February 3, 2026 • 48 mins
Bryan Stevenson – founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, author of Just Mercy, and one of the most influential justice advocates of our time – joins My Legacy with his plus one: Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent nearly 30 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
In this special Black History Month episode, Stevenson and Hinton sit down with hosts Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters King, Marc Kielburger, and Craig Kielburger to share the extraordinary story of how they met, what kept them both going, and what it really means to seek justice with love, not vengeance.
Together, they share how:
- Real justice starts with telling the truth about our past
- We are all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done
- You don’t truly appreciate sunshine and stars until they’re taken from you
- Hope is a daily, defiant choice
- Laughter can keep your soul alive, even in a 5x7 cell
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We have a legal system in this country that treats
you better if you're rich and guilty.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Than if you're poor and innocent.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Ryan Stevenson, groundbreaking civil rights attorney, founded the Equal Justice
Initiative to defend those no one else would to always.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Do the right thing, even when the right thing is
the hard thing.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Winning landmarks, Supreme Court cases and freeing over one hundred
and forty longly condemned prisoners.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
They that are shulish man hand and you God has
sent me his number one Lord.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Anthony Ray Hinton survived twenty eight years on death row
for a crime he didn't commit. Two men, a bond
forged by injustice and a mission to tell the truth
we all need to hear.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
We say in our world that capital punishment means them
without the capital get the punishment.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
It had to only evidence their need, and that is
and I was black.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Choosing hope over hate became their greatest act of resistance.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Most people wouldn't be able to endure that.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It's just easier to give up than What makes him
so remarkable.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Is that he found his hope.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Michael B. Jordan and Osha Jackson Junior brought their story
to the Big Screen in Jess Mercy and now hosts
Martin Luther King the Third, Andrea Waters, King, Mark Kilberger,
and Craig Hilberger Died Deeper, a transformative conversation about resilience, redemption,
and how in the darkest moments we can choose hope
over hate.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
We don't talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because
we want to punish America. We talk about these things
because we want to liberate America. It's those uncomfortable truths
that inspire us.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Welcome to My Legacy Today. Our guest is the extraordinary
Brian Stephenson, a man who has dedicated his life to
defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. His work
has fundamentally reframed what justice can and should look like
in America. Brian, we are truly honored that you are
here with us today. And as our audience knows, our
(01:56):
guests always bring a plus one to the conversation, someone
who has impacted their life in a profound way. You've
brought someone whose story is at the heart of why
you do this work. Will you please do us the
honor of introducing your plus one?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yes, I am thrilled to be sitting next to my client,
my friend, my brother, my colleague, Anthony ray Hinton, who
was born and raised in Alabama, northwest of Birmingham, raised
by an amazing, loving mother who taught him really powerful
(02:35):
truths about what's right and what's wrong. A talented baseball
player was working in the coal mines and then was
wrongly accused of committing two murders because he was poor
and didn't have the resources to get the kind of
legal help he needed. Because he is black and was
(02:56):
presumed dangerous and guilty, he was wrongly convicted and sentenced
to death and spent nearly thirty years on Alabama's death row.
I had the great privilege of representing him for the
last sixteen years, and I'm so thrilled that in April
of twenty fifteen, he walked out of prison here and
(03:18):
not just walked out and regained his freedom, but began
a project, a movement, a mission to tell people around
this country about the harms of the death penalty, of
the wrongfulness of inequality and justice. And he's now a
beloved community educator here at the Equal Justice Initiative.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So this is Anthony ray.
Speaker 5 (03:38):
Hinton to understand this incredible bond that the two of
you share today. Let's go back to when you first
met Anthony. You have been on death row.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
For over a decade wow.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
And one day, while you're being walked back to your cell,
you see Brian on television talking about Walter McMillan, a
man that he just freed from death row. What did
you write to Brian in that first letter that you
sent him.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Missus Stevenson. I know you get a lot of letters
from inmates, I said, but I am truly innocent and
I would like to ask a favor of you. And
that prav was what you read my transcript. And after
reading my transcript, which you consider being my lawyer, and
I figure, hearing so much about him, as small as
(04:29):
it was, as great as he was, once he read
my transcript, that would be no doubt that he would
say something is wrong with this case. I felt within
my heart this is the right person. After listening to
him on TV talk about why we don't lead a
death penalt in his country, and I figured my case
was perhaps one of the best case he would ever
(04:51):
come across. Due to the fact there was no evidence,
there was no eyewitness no finger, Prince. It was based
on racism, if you ask MENI and the fact that
I was going black and poor. And I think about
three months later he had told me he was coming
to see me. And the day I say this with
(05:11):
all the day that I shook this man's hand, I
knew God had sent me his number one lawyer. Wow.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
And at that point you had been on death row
for over a decade.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Yes, And he said I'm gonna get you out of here.
And I hadn't heard that from any lawyer that I
had previous to missus Stevenson becoming my lawyer. And when
he said those words, he said, don't worry, I'm gonna
get you out of here. I believed you. I had
no reason to doubt him. I knew it was gonna
(05:48):
be a challenge, but I really felt that this was
the man that God had brought him my life to
represent me, to get me to where I am today.
And I was right, Wow, you were Yes.
Speaker 6 (06:03):
You know, Brian gave a little bit of a context.
Anthony was charged with two murders in nineteen eighty five.
He was convicted to send to death row, even though
he had a solid alibi. The only evidence linking him
to the crime was a gun that the state claimed
matched the bullets, but Brian, of course, would later prove
that it didn't. But then, the more substantive question is
that you said that race, poverty, and inadequate legal assistance
(06:26):
conspired to create a text book example, a textbook example
of injustice in the Anthony's case. What do most people
not understand about those three intersections of race, poverty, and
adequate legal assistance, and how unfortunately those often conspire to
work together.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Well, I mean, I often say that we have a
legal system in this country that treats you better if
you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.
Well not Culpability shapes the outcomes of many criminal trials,
and Hitton's case dramatically revealed that the state had virtually
no credible basis for believing that he committed these crimes.
(07:07):
They retrieved a gun from his mother's home that clearly
had not been fired in many, many years. They tested it,
There was no legitimate match between the bullets and this
gun from the crime scene. But they were so desperate
to solve these crimes, just to create some contexts these murders,
A couple of fast food store managers had created a
(07:31):
lot of fear and alarm in the Birmingham area, so
people were on edge. There was pressure on them to
make an arrest. People wanted to believe that some dangerous
person was no longer out there, and that pressure meant
that I don't think they were as focused on getting
the right person, the person who had actually committed the crime,
then getting somebody that would allow them to say to
(07:51):
the public, we've solved the crime. And because mister Hinton
was indigen didn't have the money, they knew he was
going to have to rely on whatever lawyer of the
court appointed to him. And to be honest, if he
had had the resources to get the kind of legal
help he needed, he would have never been convicted. And
it's still tragic to this day that he didn't have that,
(08:13):
because he's sitting here next to me now and he's
got an amazing sense of humor, he's got a powerful
mission and testimony, and he's a powerful speaker. But he
lost twenty eight years of his life. He lost so
much that no one can give him back, and that's
a tragedy we cannot fix. And so having an energen
(08:33):
defense system. Having a legal system that doesn't disadvantage you,
doesn't disfavor you even when you're innocent, is a critical
issue in America, and we've done very little to create
the kind of resources that many people in this country
need when they're accused of a crime. So that's how
poverty plays out. He needed an expert who could make
(08:54):
it very clear that the weapon that they were trying
to connect was not the weapon involved.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Couldn't get that.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
He got an expert who was literally blind in one eye,
who was a mechanical engineer who had never testified on
this kind of case, and the jury literally laughed at that.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Witness when he was on the stand.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Race comes into play because I do think there's a
presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned the black
and brown people in this country, where when the jury
comes in, they presume you're guilty, They presume you're dangerous,
and the burden is on you to prove the opposite. Now,
our legal system is actually based on a presumption of innocence.
