Bryan Stevenson

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.

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 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.