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
When we censor knowledge and understanding of that history, when we restrict and limit what people learn about it, what we do is not just dishonest, it's unjust. And so if we're called to do justice, we have to find a way to embrace this. You know, for a hundred years, we pulled Black people out of their homes and they were beaten and tortured and lynched on courthouse lawns.
And we've hardly talked about it. That era of segregation that I was born into, the humiliation and degradation of that should not just be the burden of the people who experienced that. It should be all of our burden. And when we understand that, then we commit to never again tolerating that kind of bigotry. We commit to due process.
We commit to the rule of law because we know that mob violence and fear and anger will create destruction and harm and hardship to people who are othered. And I think a consciousness about that is really key to how we move forward. And so... Yes, I do believe that learning at this moment, all across the globe, is going to be a vital action item.
Absolutely. And the beautiful thing is that on the other side of that learning... You get to understand what hope can yield. We have an exhibit in our museum. It's 800 jars of soil. And we have a project where we're trying to put markers at every lynching site in America.
And when people go to these sites, we ask them to put soil from the lynching site in a jar that has the name of the victim and the date. And they bring it back to the museum. And so when you come to our museum, you see these jars of soil. A couple of years back, an older Black woman called and said, oh, Mr. Stevenson, I want to dig some soil for your museum.
Do you have a county where no one has done anything? And we did. So we asked her to go to this county. And she told me when she got there that she had to pray before she got out of her car because it was this really scary place. It was a dirt road in the middle of the woods. And we'd given her the jar with the name of the victim and a memo that talked about the lynching and an implement.
And she said she found her strength, got out of the car, crossed the dirt road, got to the spot where the lynching took place, got down on her knees. And then she said this pickup truck came down the road and there was this big white guy in the truck and he stared at her as he drove by. And she said she was afraid. Then he stopped, turned his truck around, drove back by and stared some more.
And then she said to her horror, the man parked his truck, got out, and started walking toward her. We tell people when they're digging soil that they don't have to explain what they're doing. We say, look, if you want to just say you're getting dirt for your garden, that's totally fine. And this man walked up to her and he said, what are you doing?
And she told me that she was going to tell him she was just getting some dirt for her garden. She said, but Mr. Stevenson, all of a sudden, something got a hold of me. And I turned to that man and I said, I'm digging soil here because this is where a Black man was lynched in 1937 and I'm going to honor his life today. And she started digging.
And the man, to her surprise, said, does that memo talk about the lynching? And she said, it does. And then the man said, can I read it? And she gave the man the memo and he started reading while she started digging. And after a few minutes, the man finished reading the memo. He put it down. And then he really surprised her. And he said, excuse me, ma'am, but would it be all right if I helped you?
And she said, yes. And the man got down on his knees next to her. And she offered him the implement to dig the soil. He said, no, no, no, no, no. You keep it. I'll just use my hands. And she said he started throwing his hands into the soil and putting it in the jar and throwing his hands into the soil with his whole body. And she said there was something about the conviction that
with which he was putting his whole body into this that just moved her. And the tears started running down her face. And the man looked at her and he said, oh, ma'am, I'm so sorry. I'm upsetting you. She said, no, no, no, no, no. You're blessing me. And she kept digging with the implement. He kept digging with his hands. And they got near the top.
of the jar and she looked over and she saw that the man had slowed down, that his face had turned red, that his shoulders had dropped. And then she said she saw a tear running down his face. And she put her hand on his shoulder and she said, are you all right? And that's when the man looked at her and he said, no, ma'am, no, ma'am.
And then he said, I'm just so worried that it might have been my grandfather who helped lynch this man. And she said, both of them just sat on that roadside and wept. After a few minutes, the man turned to her and he said, ma'am, I really want to take a picture of you holding the jar of soil. She said, okay, but I want to take a picture of you holding the jar of soil.
And so they took pictures of one another. And she said, well, I'm going back to Montgomery to put this in the museum. And the man said, would it be all right if I just followed you back? And she said, sure. And she called me on the way back. She said, Mr. Stevenson, I want you to come to the museum and meet my new friend.
And I was there when these two people who met on a roadside in a place of bigotry and violence and hate came in together and did something beautiful by putting that jar of soil in that exhibit. I'm not naive. I don't think beautiful things like that always happen when we tell the truth. But I do believe we deny ourselves the beauty of justice when we refuse to tell the truth.
On the other side of truth is redemption, restoration, reconciliation. I don't talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because I want to punish. I talk about these things because I want us to be liberated from the harm, the burden, the weight that history will continue to carry until we confront it, until we continue to acknowledge it.
And so part of what we're trying to do with these sites is to invite people into a journey of learning that allows us to get to something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, which I think is waiting for us. I do. I think it's just waiting for us all across the globe.
I think we have an opportunity to get to something that feels more like freedom, equality, and justice, but we can't get there if we're unwilling to be honest about the harms that hold us back.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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