(09:34):
It's not mister Hinton's burden to prove anything. When he
gets to court. He should have been able to sit
there and be exonerated because the state couldn't incredibly prove
his guilt, but because he's black and there's this presumption
of dangerousness and guilt, it was his burden to prove
to the jury that he didn't commit this crime. And
of course that's a whole different kind of task than
the lawyer that was appointed to represent him was prepared
(09:56):
to take on.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
And so that combination of race.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And poverty really created an environment where he could be
wrongly convicted.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
And it's a huge problem.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
We've now identified over two hundred people who've been exonerated
after being sentenced to death. We have an error rate
in this country that's shocking. For every eight people we've
executed in the United States, we've identified one in this
in personal on death world who's been exonerated and released.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And the truth is we would never tolerate that rate
of error in any other area. If somebody said one
out of eight planes is going to crash on takeoff
and everybody's going to die, nobody would fly. If somebody said, oh,
one out of eight apples has a toxin on it
and if you touch that apple, you're going to die,
we would stop selling apples. But we continue to tolerate
(10:46):
a death penalty with this sort of error rate, and
the victims are people like mister Hinton. You know, if somebody,
if I get in trouble and someone represents me and
my life is imperiled, I want that lawyer to represent
me as if their life was in pair. I want
them to fight for me like they're fighting for themselves.
(11:06):
And that's the kind of lawyer I want to be.
And that's the kind of lawyer that mister Hinton needed
but didn't get. And because he didn't get that, it
costs to nearly thirty years. And I do hope people
understand that this isn't just some rare incident. His case
traumatized these problems in a very powerful way. We say
(11:27):
in our world the capital punishment means them without the
capital get the punishment. I think when people talk about
the death penalty, the threshold question isn't whether people deserve
to die for the crimes they've committed. The threshold question
is do we deserve to kill if we have a
legal system that is so undermined by bias against the poor,
(11:48):
bias against people of color, that's so flawed by errors,
And in my judgment.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
We do not have that kind of system.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
We do not deserve to kill when there are people
like Anthony ray Hinton experiencing what he's experienced in this
country over there over the time he was on death row.
Speaker 6 (12:06):
Wow, that was just so incredibly powerful to understand. The
one and eighth.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
When I was arrested, the officer told me there was
five things that was going to convict me. And he said,
number one, you black. Number two, a white man is
gonna say you shot it. Number three, you're gonna have
a white judge. Number four, you're gonna have a white prosecutor.
(12:32):
The number five you're gonna have an all white jurry.
No way in there did he ever say we have evidence,
we have failure, Prince, we have on our witness, we
got your on camera, or we got someone that gave
us a description. And even to this day, that still
hunts me because this detective knew they didn't need new evidence.
(12:55):
They they had the only evidence they need, and that
is and I was black.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
We've spent.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars on jails
and prisons in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. We
spent hundreds of millions of dollars on more law enforcement resources.
We didn't spend a penny on indigen defense in most
of these jurisdictions, we didn't have that same kind of
increase in spending.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And we could do that.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
I think, you know, for us, and mister Hinton is
now involved in this work. If we made the kind
of investments into dealing with the health needs of a
lot of people who are struggling, I think we could
actually dramatically reduce the problems of crime. We could improve
public safety, we could eliminate some of these horrible crimes.
Most of our policy makers, and you know this, they
(13:44):
go around saying, after you've been raved, after you've been robbed,
after you've been murdered, we're going to really beat up
on the.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Person who committed that crime. That's not an effective strategy.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
We should be saying, what are we going to do
to prevent these kinds of crimes? And that means we
have to invest in health. We have to invest in
making sure people had the basic needs. And I'll use
the drug policies just one small example and I'll stop.
You'll remember the nineteen seventies and eighties, we had politician
from both political parties who were saying that people who
(14:14):
are drug addicted and people who are drug dependent are
criminals who should be punished. And that's when our prison
population went from three hundred thousand in the early seventies
to over two million by the end of the century,
who became the nation with the highest rate of incarceration
in the world. Now, we should have said that people
who are suffering from drug addiction and drug dependency had
a health problem and we need a healthcare response to
(14:37):
that problem. And if we had invested in health care
solutions to addiction and dependency, we would have had all
of these millions of people going to jails in prison.
We could have kept families together, We could have reduced
all of that collateral crime. We wouldn't need to be
hunting drug traffickers in the Caribbean and talking about the
(14:57):
scourge and the threat of that problem, because we would
have been dealing with this problem as a health problem
and be in a very different place. Instead, we have
these record levels of opioid addiction and addiction and drug overdose.
And that's where I feel like we do have the capacity.
The questions do we have the will and I think
if we can match the will with our capacity, we
(15:19):
can completely change.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Our legal system.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I don't think there's anything that we should be bragging
about or even honorable about having the highest rate of
incarceration in the world. That's that statistic, that mark's failure.
When you have to imprison so many people, then you
are failing to use your resources in a way that
build a healthy and just society. And we just have
to connect the will with the capacity, and I think
(15:46):
if we do that, we can make transformational changes in
our society.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
List let me ask a question.
Speaker 7 (15:53):
You were twenty nine years old when you were sent
to death row, Yes, sir, and it was over a
dozen years before you met Brian. How did you survive
during that time?
Speaker 4 (16:09):
Uh? To be honest with you, I survived uh by faith,
and I came to understand, UH, that was nothing I
could do. Uh. I had to somehow find a way
to escape. And I used my mind to believe that
(16:29):
I wasn't in at five I seven n every morning
I had the ability to leave and go wherever I
wanted to go and do whatever I wanted to do.
And then without having that ability to do that, uh,
having mister Stevenson wanted done me no good because I
was in solitary confinement, and solitary confinement is uh meant
(16:50):
to break uh, And so I refused to be broke.
I hadn't committed the crime, and I just knew at
some point in some time, I truly felt that God
was gonna send somebody by just say hey, I'm gonna
look at this case. This man is innocent, and I
held on to my belief. I held on to my
(17:12):
imagination until the real, the real hero came by. He
had assured me that he was gonna get me out,
and I began to use my mind in essential being
free and thought about what I would do once I
was out, and all that's how I survived.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
So mister Hinton, as I think you know, has a
remarkable book about his experience called The Sun Does Shine,
which I'll encourage everyone to buy and read, because it
is absolutely true that the amount of time that he
spent on death row. Alabama's not a state like some
of these states where there are never executions. During the
(17:56):
time he was on death row, fifty five people were executed.
That meant people would be walking by his cell. In
the early years. They would execute people with the electric chair.
So he'd be in his cell and he'd smell the
flesh burning, he'd hear the sound. It was traumatizing. This
was torture, and not everybody, and in fact, most people
(18:18):
wouldn't be able to endure that wouldn't be able to
survive that. It's just easier to give up than to
have hope in such a hopeless place. And what makes
him so remarkable is that he found his hope and
that struggle to hold on too, that was every bit
as challenging as the legal struggle. We had to persuade
(18:38):
a court to grant him relief, which is why, you know,
I think he's someone who absolutely, you.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Know, should be celebrated and admired.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
But it is no small thing to survive an environment
like that in the way that he did it.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Coming up an unlikely friendship on Death Row, Anthony Ray
Hinton on his conversations with the one of a KKK
grand Wizard that broke through generations of hate.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Now back to my legacy.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
There's one particular story that I'm captivated by because as
someone that spent over a decade monitoring the klu Klux
Klan and Neil nazi'san Skinheads under Reverend C. Vivian at
the Center for Democratic Renewal. One of the most unexpected
stories from your time on Death Row is about Henry Hayes.
(19:32):
And for our audience listeners who don't know this, Henry
Hayes's father was a klu klux Klan KKK grand wizard
who ordered him to lynch a nineteen year old black man.
Can you just tell us a little bit about this
unlikely friendship.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
A black man had been found not guilty for kidding
a white police officer in Birmingham, and my father gave
him and two other clansmen to order to go out
and kill the first African Amory male they came across.
And they just happened to come across Michael McDonnell and
they executed him in their own way. And when Henry
(20:15):
came to death Robe or he wouldn't talk, and I
would talk to him and holler over at and he
never would speak anything. But eventually I didn't let that stop.
Now didn't know who he was really because on Death
Rowd you can't see them but man's wide and concrete.
You don't know who next to you. But we began
(20:38):
to talk, and I got a note saying, do you
know who you're talking to every day? And I hollered
out and know whoever? Simply they know? Then they said
that's the plansmen who killed that kid, And so I
asked Henry, of course, and I said, Henry, why you
didn't tell me who you were? And Henry didn't respond.
(20:58):
But I had to ask myself more important question did
it matter? And once I asked myself did it matter?
The answer was no. He still deserved compassion, He still
deserved it love like any other. And so I began
to talk to him, and so Henry would call me Ray.
