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
Our hope is what can sustain us when things look bleak and difficult. And that is the reason why I believe that hopelessness is the enemy of justice. Justice will prevail if we allow ourselves to give in to hopelessness. Hope is our superpower. It's the thing that will get some of us to stand up even when people say sit down. It will get some of us to speak even when people say be quiet.
It's the thing that will get us to believe we can do things that maybe other people think we can't do. I have to give it to my clients, and I can't give someone something I don't have. And so for me, it's an orientation of the Spirit. You know, Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about wanting all kinds of things during the time of Soviet domination.
And he said, we wanted money and recognition and resources, but the only thing we needed, he said, was hope. And Havel says the kind of hope you need is not a preference for optimism over pessimism. It's not a pie-in-the-sky thing. He says it's an orientation of the Spirit, a willingness to sometimes position yourself in a hopeless place and be a witness.
And that, I do think, is the gift I've been given by so many people who've come before me, so many people who have done things with fewer resources, fewer opportunities, fewer supports than I have. And it's what I want to give to the people who come after me.
is, you know, this idea that if we can labor long and save lives and change the law and create perhaps a slightly more just system, then we have to continue to hope we can do more.
Yeah, I think learning about hope is... is a really important action item. Sometimes I think we don't think of learning as an action item, but I do. I think to learn is to do something.
And learning the stories of what hopeful people did despite the odds is one of the most important things we can do to prepare ourselves, to train ourselves, our minds and our bodies to do hopeful things in our lives. Just like we have to train ourselves if we want to be fit or run a race. I think we have to train ourselves, prepare ourselves to be hopeful in the midst of so many difficulties.
And the world is just filled of stories about hopeful people. And I think we need to learn them and be shaped by them. I never really talked much about my grandmother or my great-grandparents who were enslaved. until I was in my 40s. I didn't want to forget about it. It just wasn't relevant in my head. Now I talk about them all the time.
Now I see in their lives strength and knowledge and wisdom and power, and it shapes what I do. And part of the reason why I'm so committed to reckoning more honestly with our history of injustice is because buried in that history are stories of hope and resilience that we need to know and we need to understand.
Yeah. I mean, there's a long list. I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of people coming out of jails and prisons that have no one to help meet their needs. We don't do anything in this country to help people recover from five years, 10 years, 20 years of incarceration.
So we're going to need people to step up, to volunteer, to help the institutions in your community that are trying to provide support. People coming out of jails and prisons with clothes, jobs, opportunities, counseling. Many of the clients that I represent went to prison before the digital age. They've never used an ATM. They don't know anything about cell phones.
And just helping people recover is one of the things you can do. And we all have skills. that people need. It doesn't matter how old you are or how much you've done, that's a role you can play. We have to take on the burdens of people who are most at risk. And so learning is, I think, really, really important.
We have a website, EJI.org, and it's just filled with all kinds of content that's designed to help people learn about what is important.
We started a decade ago asking prosecutors to create conviction integrity units that would review cases in their office where there were claims of innocence because this shouldn't be the burden of a defense attorney or a journalist, but we should all care about making sure that people who are innocent If you care about justice, you should care about injustice. Absolutely. Absolutely.
And then there are hundreds of ways to become more active in dealing with the inequality gap that condemns so many children. So many children aren't getting the support they need, the help they need, the resources they need. I just think that everyone has something to offer there.
You know, I think we should all care about educating kids who have fewer resources, who don't have the same opportunities, and there's nothing holding us back. We just have to have the will. to do that. And then finally, I am persuaded that we all have to learn more about our history that holds us back from a lot of these things.
I don't think many people in this country and across the globe have been taught the kinds of things we need to know to better prepare ourselves for creating a more just future. We have something called a history of racial injustice. It's a calendar. We put out something every day and you can sign up for it. And each day,
We're going to teach you something about parts of our history that aren't pleasant, but we think they're necessary to understand and know. And I hope we prepare people to be better informed, better citizens, better stewards of the opportunities we have to create a more just world.
It's EJI.org, and we're on all of the social media sites, and so you can sign up there as well. But yeah, particularly now when there's such resistance to honest education about some of these topics, I think it's going to become even more important. that we be informed, that we be aware of the lessons we can learn from the misery of history.
There are lessons we learn from the glory of history, but there are also lessons we must learn from the misery of history. And the more I do this work, the more I've come to believe that memory is the justice we owe the 10 million Black people who endured the immense suffering and constant sorrow of slavery.
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