Bryan Stevenson

Two weeks into law school, I still felt off.

And I finally did what she encouraged me to do, and I found as many of the kids in my little group as I could.

And I said, I didn't tell the truth on the first day of law school.

I need to tell you why I'm in law school.

And I told them that my great grandfather, I said, I'm in law school because my great grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia.

And despite the fact that it was against the law for an enslaved person to learn to read or write, my great grandfather risked his life to learn to read and write.

He could have been sold, he could have been killed, but he had a hope of freedom so great that he was willing to risk his life.

And this was the 1850s.

He didn't know a civil war was coming the next decade, but he still had that hope of freedom.

And after emancipation, my grandmother told me that my great-grandfather would sit on the porch of their home and read the newspaper to people who were formerly enslaved who didn't know how to read because he wanted them to know what was going on.

And she loved the fact that he knew how to read and she would push her siblings out of the way when he started reading and she would wrap her arms around his leg when he started reading because she wanted to learn to read.

And she thought you learned to read by touching somebody while they read.

And he figured out what she was doing.

He said, no, Victoria, that's not how you learn to read.

I'll teach you how to read.

And he taught her how to read.

And my grandmother worked as a domestic her whole life, but she was a reader.

She had this hope that reading could create a better world, a bigger world, a more fulfilling world.

And she gave it to her children.

My grandmother had 10 children.