We talk every day, and I was asking Henry coursetion, like, Henry,
(21:22):
do they teach you to hate in school? This is
something your mom and dad talked to you. I wanted
to know, I really did, and he would tell me,
and I thought about what my mother told She said,
no matter what one does in life, they still deserve compassion.
And she would always say, boy, you always making me mad,
(21:43):
and I still love you, and you're always doing something
that God don't like, and he still loved you. So
I want you to have the same compassion for someone else.
And Hearry fit that mold and so I wanted to
show Henry that although we was born different color, we
still was brothers in Christ. And so I allowed Henry
to say what he wants. And I know this over
(22:05):
the course of the year by just being who I was.
I didn't try to talk down to him. I didn't
try to tell him anything that he said was wrong.
I wanted him to finally figure that out for himself.
And over the course of fourteen years we became friends.
And the reason I can say we became friend I
(22:25):
never will forget. One day on the visiting yard, his
father came the sin and he begged for me to
come to his table, and I got up, and you
weren't supposed to get up, but I got up and
went over to his table. And then he said, then
I want you to meet my friend Ray. And when
he introduced me to his father as his friend, I
(22:47):
knew then that something had changed in it, because he
probably never had said a black person was his friend.
And I put my hand out to shake his father hand,
but his father wouldn't shake my hand. He took my
hand down and I went back to my table, and
my visit asked me. He said, what was it that
all about? And I said progress. It's so. When we
(23:09):
left the visiting yard, I looked at him may and
I said, Henry, what's wrong? And he wouldn't save us.
I said, Henry, what's wrong? He said nothing. I said, Henry,
come on, man, tell me what's wrong. And he said, well,
my father said, as long as he come to see me,
I am never to invite a nigger to his tape.
(23:31):
And I said, Henry, that's your father cancer. If your
father want to die with that cancer called hey, let
him do it. But you don't have to, I said, Henry.
For the first time in your life, you are where
you can make your own decision. Who you talk to,
how long you talk to him, who you want to
be friends with, that's up to you. Now. Your father
can't tell you that. Your mother can't take it. And
(23:54):
we got back to the sailing and he went in
his ceiling. We lived bite chum and we talked for
the rest of us and I said, Henry, I want
you to know that God created you in his own image.
He created you the way that he wanted you to be,
and he created me who he wanted me to be.
I said, Henry. I have never stole from him and
(24:15):
never robbed, he never did anything. I don't know, why
do you hate me? And Henry respond was I don't
even know you. And I said, Henry, that's my point, exactor,
you don't even know me to hate man. And from
then on we just became talking every day, became friends
as best she could. On death row and his family
(24:39):
died out older of course of fifteen years, and he
actually one could I sit with him and it wasn't
granted his wish and I sit with him a little
bit doing to the day of the execution. But what
got me was his last words. And his last words
was all of my life. I was brought up to hate.
(25:00):
Every people that I was brought up to hate. For
the last fifteen years have shown me nothing but look
and tonight, els, I lead this work, I lead this world.
I'm knowing what real love feel like. And they executed
my friend Henry, and I am convince that America ever
(25:20):
want to do away with hate. We got the party
be willing to talk to each other and be willing
to listen to each other. But I gets it, America
are freight to have that opening on this conversation like
Henry and I did.
Speaker 7 (25:36):
Wow, mister Henson, your mother believed in your innocence and
visited you every single month until the day she died
in two thousand and two. What's one thing your mother
taught you that kept you going during your darkest moments?
Speaker 4 (25:58):
You know what? My mother was one of those that
she knew her children somehow. My mother could put twelve
cookies in a jar and she would tell all us,
(26:18):
don't touch. But she come home and she count those
cookies and one was missing. She knew exact just one
of the old children got that cooking. And that because
I say today to young people, if PAMs is really
paying attention, they know you better they could think they are.
And my mom not one time asked me did I
(26:41):
do it? She looked at me and she said, I
know you didn't do this and that because of the
way she brought me up. That's the way I grew
up without a father, But I didn't grow up because
he was absent. Ah. My father worked in a coal
mine and a rock fell on him and he lost
his mind. And my father was a mental institution and
the rest of them since I was four years old.
(27:04):
But I didn't fear no man more than I feared
my mother. My mom just knew that one day I
could come home. And my mom used to ask me
every every day, every day she come or she would say,
when are you coming home? And to be honest with you,
(27:26):
I would have to lie to my mom. And I
was some moment they working on it, and soon and
that soon never did get there and before she passed away,
and I have to live with that every day. But
I know my mom passed knowing that her baby boy.
(27:46):
I'm the baby of ten, five boys and five girls,
and with every five in my bean, I know my
mom passed knowing that I was coming home, knowing that
I was innocent and sold. That cares me every day,
and every day I leave home with the thought of
(28:06):
making my mom proud. What can I do to make
my mom even proud of me? And if that means
falling down, getting up and saying, hey, I'm sorry for
falling down, then we have a problem saying it. And
I just want to say that I had the best
loved in the world and my mom taught me so
(28:26):
much that to this day I'm still living off and
I believe with every friv of my bean, I'm leaving
off my mother prayer for me. Wow.
Speaker 6 (28:37):
She sounds like just an incredible force for humanity. April third,
twenty fifteen. Good Friday, of course for our listeners and
our viewers. You walked out of Jefferson County Jail at
nine thirty in the morning. You said that being released
at the age of fifty eight, if I'm not mistaken,
was like walking out into another planet. Can you just
(28:58):
help us understand that? And what is the hardest adjustment?
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Well, you know, I tell people it was. It was
good and bitter. The good was I was finally out.
The bad part to me was my mother wasn't there
to see her baby boy or come home. But we
did the interview and missus Stevenson had told my best
(29:23):
friend Leicester to uh take me to his home, but
I wanted to go and see where they had buried
my mother. And the two of us got in his
car and I put on the seat belt and asked
we was going down the road? This white lady said
in one tenth for a mile to and right and
(29:44):
the buildings, which I said, what the hell? And I
was afraid to look back at and I was pointing
back in the back telling him that a white lady
was in the back seat, and he was laughing and
I can't understand what he laughing about. And I'm saying,
white lady like that. And when you couldn't take it
(30:07):
no more, he pulled over. He said, there's no white
lady back else. She in here, And I said, how
the hell she get in now? And he went to
telling me about GPS's and all of that, and she
would would tell him that cookies Ralph for faster rock take.
You realize I'm being locked up thirty years and I
(30:30):
don't know nothing about model technology. I don't know anything
about your changes of the world and what's going on.
I'm taking each minute, five minute trying your just trying
to learn. And my focus was to be honest with you.
Where do I live? What do I get a job?
What do I I get closed? Because I was set
(30:52):
as say say free, but I was set free with nothing.
I didn't have a place to live. I didn't have
a place to call home or anything. But through it
all all I was able to live with my best
friend and ever I said, Missus Steveson was never spot
and have been there from the time I will release.
(31:15):
And before I got released, and I begin to say, hey,
I don't know how I'm gonna make it, if life
is going to be this, it worked out, and I
am so thankful to be where I am today. And
I didn't give up, and I'm again I had hope
that one day it would get better. And I can
truse to say that it out.
Speaker 6 (31:36):
You said something that we all loved, and it was
the fact that you go outside every night and look
at the stars in the moon because you hadn't seen
them for years. And you still to this day walk
in the rain, having thirty or nearly thirty years stolen
from you. You could be bitter and resentful, but you
are just a bundle of love. You're a bundle of wisdom,
(31:57):
of energy, of just gratitude. How do you have so
much gratitude in your heart right now?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
Well, you know, being locked up for thirty years, you
don't realize. There's an old say, you don't realize what
you had until you lose it. And I had lost
my freedom, and I would sit there and look lay
in the bed and look up and see nothing but country.
And then I realized when I was free, I never
(32:26):
did look up and see the stars of the moon,
and how much I wish I had seen the stars
in the moon because God put one of the most
beautiful pictures that Lambrandt Percossa could never have painted. And
I try to tell people, never take it for gregg.
Always look up, just see the beautiful stars dreaming and
(32:50):
flitzing wash the moon. And so when I came home,
I made a promise to myself that every night I
would go out and watch the stars in the moon
and look up and thank God for putting that beautiful
picture up there so I could see it. Never take
anything for granted. All life is not promised. Tomorrow could
(33:11):
be the last day. So enjoy the day, but enjoy
it in the way that you enjoy it with somebody
that makes someone else feel just as good as you feel.
