Bryan Stevenson

It absolutely is.

It can feel challenging and exhausting, but it's also really empowering.

If we have the ability to catch a stone,

to exercise that ability and to know we're not only helping the person who would have been the target of that violence, but we're also helping the person who threw the stone.

Because what they don't realize yet is that to get to redemption, to get to grace, to get to the beloved community that we talk so much about, we can't throw stones at one another because we're angry and afraid.

And sometimes people get overwhelmed and they can't remember that until they pick the stone up and they throw it.

And I not only want to help the person throwing the stone at, but I want to help them have the opportunity to recover from the mistake of harsh judgment, of violent judgment against someone in a way that's less consequential.

And

You know, one of the things that I'd like to believe is that if you catch one stone, it becomes easier to catch the next one, even though it's bigger.

It becomes a way of life.

It becomes a way of moving through the world.

And I'm grateful that people have caught stones for me.

You know, growing up in a poor, racially segregated community, you know, I started my education in a colored school when I was a little boy.

They didn't let black children attend the public schools.

There were no high schools for Black people in our county when my dad was a teenager, so he couldn't go to high school.

So I was raised in this poor community where most of the adults didn't have high school degrees, not because they weren't smart or hardworking, but there literally were no high schools for Black people.

And then lawyers came into our community and made them open up the public schools.

And because these lawyers got proximate to poor kids like me, I got to go to the public schools.

I am 65.

Yeah.