Bryan Stevenson

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.

I think that's so true, Mel.

And I do think one of the

failures we have tolerated is our unwillingness to remember, to confront honestly this history.

There are people in other parts of the country who were 15 years younger than me who didn't experience integration in education until the 1970s, late 1970s, because there was so much resistance to this.

And the thing that even in my county, which was 80% white and 20% black, if you had a vote

on whether to let Bryan Stevenson into the public schools, we would have lost the vote.

because the majority of people didn't want that integration.

It took a commitment to the rule of law that these lawyers enforced for those school doors to open, which is why I ultimately became a lawyer, because there was a power in using the rule of law to help disfavored people, to help marginalized people, to help people who people wanted to exclude.