And every day I try to come here at Eji,
I hope that I can say something to someone and
make them smile, because I believe that we need to
smile more. We need to learn how to embrace one another,
(33:35):
love one another, and treat each other with the most respect.
And that's what I try to do every day of
my life. I'm not worried about what happened. I'm trying
to live for today and hopefully if I see fit
God to see fit for me to live tomorrow. I
want to put a smile on whoever face I come
in contact with.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Well, you've certainly done that today, and for all of
our listeners, I wish for you, and you're outside again
at night and you're looking at the stars and the moon,
that you also remember that, Anthony Hinton, probably, if not
at that moment, at some point that night, we'll be
joining you in that moment of awe and gratefulness.
Speaker 6 (34:15):
If you're looking for stories that move you, insights that
shift you, in conversations that stay deeply within you, do
us a favor, and do yourself a favor and hit
the subscribe button right now. It's the best way to
support this podcast and support your journey. New episodes drop
every week.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Now. Back to My.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Legacy, Brian.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
You spent your career in court rooms, winning legal battles,
but then you decide to build the Legacy Museum and
the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. What was it
that made you realize that the fight for justice had
to expand beyond the courts.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Well, I think it was that realization that we were
moving into an era where our courts were retreating from
a full comitment to the rule of law. If you
study Reconstruction, what happened after the Civil War. We created
laws that should have created a different future for formerly
enslaved people. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection. The fifteenth
Amendment guaranteed the right to vote, and during that twelve
(35:15):
year period, eighty percent of the black people eligible to
vote registered and voted. We send people to Congress, we
opened black colleges. It's when we built most of the
black churches that exist in this country. We made a
commitment to family. There were thriving communities in Tulsa and
places Greenwood and all these places around the country. And
then our courts retreated from a commitment to the rule
(35:37):
of law, and the US Supreme Court decided to favor
states rights over constitutional rights. We gave in to the
demands of racial hierarchy and white supremacy over the demands
of equal protection and the right to vote. And that's
what created that century of a challenge. And I sensed
(35:59):
something like that happening again a decade ago, when the
Court stopped responding to evidence of innocence. When we were
losing cases of clear intentional racial bias and jury selection,
when evidence of innocence was being ignored, it just became
clear to me that we had to keep doing that
legal work, but we were going to have to get
outside the court room and begin doing this narrative work.
(36:21):
And I do think that is the defining struggle for
this era, that we are now in a narrative battle
in this country and across the globe. There are people
who are pushing the politics of fear and anger. They
know that when people allow themselves to be governed by
fear and anger, they'll start tolerating things you should never tolerate.
(36:43):
They know that if you allow us have to be
governed by fear and anger, people will accept things that
are unacceptable. When you look at human history, the worst
moments in the twentieth centuries when countries gave in to
the politics of fear and anger. That's what happened in Europe,
in Germany in the nineteen thirties and forties, is what
happened in Rwanda in the early nineteen nineties, where neighbors
allowed themselves to be so swept up with fear and
(37:04):
anger that they started slaughtering their other neighbors, and it
will happen anywhere when we give into that. And so
for me, it became necessary to kind of combat that
in this narrative struggle. And at the heart of that
struggle in America at least, is our continuing challenge to
overcome the legacy of racial inequality, racial injustice. It doesn't
(37:26):
matter where you live in the Northwest, the southeast, north, midwest,
New England. If you live in America, you live in
a space where there's a long history of racial inequality.
And I believe that history has created toxins pollution in
the air that we all breathe in, and it keeps
us from being fully healthy. And it's largely in the
air because we haven't committed to talking about to challenging
(37:48):
that narrative in the way that we need to. And
I think that's what we must do in this moment.
I don't blame past generations. When you're enslaved, you have
to focus on freedom. When you're being terrorized by lynching violence,
you have to focus on security. In Montgomery the nineteen fifties,
when you're disenfranchised and excluded, you have to focus on
civil rights. But in twenty twenty five, we now have
(38:11):
the capacity, we have the opportunity, and I believe we
have the obligation to confront this narrative, to change this history,
to commit to a period of truth and justice, truth
and repair, truth and redemption, truth and restoration.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
That's what we haven't done.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
In South Africa after the collapse of apartheid, they committed
to a process where the victims of apartheid could give
voice to their harm, where the perpetrators could give voice
to their regret. You go to Berlin, you see a
city that's reckoned with the history of the Holocaust. Every
two hundred meters there's a monument, a memorial, a stone
that the National Memorial, the Memorial to Victims of the Holocaust,
(38:49):
is in the center of the city. There are no
atal fitnor statues in Berlin. There are no monuments of
memorials to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And when I
looked at the landscape of Montgomery, this is the city
that it has fifty nine markers and monuments through the Confederacy,
And when I moved here in the nineteen eighties, you
couldn't find the word slave, slavery and slaveman anywhere in
the public landscape. Our three largest high schools were named
(39:11):
after Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Sidney Lanier are all
Confederate leaders, and we didn't acknowledge the history of the
Civil rights terror and so.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
We felt like that had to change.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
So we've done a lot of scholarship, and then we
felt like we needed to create cultural institutions that help
people reckon with the truth. I think the thing about
truth and justice, truth and repair, truth and redemption, those
things are sequential. You've got to have the truth part
before you can get to the beautiful our words. And
when you skip the truth and you just try to
do repair and remedy, it doesn't work. So we believe
(39:44):
we have to create these truth telling spaces. When I
came back from South Africa in Berlin, I couldn't think
of cultural institutions that were klent talking honestly about the
legacy of slavery or lynching. And that was the reason
why we created these spaces. And I'm excited. I manered
because people are coming and we're getting amazing feedback. And
this truth telling, I believe is what our generation must
(40:08):
commit to create the world that we want to create.
I tell people the purpose of our museum and our
memorial and our new sculpture park. The purpose is to
create a world where the children of our children are
not going to be presumed dangerous or guilty because they
their color. I want to create a world where no
one can go through what mister Hinton had to go through.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
We have to create a.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
World where all kinds of people are liberated from the
biggotree that comes when we accept these narratives of racial inequality.
And it's both black and white people. You know, the
white kids who were taught that they're better than everybody
else because they're white. They were basically taught that they
could only love a certain kind of person. They couldn't
love anybody and everybody. They could only have a certain
kind of narrow existence. And I think that's cruel. We
(40:50):
want to break that down. But to do that, I
do think we have to go through this truth telling
process people. So it's hard, it's challenging, it's uncomfortable.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
And I get it.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
But we can't make the truth comfortable just so people
will embrace. We've got to make it what it is.
And the reality is is that it's those uncomfortable truths
that inspire us to do the great things. It was
never comfortable to be off the buses for three hundred
and eighty one days. It was not comfortable to walk
from Selma to Montgomery. Nothing about justice and change and
progress in this country that's been meaningful has ever been comfortable, convenient,
(41:24):
or easy. And so that's what we want people to
embrace if they're going to be part of this struggle.
And so, yeah, I'm really proud that we now have
a landscape that I hope can really advance this era
of truth and justice that I believe our nation desperately needs.
Speaker 5 (41:39):
It's not about collective guilt, it's about collective responsibility.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
I tell people all the time that we don't talk
about slavery and lynching and segregation because we want to
punish America. We talk about these things because we want
to liberate America. I believe something better is waiting for us.
I think that there's something that feels more light freedom,
more like justice, more like equality and community, and.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
It's waiting for us.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
But we can't get there if we don't have the
courage to turn back and deal with these burdens that
are holding us back, this history that is holding us back.
Speaker 6 (42:11):
Anthea's want just to transition to you for a moments.
Your story, of course is at the Legacy Museum, and
now we all know that you're this remarkable community educator
traveling the country to speak about your experiences, and of
course that also advocate against the death penalty. So thank
you for that. When you stand in front of audiences,
especially young audiences, and share what happened to you, what's
(42:32):
the one thing you want them to especially remember.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
I won't be able to remember what I went through,
and I want them to realize that they have the
power to change it. Well, no one else could go
through what I went through. And I try my bis
to encourage them to get out and vote. If they're
not a registered voter, get out and vote and learn
(42:58):
to run for office. And I think if we can
get young people motivated to pick up politics and be
in it for the right reason, then I believe that
hope that I have, mister Stevenson, have you have? Our
young people is yearning to do things great. And I'm
(43:22):
one of those who encouraged those young people to don't
sit back, don't just talk, get out and do. And
every time I leave a university or somewhere where I
had the privious to talk to young people I love.
