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
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 We have tolerated is our unwillingness to remember, to confront honestly this history. There are people in other parts of the country who are 15 years younger than me who didn't experience integration in education before. 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. And when I finished law school in the 80s, this population of people being sent to jails and prisons,
And most specifically, the people who were being condemned to death facing execution were the people who I felt were most in need of the rule of law.
And justice.
And for me, stone-catching is like embracing people. who are struggling, who are falling down, who are not sure they can do it. And it's the gift we all get.
I mean, one of the things I'm persuaded is that no matter what your education level, no matter where you live, no matter how old you are, no matter what you think about this or that, we all have the capacity to get close to someone who's fallen down, who's suffering, who's struggling. who's overwhelmed and wrap our arms around them and affirm their humanity and their dignity.
For me, that's what stone-catching is all about. It's about affirming the humanity and the dignity of the people whose humanity and dignity is being questioned, who have become hopeless and despairing about their humanity and dignity.
And as the recipient of that kind of stone catching and that kind of affirmation, I don't feel any choice but to participate in sharing that with the people I encounter.
It means that if someone tells a lie, they're not just a liar. If someone takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And we shouldn't be judged by just that person. one bad act. I think we all don't want to be reduced to the worst thing we've ever done.
No human being wants to be imprisoned by one mistake, one falsehood, one bad reaction. We desperately yearn to be seen as something more than that. And I think it's worth committing to a worldview that allows that to shape our thinking. And in so many of our institutions, in so many places, we've not done that.
Our criminal justice system is a system that seems very much rooted in this idea that you can only be the crime you've been accused of. And I think that leads to a lot of injustice. It leads to a lot of misjudgment about who people are.
I mean, for me, it's been important to commit to this concept that we're all more than the worst thing we've ever done, because I don't want to be judged by the worst things I've done. But I also realize I have to share that with other people. It's interesting, in this country, for a long time, we had legislators that
When you listen to them talk about creating new sentences and punishments, they talk as if they can put crimes in prison. I hate that crime, so I want to give that 20 years. I hate that crime. I want to give it 50 years. And they're talking as if they have the ability to put a crime in prison, to put it in there for life and all of these other things.
But we don't have the ability to put crimes in prison. We can only put people in prison, and people are not crimes. They can commit crimes, and we could want to hold them accountable for the crimes they've committed, but there's a difference between a person and a crime. And when we focus on the person, the conversation tends to shift. We tend to think differently.
A woman who's been abused for 20 years and suffered just unimaginable pain and humiliation at at the hands of someone who just thought they could do whatever they want, who finally reacts, even violently, is not just a violent offender. She is someone who is trying to manage decades of abuse and mistreatment.
Showing 1101–1120 of 1,245 · page 56 of 63
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