Bryan Stevenson

And their hope is what sustains me.

And all of a sudden, I didn't feel diminished at Harvard Law School.

In fact, I felt like maybe I had something that other people might not have

That's a great question.

No, I had no idea.

I knew I wanted to help the poor.

I knew I wanted to give back in the ways that people had given me as a child of the civil rights movement.

I knew I wanted to do something about the justice quotient in this country, but I didn't know where that would take me.

And to be honest, I was kind of frustrated in my first two months at Harvard because nobody seemed to be talking about the poor or equality or justice.

I finished my first year and I went over to the School of Government.

to get a degree in public policy and I remember the day two months into that program when I woke up one morning looked in the mirror and I thought wow I'm even more miserable here than I was at the law school because they were teaching us how to maximize benefits and minimize cost but it didn't seem to matter whose benefits got maximized and whose costs got minimized and I went back to the law school and was really in the middle of this existential crisis

Until I took a course that required me to get proximate.

That's when things came together for me.

My law school professor, Elizabeth Bartholet, who I'm forever grateful to, taught a course where she allowed her students to spend one month working with a human rights organization somewhere in the country.

And I went to Atlanta, Georgia to work with what was then called the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, this group of lawyers who represented people on death row.

And they seemed so mission-driven.

They seemed so purposeful.

They got up early.

They had a clarity of purpose that I just loved.

And after I'd been there a week, one of them said, oh, Brian, we want you to go to death row and meet somebody we haven't had time to meet.