Three months, four months, six months later, I get an
email or letter saying, mister Hinton, I listened to you.
(43:45):
I decided that I'm going to law school and become
a lawyer and fight. This is what makes me get
up every morning. Be hoped for that our young people
is yearning to be great, and I hope that I
can just nudge them a little bit oh to be
that great. Wow.
Speaker 7 (44:03):
Amazing Brian and your ted talk that has been viewed
over nine million times. You said each of us is
more than the worst thing that we've ever done. After
representing over one hundred and forty people on death Row,
what have they taught you about what's possible when we
(44:24):
see people's full humanity.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Well, it's been the great joy of my life. It's
been a real privilege.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
People don't think, you know, the choice I made was
a particularly smart one because we don't you know, you
don't make a lot of money and all of that.
But I feel like I've been so privileged to stand
next to people who have been condemned, who have been marginalized,
who are disfavored, who are hated, Because what I've learned
is that when you stand next to someone who's hated
(44:52):
and disfavored and condemned, you can sometimes harness the power
of grace, the power of mercy, and really do some
being beautiful. And I now believe, more than I've ever believed,
that we are all more than the worst thing we've
ever done. I think if someone tells a lie, they're
not just a liar. I think if someone takes something,
they're not just a thief. I think even if you
(45:13):
kill someone.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
You're not just a killer. And we're required to know
the other things you are before we judge you.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
And when you have that orientation, the most beautiful thing
that comes from that is that you're able to avoid hate.
You're able to avoid the trap of hating someone because
they hate you. The burden that comes with filling your
heart with all of this violence and bigotry. That's the
(45:42):
power for me of doing the work that I get
to do. And then, you know, you get to meet
someone like an Anthony ray Hinton, someone whose remarkable heart
and character and spirit is as glorious as reflective of
God's power and grace and mercy as any place you
could go. You could go to all kinds of places
(46:02):
in the world. You go around people with a lot
of money, a lot of resources, people who have this
or that, and you might not find anything precious and
rare and beautiful like the soul of this man. And
so I feel really, really privileged. And you know, we
want these cases banning mandatory life sentences for children. And
the great privilege I have every day now at Eji
(46:24):
is that a lot of those folks who were told
they were going to die in prison when they were
children are now out and they're working here. So I
can walk down the hall and see somebody who was
supposed to die in prison, and the office doing intakes.
I can get on the shuttle buses where a couple
of my clients who were told they were going to
die in prison are now driving the shuttle bus. We've
got people working in the museum who were sentence to
(46:46):
life imprisonment without parole.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
I tell people, I haven't made a lot of money,
but I've made more than money.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Couldn't ever buy. And being able to see what justice
can create in the lives of people who've been treated unjusted.
Speaker 4 (46:58):
Beautiful.
Speaker 6 (47:00):
Well, Brian Anthony, thank you on our collective behalf, and
thank you on behalf of humanity for this incredibly powerful conversation.
We are inspired by your love, your conviction, your passion,
your energy. What began as a letter from a death
row inmate became a sixteen year fight for justice was
started obviously just as a regular lawyer client relationship has
(47:24):
become a bond of friendship, love and admiration and just
true partnership between the two of you. We've also been
educated on the fact that the rate of error for
death row inmates is one and eight, the quote that
those without the capital often get the punishments. But you've
also inspired us to look at the stars in the
moon every evening, to go walk and dance in the rain,
(47:47):
and never take for granted those things that we have
the ability to enjoy in life. Thank you for showing
us what's possible when somebody refuses to accept injustice. And
both of you thank you for being shining examples people
who refuse to live in despair but instead live with
the hope.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
A lot of gratitude to you both. Thank you, it's
great to be with you.
Speaker 7 (48:10):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so very much.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
If you enjoyed today's conversation, subscribe, share, and follow us
on at my Legacy Movement on social media and YouTube.
New episodes drop every Tuesday, with bonus content every Thursday.
At its core, this podcast honors doctor Kin's vision of
the beloved community and the power of connection. A Legacy
(48:37):
Plus Studio production distributed by iHeartMedia creator and executive producer
Suzanne Hayward Come executive producer Lisa Lyle. Listen on the
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
We have a legal system in this country that treats
you better if you're rich and guilty.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Than if you're poor and innocent.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Ryan Stevenson, groundbreaking civil rights attorney, founded the Equal Justice
Initiative to defend those no one else would to always.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Do the right thing, even when the right thing is
the hard thing.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Winning landmarks, Supreme Court cases and freeing over one hundred
and forty longly condemned prisoners.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
They that are shulish man hand and you God has
sent me his number one Lord.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Anthony Ray Hinton survived twenty eight years on death row
for a crime he didn't commit. Two men, a bond
forged by injustice and a mission to tell the truth
we all need to hear.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
We say in our world that capital punishment means them
without the capital get the punishment.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
It had to only evidence their need, and that is
and I was black.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Choosing hope over hate became their greatest act of resistance.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Most people wouldn't be able to endure that.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It's just easier to give up than What makes him
so remarkable.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Is that he found his hope.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Michael B. Jordan and Osha Jackson Junior brought their story
to the Big Screen in Jess Mercy and now hosts
Martin Luther King the Third, Andrea Waters, King, Mark Kilberger,
and Craig Hilberger Died Deeper, a transformative conversation about resilience, redemption,
and how in the darkest moments we can choose hope
over hate.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
We don't talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because
we want to punish America. We talk about these things
because we want to liberate America. It's those uncomfortable truths
that inspire us.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Welcome to My Legacy Today. Our guest is the extraordinary
Brian Stephenson, a man who has dedicated his life to
defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. His work
has fundamentally reframed what justice can and should look like
in America. Brian, we are truly honored that you are
here with us today. And as our audience knows, our
(01:56):
guests always bring a plus one to the conversation, someone
who has impacted their life in a profound way. You've
brought someone whose story is at the heart of why
you do this work. Will you please do us the
honor of introducing your plus one?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yes, I am thrilled to be sitting next to my client,
my friend, my brother, my colleague, Anthony ray Hinton, who
was born and raised in Alabama, northwest of Birmingham, raised
by an amazing, loving mother who taught him really powerful
(02:35):
truths about what's right and what's wrong. A talented baseball
player was working in the coal mines and then was
wrongly accused of committing two murders because he was poor
and didn't have the resources to get the kind of
legal help he needed. Because he is black and was
(02:56):
presumed dangerous and guilty, he was wrongly convicted and sentenced
to death and spent nearly thirty years on Alabama's death row.
I had the great privilege of representing him for the
last sixteen years, and I'm so thrilled that in April
of twenty fifteen, he walked out of prison here and
(03:18):
not just walked out and regained his freedom, but began
a project, a movement, a mission to tell people around
this country about the harms of the death penalty, of
the wrongfulness of inequality and justice. And he's now a
beloved community educator here at the Equal Justice Initiative.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So this is Anthony ray.
Speaker 5 (03:38):
Hinton to understand this incredible bond that the two of
you share today. Let's go back to when you first
met Anthony. You have been on death row.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
For over a decade wow.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
And one day, while you're being walked back to your cell,
you see Brian on television talking about Walter McMillan, a
man that he just freed from death row. What did
you write to Brian in that first letter that you
sent him.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Missus Stevenson. I know you get a lot of letters
from inmates, I said, but I am truly innocent and
I would like to ask a favor of you. And
that prav was what you read my transcript. And after
reading my transcript, which you consider being my lawyer, and
I figure, hearing so much about him, as small as
(04:29):
it was, as great as he was, once he read
my transcript, that would be no doubt that he would
say something is wrong with this case. I felt within
my heart this is the right person. After listening to
him on TV talk about why we don't lead a
death penalt in his country, and I figured my case
was perhaps one of the best case he would ever
(04:51):
come across. Due to the fact there was no evidence,
there was no eyewitness no finger, Prince. It was based
on racism, if you ask MENI and the fact that
I was going black and poor. And I think about
three months later he had told me he was coming
to see me. And the day I say this with
(05:11):
all the day that I shook this man's hand, I
knew God had sent me his number one lawyer. Wow.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
And at that point you had been on death row
for over a decade.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Yes, And he said I'm gonna get you out of here.
