, creating an ongoing accountability that most of America would rather forget.
What This Means for You
Bryan Stevenson once said: "Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done." That single idea has freed the wrongly convicted, reformed sentencing for children, and forced a nation to confront its history of racial violence. If the injustice in your world feels monolithic and permanent, Stevenson's life offers a counter-narrative: one person with clarity, persistence, and a refusal to dehumanise anyone — including the opposition — can reshape what seemed immovable.