Bryan Stevenson
speaker
1,245 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 3 Jul
Bryan Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I remembered when I was a little boy, my mom had taken us to church and I was talking to my friends and there was this little skinny kid I'd never seen before. And I remembered on this night, turning to that kid and saying, hey man, what's your name? And this little boy tried to answer my question, but he also had a speech impediment and he couldn't get his words out and he stuttered terribly.
And then I remembered that I did something really ignorant when that little boy couldn't get his words out right. I laughed and my mother saw me laughing and she gave me this look I'd never seen before. And she came over and grabbed me by the arm and pulled me aside. She said, Brian, don't you ever laugh at somebody because they can't get their words out right.
And even at 10, I was a little bit of a young lawyer. And I was like, mom, I wasn't laughing. I couldn't hear. There were lights going on. There were things happening all around me. My mother said, no, Brian, you know better than that. And then she looked at me. She said, now you go back over there and you tell that little boy you're sorry. I said, okay.
And I took a step and my mom wasn't satisfied. She grabbed me by the arm. She said, wait, after you tell that little boy you're sorry, I want you to hug that little boy. And I kind of rolled my eyes. I said, okay, mom. And I took a step and then she grabbed me by the arm again. She said, wait. After you hug that little boy, I want you to tell that little boy you love him.
I said, mom, I can't go over there and tell that little boy I love him. She gave me that look. I said, all right. I remember going over to that little boy saying, look, man, you know, well, I'm sorry. And then I lunged at him and gave him my little boy version of a man hug. And then I remember trying to say as insincerely as I possibly could. I said, you know, well, I don't know. Well, I love you.
And what I'd forgotten was how that little boy hugged me back. And then he whispered flawlessly in my ear, he said, I love you too. And I was thinking about that while my client was trying to get his words out. And finally, my client got his words out and he said, I just want to thank you for fighting for me.
And the last thing that man said to me, he says, I want you to know that I love you for trying to save my life. He hung up the phone. They pulled him away. They strapped him to a gurney and they executed him. That moment was the moment when I said, I just can't do this anymore. It just seemed too much. And I think it was because I realized with great intensity how broken he was.
And the question I had in my mind is, why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is it about us that when we see brokenness in other people, we want to hurt them for it, kill them for it? I represent the broken. All of my clients have been broken by poverty, broken by trauma, broken by addiction, broken by illness, broken by disability, broken by despair.
And then I realized I work in a broken system because the people with power won't get proximate. They don't have hope. They're unwilling to be compassionate. And I was sitting there just thinking about why do I do what I do? And that was the moment when I had this realization that I don't do what I do because I've been trained as a lawyer. I don't do what I do because somebody has to do it.
I don't even do what I do because it's about human rights or justice. That's part of it. But what I realized that night that I'd never realized before is that I do what I do because I'm broken too. I am not unflawed. I am not unblemished. I am not uncomplicated in the same ways that the people I represent are. But I do believe in the power of redemption. I do believe in grace.
I do believe in mercy. I do believe in restoration because I have been the beneficiary of so much grace and so much mercy. That man, before he was executed, gave me something so powerful, so beautiful, so affirming. And that's why I think we should do better for the broken. that we encounter. We should think better of the broken that we encounter.
Because just as we can give to them, they can give to us. And it does, for me, become important to talk about the fact that we can't create a perfect world, but we can create a world that's filled with more grace, more mercy, and more love.
I'm grateful that I am the heir of so many hopeful people, people who had to do things much harder than I've had to do. By living in Montgomery, Alabama, I have a vantage point that I feel really privileged by. The generation of people who came before me in that community would have to put on their Sunday best.
They'd go places to push for the right to vote, push for the right to be treated fairly. They'd be on their knees praying, and they'd get beaten and battered and bloodied. And they'd go home and change their clothes and wipe the blood off, and they'd go and do it again. Right. And I haven't been beaten and battered and bloodied as the people who came before me.
I stand on the shoulders of people who did so much more with so much less. It's their hope that shapes my hope. My great-grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia. When I went to Harvard Law School, they tried to make everybody feel welcome on the first day. And they took out groups of 13 students. And my group leader just asked everybody in the group, why are you in law school?
And the people in my group started saying, invoking these familial connections. They were all talking about how they were the son or the daughter or the grandson, the granddaughter, the nephew, the niece of a lawyer. And after the fifth one, I started to squirm a bit because I knew I wasn't related to a lawyer.
And then after the seventh or eighth person who made that same invocation of a family relation, I really started to feel diminished. And then I realized that not only was I not related to a lawyer, I realized I'd never even met a lawyer. And by the time they got to me, I just felt so out of place that I didn't answer the question. I told a joke. I tried to distract people.
And as soon as that meeting was over, I called my mom. I said, mom, I don't belong at this law school. And I had one of those kind of mothers. My mother said, what are you talking about? You belong wherever you go. You're the smartest person in the world. You can do anything you want to do. And then she said, now you need to go find those kids and tell them why you're really in law school.
And I felt better after talking to my mom, but I didn't think I could actually pull those kids together. 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.
Showing 1041–1060 of 1,245 · page 53 of 63
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