And I hadn't heard that from any lawyer that I
had previous to missus Stevenson becoming my lawyer. And when
he said those words, he said, don't worry, I'm gonna
get you out of here. I believed you. I had
no reason to doubt him. I knew it was gonna
(05:48):
be a challenge, but I really felt that this was
the man that God had brought him my life to
represent me, to get me to where I am today.
And I was right, Wow, you were Yes.
Speaker 6 (06:03):
You know, Brian gave a little bit of a context.
Anthony was charged with two murders in nineteen eighty five.
He was convicted to send to death row, even though
he had a solid alibi. The only evidence linking him
to the crime was a gun that the state claimed
matched the bullets, but Brian, of course, would later prove
that it didn't. But then, the more substantive question is
that you said that race, poverty, and inadequate legal assistance
(06:26):
conspired to create a text book example, a textbook example
of injustice in the Anthony's case. What do most people
not understand about those three intersections of race, poverty, and
adequate legal assistance, and how unfortunately those often conspire to
work together.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Well, I mean, I often say that we have a
legal system in this country that treats you better if
you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.
Well not Culpability shapes the outcomes of many criminal trials,
and Hitton's case dramatically revealed that the state had virtually
no credible basis for believing that he committed these crimes.
(07:07):
They retrieved a gun from his mother's home that clearly
had not been fired in many, many years. They tested it,
There was no legitimate match between the bullets and this
gun from the crime scene. But they were so desperate
to solve these crimes, just to create some contexts these murders,
A couple of fast food store managers had created a
(07:31):
lot of fear and alarm in the Birmingham area, so
people were on edge. There was pressure on them to
make an arrest. People wanted to believe that some dangerous
person was no longer out there, and that pressure meant
that I don't think they were as focused on getting
the right person, the person who had actually committed the crime,
then getting somebody that would allow them to say to
(07:51):
the public, we've solved the crime. And because mister Hinton
was indigen didn't have the money, they knew he was
going to have to rely on whatever lawyer of the
court appointed to him. And to be honest, if he
had had the resources to get the kind of legal
help he needed, he would have never been convicted. And
it's still tragic to this day that he didn't have that,
(08:13):
because he's sitting here next to me now and he's
got an amazing sense of humor, he's got a powerful
mission and testimony, and he's a powerful speaker. But he
lost twenty eight years of his life. He lost so
much that no one can give him back, and that's
a tragedy we cannot fix. And so having an energen
(08:33):
defense system. Having a legal system that doesn't disadvantage you,
doesn't disfavor you even when you're innocent, is a critical
issue in America, and we've done very little to create
the kind of resources that many people in this country
need when they're accused of a crime. So that's how
poverty plays out. He needed an expert who could make
(08:54):
it very clear that the weapon that they were trying
to connect was not the weapon involved.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Couldn't get that.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
He got an expert who was literally blind in one eye,
who was a mechanical engineer who had never testified on
this kind of case, and the jury literally laughed at that.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Witness when he was on the stand.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Race comes into play because I do think there's a
presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned the black
and brown people in this country, where when the jury
comes in, they presume you're guilty, They presume you're dangerous,
and the burden is on you to prove the opposite. Now,
our legal system is actually based on a presumption of innocence.
(09:34):
It's not mister Hinton's burden to prove anything. When he
gets to court. He should have been able to sit
there and be exonerated because the state couldn't incredibly prove
his guilt, but because he's black and there's this presumption
of dangerousness and guilt, it was his burden to prove
to the jury that he didn't commit this crime. And
of course that's a whole different kind of task than
the lawyer that was appointed to represent him was prepared
(09:56):
to take on.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
And so that combination of race.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And poverty really created an environment where he could be
wrongly convicted.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
And it's a huge problem.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
We've now identified over two hundred people who've been exonerated
after being sentenced to death. We have an error rate
in this country that's shocking. For every eight people we've
executed in the United States, we've identified one in this
in personal on death world who's been exonerated and released.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And the truth is we would never tolerate that rate
of error in any other area. If somebody said one
out of eight planes is going to crash on takeoff
and everybody's going to die, nobody would fly. If somebody said, oh,
one out of eight apples has a toxin on it
and if you touch that apple, you're going to die,
we would stop selling apples. But we continue to tolerate
(10:46):
a death penalty with this sort of error rate, and
the victims are people like mister Hinton. You know, if somebody,
if I get in trouble and someone represents me and
my life is imperiled, I want that lawyer to represent
me as if their life was in pair. I want
them to fight for me like they're fighting for themselves.
(11:06):
And that's the kind of lawyer I want to be.
And that's the kind of lawyer that mister Hinton needed
but didn't get. And because he didn't get that, it
costs to nearly thirty years. And I do hope people
understand that this isn't just some rare incident. His case
traumatized these problems in a very powerful way. We say
(11:27):
in our world the capital punishment means them without the
capital get the punishment. I think when people talk about
the death penalty, the threshold question isn't whether people deserve
to die for the crimes they've committed. The threshold question
is do we deserve to kill if we have a
legal system that is so undermined by bias against the poor,
(11:48):
bias against people of color, that's so flawed by errors,
And in my judgment.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
We do not have that kind of system.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
We do not deserve to kill when there are people
like Anthony ray Hinton experiencing what he's experienced in this
country over there over the time he was on death row.
Speaker 6 (12:06):
Wow, that was just so incredibly powerful to understand. The
one and eighth.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
When I was arrested, the officer told me there was
five things that was going to convict me. And he said,
number one, you black. Number two, a white man is
gonna say you shot it. Number three, you're gonna have
a white judge. Number four, you're gonna have a white prosecutor.
(12:32):
The number five you're gonna have an all white jurry.
No way in there did he ever say we have evidence,
we have failure, Prince, we have on our witness, we
got your on camera, or we got someone that gave
us a description. And even to this day, that still
hunts me because this detective knew they didn't need new evidence.
(12:55):
They they had the only evidence they need, and that
is and I was black.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
We've spent.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars on jails
and prisons in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. We
spent hundreds of millions of dollars on more law enforcement resources.
We didn't spend a penny on indigen defense in most
of these jurisdictions, we didn't have that same kind of
increase in spending.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And we could do that.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
I think, you know, for us, and mister Hinton is
now involved in this work. If we made the kind
of investments into dealing with the health needs of a
lot of people who are struggling, I think we could
actually dramatically reduce the problems of crime. We could improve
public safety, we could eliminate some of these horrible crimes.
Most of our policy makers, and you know this, they
(13:44):
go around saying, after you've been raved, after you've been robbed,
after you've been murdered, we're going to really beat up
on the.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Person who committed that crime. That's not an effective strategy.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
We should be saying, what are we going to do
to prevent these kinds of crimes? And that means we
have to invest in health. We have to invest in
making sure people had the basic needs. And I'll use
the drug policies just one small example and I'll stop.
You'll remember the nineteen seventies and eighties, we had politician
from both political parties who were saying that people who
(14:14):
are drug addicted and people who are drug dependent are
criminals who should be punished. And that's when our prison
population went from three hundred thousand in the early seventies
to over two million by the end of the century,
who became the nation with the highest rate of incarceration
in the world. Now, we should have said that people
who are suffering from drug addiction and drug dependency had
a health problem and we need a healthcare response to
(14:37):
that problem. And if we had invested in health care
solutions to addiction and dependency, we would have had all
of these millions of people going to jails in prison.
We could have kept families together, We could have reduced
all of that collateral crime. We wouldn't need to be
hunting drug traffickers in the Caribbean and talking about the
(14:57):
scourge and the threat of that problem, because we would
have been dealing with this problem as a health problem
and be in a very different place. Instead, we have
these record levels of opioid addiction and addiction and drug overdose.
And that's where I feel like we do have the capacity.
The questions do we have the will and I think
if we can match the will with our capacity, we
(15:19):
can completely change.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Our legal system.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I don't think there's anything that we should be bragging
about or even honorable about having the highest rate of
incarceration in the world. That's that statistic, that mark's failure.
When you have to imprison so many people, then you
are failing to use your resources in a way that
build a healthy and just society. And we just have
to connect the will with the capacity, and I think
(15:46):
if we do that, we can make transformational changes in
our society.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
List let me ask a question.
Speaker 7 (15:53):
You were twenty nine years old when you were sent
to death row, Yes, sir, and it was over a
dozen years before you met Brian. How did you survive
during that time?
