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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He could have been sold, he could have been killed, but he had a hope of freedom so great that he was willing to risk his life. And this was the 1850s. He didn't know a civil war was coming the next decade, but he still had that hope of freedom.
And after emancipation, my grandmother told me that my great-grandfather would sit on the porch of their home and read the newspaper to people who were formerly enslaved who didn't know how to read because he wanted them to know what was going on.
And she loved the fact that he knew how to read and she would push her siblings out of the way when he started reading and she would wrap her arms around his leg when he started reading because she wanted to learn to read. And she thought you learned to read by touching somebody while they read. And he figured out what she was doing. He said, no, Victoria, that's not how you learn to read.
I'll teach you how to read. And he taught her how to read. And my grandmother worked as a domestic her whole life, but she was a reader. She had this hope that reading could create a better world, a bigger world, a more fulfilling world. And she gave it to her children. My grandmother had 10 children. 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 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. 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 anymore. 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 costs. 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, whom 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. Just explain to him that he's not at risk of execution anytime in the next year. We're worried he may not know that. So, of course, I said yes. I got in my car. I started driving to Jackson, Georgia. But then it hit me that I was just this law student.
I didn't know anything. I'd never been to death row. I'd never been.
I had not been in a maximum prison. I'd done some work at a low-level prison in the Boston area, but first time in any kind of secure maximum prison. And I just started to feel completely unprepared. And I parked my car and I went into the prison. The guards were not very nice. They sent me to the back in this visitation room.
And I was so anxious that I tried to rehearse exactly what I was going to say. And then they brought this condemned man into the room. And I remember being struck by how burdened with chains he was. He had handcuffs on his wrist. He had a chain around his waist. He had shackles on his ankles. It took them 10 minutes to unchain him. And he walked over to me and I was so overwhelmed.
I just started to apologize. I said, I'm so sorry. I'm just a law student. I don't know anything about the death penalty. I don't know anything about criminal procedure. I don't know anything about appellate procedure, civil procedure. And then I remembered what I was supposed to say. I said, but they sent me down here to tell you that you're not at risk of execution anytime in the next year.
And when I said that, the man said, wait, wait, wait, say that again. I said, you're not at risk of execution anytime in the next year. And the man said, wait, wait, say that again. I said, you're not at risk of execution anytime in the next year. And that's when this man hugged me. And he said, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,245 · page 54 of 63
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