Bryan Stevenson

My mom was the youngest.

of her 10 kids, I'd go visit my grandmother and sometimes she'd stand on the porch and before she would let you in, you would have to read something from a book.

That's how committed she was to reading.

As I said, we grew up in this poor community.

A lot of people didn't have a lot of things.

There were people who had outhouses.

They didn't have running water.

Most of the people worked in poultry plants.

You didn't see a lot of hope outside the door.

But when I was a little boy, my mother went into debt

and bought us the World Book Encyclopedia.

She bought us these books, and you could see so many beautiful things in these books, the things you couldn't see outside the door.

And she had this hope that this investment in books that she couldn't afford would do something for her children.

And I can't claim to have always understood that because when you're 10, Christmas comes along, you go outside and your friends are like, well, I got a bicycle, I got a baseball, I got a basketball.

And I'd have to say, well, I got volume G of the World Book Encyclopedia.

But I told my classmates at Harvard Law School, I'm here because there are generations of hopeful people here.

who have positioned me here.

It's the hope of my enslaved great-grandfather.

It's the hope of my grandmother who had to flee the South because of terror, violence, and lynching.

It's the hope of my parents.