Speaker 4 (16:09):
Uh? To be honest with you, I survived uh by faith,
and I came to understand, UH, that was nothing I
could do. Uh. I had to somehow find a way
to escape. And I used my mind to believe that
(16:29):
I wasn't in at five I seven n every morning
I had the ability to leave and go wherever I
wanted to go and do whatever I wanted to do.
And then without having that ability to do that, uh,
having mister Stevenson wanted done me no good because I
was in solitary confinement, and solitary confinement is uh meant
(16:50):
to break uh, And so I refused to be broke.
I hadn't committed the crime, and I just knew at
some point in some time, I truly felt that God
was gonna send somebody by just say hey, I'm gonna
look at this case. This man is innocent, and I
held on to my belief. I held on to my
(17:12):
imagination until the real, the real hero came by. He
had assured me that he was gonna get me out,
and I began to use my mind in essential being
free and thought about what I would do once I
was out, and all that's how I survived.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
So mister Hinton, as I think you know, has a
remarkable book about his experience called The Sun Does Shine,
which I'll encourage everyone to buy and read, because it
is absolutely true that the amount of time that he
spent on death row. Alabama's not a state like some
of these states where there are never executions. During the
(17:56):
time he was on death row, fifty five people were executed.
That meant people would be walking by his cell. In
the early years. They would execute people with the electric chair.
So he'd be in his cell and he'd smell the
flesh burning, he'd hear the sound. It was traumatizing. This
was torture, and not everybody, and in fact, most people
(18:18):
wouldn't be able to endure that wouldn't be able to
survive that. It's just easier to give up than to
have hope in such a hopeless place. And what makes
him so remarkable is that he found his hope and
that struggle to hold on too, that was every bit
as challenging as the legal struggle. We had to persuade
(18:38):
a court to grant him relief, which is why, you know,
I think he's someone who absolutely, you.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Know, should be celebrated and admired.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
But it is no small thing to survive an environment
like that in the way that he did it.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Coming up an unlikely friendship on Death Row, Anthony Ray
Hinton on his conversations with the one of a KKK
grand Wizard that broke through generations of hate.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Now back to my legacy.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
There's one particular story that I'm captivated by because as
someone that spent over a decade monitoring the klu Klux
Klan and Neil nazi'san Skinheads under Reverend C. Vivian at
the Center for Democratic Renewal. One of the most unexpected
stories from your time on Death Row is about Henry Hayes.
(19:32):
And for our audience listeners who don't know this, Henry
Hayes's father was a klu klux Klan KKK grand wizard
who ordered him to lynch a nineteen year old black man.
Can you just tell us a little bit about this
unlikely friendship.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
A black man had been found not guilty for kidding
a white police officer in Birmingham, and my father gave
him and two other clansmen to order to go out
and kill the first African Amory male they came across.
And they just happened to come across Michael McDonnell and
they executed him in their own way. And when Henry
(20:15):
came to death Robe or he wouldn't talk, and I
would talk to him and holler over at and he
never would speak anything. But eventually I didn't let that stop.
Now didn't know who he was really because on Death
Rowd you can't see them but man's wide and concrete.
You don't know who next to you. But we began
(20:38):
to talk, and I got a note saying, do you
know who you're talking to every day? And I hollered
out and know whoever? Simply they know? Then they said
that's the plansmen who killed that kid, And so I
asked Henry, of course, and I said, Henry, why you
didn't tell me who you were? And Henry didn't respond.
(20:58):
But I had to ask myself more important question did
it matter? And once I asked myself did it matter?
The answer was no. He still deserved compassion, He still
deserved it love like any other. And so I began
to talk to him, and so Henry would call me Ray.
We talk every day, and I was asking Henry coursetion, like, Henry,
(21:22):
do they teach you to hate in school? This is
something your mom and dad talked to you. I wanted
to know, I really did, and he would tell me,
and I thought about what my mother told She said,
no matter what one does in life, they still deserve compassion.
And she would always say, boy, you always making me mad,
(21:43):
and I still love you, and you're always doing something
that God don't like, and he still loved you. So
I want you to have the same compassion for someone else.
And Hearry fit that mold and so I wanted to
show Henry that although we was born different color, we
still was brothers in Christ. And so I allowed Henry
to say what he wants. And I know this over
(22:05):
the course of the year by just being who I was.
I didn't try to talk down to him. I didn't
try to tell him anything that he said was wrong.
I wanted him to finally figure that out for himself.
And over the course of fourteen years we became friends.
And the reason I can say we became friend I
(22:25):
never will forget. One day on the visiting yard, his
father came the sin and he begged for me to
come to his table, and I got up, and you
weren't supposed to get up, but I got up and
went over to his table. And then he said, then
I want you to meet my friend Ray. And when
he introduced me to his father as his friend, I
(22:47):
knew then that something had changed in it, because he
probably never had said a black person was his friend.
And I put my hand out to shake his father hand,
but his father wouldn't shake my hand. He took my
hand down and I went back to my table, and
my visit asked me. He said, what was it that
all about? And I said progress. It's so. When we
(23:09):
left the visiting yard, I looked at him may and
I said, Henry, what's wrong? And he wouldn't save us.
I said, Henry, what's wrong? He said nothing. I said, Henry,
come on, man, tell me what's wrong. And he said, well,
my father said, as long as he come to see me,
I am never to invite a nigger to his tape.
(23:31):
And I said, Henry, that's your father cancer. If your
father want to die with that cancer called hey, let
him do it. But you don't have to, I said, Henry.
For the first time in your life, you are where
you can make your own decision. Who you talk to,
how long you talk to him, who you want to
be friends with, that's up to you. Now. Your father
can't tell you that. Your mother can't take it. And
(23:54):
we got back to the sailing and he went in
his ceiling. We lived bite chum and we talked for
the rest of us and I said, Henry, I want
you to know that God created you in his own image.
He created you the way that he wanted you to be,
and he created me who he wanted me to be.
I said, Henry. I have never stole from him and
(24:15):
never robbed, he never did anything. I don't know, why
do you hate me? And Henry respond was I don't
even know you. And I said, Henry, that's my point, exactor,
you don't even know me to hate man. And from
then on we just became talking every day, became friends
as best she could. On death row and his family
(24:39):
died out older of course of fifteen years, and he
actually one could I sit with him and it wasn't
granted his wish and I sit with him a little
bit doing to the day of the execution. But what
got me was his last words. And his last words
was all of my life. I was brought up to hate.
(25:00):
Every people that I was brought up to hate. For
the last fifteen years have shown me nothing but look
and tonight, els, I lead this work, I lead this world.
I'm knowing what real love feel like. And they executed
my friend Henry, and I am convince that America ever
(25:20):
want to do away with hate. We got the party
be willing to talk to each other and be willing
to listen to each other. But I gets it, America
are freight to have that opening on this conversation like
Henry and I did.
Speaker 7 (25:36):
Wow, mister Henson, your mother believed in your innocence and
visited you every single month until the day she died
in two thousand and two. What's one thing your mother
taught you that kept you going during your darkest moments?
Speaker 4 (25:58):
You know what? My mother was one of those that
she knew her children somehow. My mother could put twelve
cookies in a jar and she would tell all us,
(26:18):
don't touch. But she come home and she count those
cookies and one was missing. She knew exact just one
of the old children got that cooking. And that because
I say today to young people, if PAMs is really
paying attention, they know you better they could think they are.
And my mom not one time asked me did I
(26:41):
do it? She looked at me and she said, I
know you didn't do this and that because of the
way she brought me up. That's the way I grew
up without a father, But I didn't grow up because
he was absent. Ah. My father worked in a coal
mine and a rock fell on him and he lost
his mind. And my father was a mental institution and
the rest of them since I was four years old.
(27:04):
But I didn't fear no man more than I feared
my mother. My mom just knew that one day I
could come home. And my mom used to ask me
every every day, every day she come or she would say,
when are you coming home? And to be honest with you,
(27:26):
I would have to lie to my mom. And I
was some moment they working on it, and soon and
that soon never did get there and before she passed away,
and I have to live with that every day. But
I know my mom passed knowing that her baby boy.
(27:46):
I'm the baby of ten, five boys and five girls,
and with every five in my bean, I know my
mom passed knowing that I was coming home, knowing that
I was innocent and sold. That cares me every day,
and every day I leave home with the thought of
(28:06):
making my mom proud. What can I do to make
my mom even proud of me? And if that means
falling down, getting up and saying, hey, I'm sorry for
falling down, then we have a problem saying it. And
I just want to say that I had the best
loved in the world and my mom taught me so
(28:26):
much that to this day I'm still living off and
I believe with every friv of my bean, I'm leaving
off my mother prayer for me. Wow.
Speaker 6 (28:37):
She sounds like just an incredible force for humanity. April third,
twenty fifteen. Good Friday, of course for our listeners and
our viewers. You walked out of Jefferson County Jail at
nine thirty in the morning. You said that being released
at the age of fifty eight, if I'm not mistaken,
was like walking out into another planet. Can you just
(28:58):
help us understand that? And what is the hardest adjustment?
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Well, you know, I tell people it was. It was
good and bitter. The good was I was finally out.
The bad part to me was my mother wasn't there
to see her baby boy or come home. But we
did the interview and missus Stevenson had told my best
(29:23):
friend Leicester to uh take me to his home, but
I wanted to go and see where they had buried
my mother. And the two of us got in his
car and I put on the seat belt and asked
we was going down the road? This white lady said
in one tenth for a mile to and right and
(29:44):
the buildings, which I said, what the hell? And I
was afraid to look back at and I was pointing
back in the back telling him that a white lady
was in the back seat, and he was laughing and
I can't understand what he laughing about. And I'm saying,
white lady like that. And when you couldn't take it
(30:07):
no more, he pulled over. He said, there's no white
lady back else. She in here, And I said, how
the hell she get in now? And he went to
telling me about GPS's and all of that, and she
would would tell him that cookies Ralph for faster rock take.
You realize I'm being locked up thirty years and I
(30:30):
don't know nothing about model technology. I don't know anything
about your changes of the world and what's going on.
I'm taking each minute, five minute trying your just trying
to learn. And my focus was to be honest with you.
Where do I live? What do I get a job?
What do I I get closed? Because I was set
(30:52):
as say say free, but I was set free with nothing.
I didn't have a place to live. I didn't have
a place to call home or anything. But through it
all all I was able to live with my best
friend and ever I said, Missus Steveson was never spot
and have been there from the time I will release.
(31:15):
And before I got released, and I begin to say, hey,
I don't know how I'm gonna make it, if life
is going to be this, it worked out, and I
am so thankful to be where I am today. And
I didn't give up, and I'm again I had hope
that one day it would get better. And I can
truse to say that it out.
Speaker 6 (31:36):
You said something that we all loved, and it was
the fact that you go outside every night and look
at the stars in the moon because you hadn't seen
them for years. And you still to this day walk
in the rain, having thirty or nearly thirty years stolen
from you. You could be bitter and resentful, but you
are just a bundle of love. You're a bundle of wisdom,
(31:57):
of energy, of just gratitude. How do you have so
much gratitude in your heart right now?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
Well, you know, being locked up for thirty years, you
don't realize. There's an old say, you don't realize what
you had until you lose it. And I had lost
my freedom, and I would sit there and look lay
in the bed and look up and see nothing but country.
And then I realized when I was free, I never
(32:26):
did look up and see the stars of the moon,
and how much I wish I had seen the stars
in the moon because God put one of the most
beautiful pictures that Lambrandt Percossa could never have painted. And
I try to tell people, never take it for gregg.
Always look up, just see the beautiful stars dreaming and
(32:50):
flitzing wash the moon. And so when I came home,
I made a promise to myself that every night I
would go out and watch the stars in the moon
and look up and thank God for putting that beautiful
picture up there so I could see it. Never take
anything for granted. All life is not promised. Tomorrow could
(33:11):
be the last day. So enjoy the day, but enjoy
it in the way that you enjoy it with somebody
that makes someone else feel just as good as you feel.
And every day I try to come here at Eji,
I hope that I can say something to someone and
make them smile, because I believe that we need to
smile more. We need to learn how to embrace one another,
(33:35):
love one another, and treat each other with the most respect.
And that's what I try to do every day of
my life. I'm not worried about what happened. I'm trying
to live for today and hopefully if I see fit
God to see fit for me to live tomorrow. I
want to put a smile on whoever face I come
in contact with.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Well, you've certainly done that today, and for all of
our listeners, I wish for you, and you're outside again
at night and you're looking at the stars and the moon,
that you also remember that, Anthony Hinton, probably, if not
at that moment, at some point that night, we'll be
joining you in that moment of awe and gratefulness.
Speaker 6 (34:15):
If you're looking for stories that move you, insights that
shift you, in conversations that stay deeply within you, do
us a favor, and do yourself a favor and hit
the subscribe button right now. It's the best way to
support this podcast and support your journey. New episodes drop
every week.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Now. Back to My.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Legacy, Brian.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
You spent your career in court rooms, winning legal battles,
but then you decide to build the Legacy Museum and
the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. What was it
that made you realize that the fight for justice had
to expand beyond the courts.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Well, I think it was that realization that we were
moving into an era where our courts were retreating from
a full comitment to the rule of law. If you
study Reconstruction, what happened after the Civil War. We created
laws that should have created a different future for formerly
enslaved people. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection. The fifteenth
Amendment guaranteed the right to vote, and during that twelve
(35:15):
year period, eighty percent of the black people eligible to
vote registered and voted. We send people to Congress, we
opened black colleges. It's when we built most of the
black churches that exist in this country. We made a
commitment to family. There were thriving communities in Tulsa and
places Greenwood and all these places around the country. And
then our courts retreated from a commitment to the rule
(35:37):
of law, and the US Supreme Court decided to favor
states rights over constitutional rights. We gave in to the
demands of racial hierarchy and white supremacy over the demands
of equal protection and the right to vote. And that's
what created that century of a challenge. And I sensed
(35:59):
something like that happening again a decade ago, when the
Court stopped responding to evidence of innocence. When we were
losing cases of clear intentional racial bias and jury selection,
when evidence of innocence was being ignored, it just became
clear to me that we had to keep doing that
legal work, but we were going to have to get
outside the court room and begin doing this narrative work.
(36:21):
And I do think that is the defining struggle for
this era, that we are now in a narrative battle
in this country and across the globe. There are people
who are pushing the politics of fear and anger. They
know that when people allow themselves to be governed by
fear and anger, they'll start tolerating things you should never tolerate.
(36:43):
They know that if you allow us have to be
governed by fear and anger, people will accept things that
are unacceptable. When you look at human history, the worst
moments in the twentieth centuries when countries gave in to
the politics of fear and anger. That's what happened in Europe,
in Germany in the nineteen thirties and forties, is what
happened in Rwanda in the early nineteen nineties, where neighbors
allowed themselves to be so swept up with fear and
(37:04):
anger that they started slaughtering their other neighbors, and it
will happen anywhere when we give into that. And so
for me, it became necessary to kind of combat that
in this narrative struggle. And at the heart of that
struggle in America at least, is our continuing challenge to
overcome the legacy of racial inequality, racial injustice. It doesn't
(37:26):
matter where you live in the Northwest, the southeast, north, midwest,
New England. If you live in America, you live in
a space where there's a long history of racial inequality.
And I believe that history has created toxins pollution in
the air that we all breathe in, and it keeps
us from being fully healthy. And it's largely in the
air because we haven't committed to talking about to challenging
(37:48):
that narrative in the way that we need to. And
I think that's what we must do in this moment.
I don't blame past generations. When you're enslaved, you have
to focus on freedom. When you're being terrorized by lynching violence,
you have to focus on security. In Montgomery the nineteen fifties,
when you're disenfranchised and excluded, you have to focus on
civil rights. But in twenty twenty five, we now have
(38:11):
the capacity, we have the opportunity, and I believe we
have the obligation to confront this narrative, to change this history,
to commit to a period of truth and justice, truth
and repair, truth and redemption, truth and restoration.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
That's what we haven't done.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
In South Africa after the collapse of apartheid, they committed
to a process where the victims of apartheid could give
voice to their harm, where the perpetrators could give voice
to their regret. You go to Berlin, you see a
city that's reckoned with the history of the Holocaust. Every
two hundred meters there's a monument, a memorial, a stone
that the National Memorial, the Memorial to Victims of the Holocaust,
(38:49):
is in the center of the city. There are no
atal fitnor statues in Berlin. There are no monuments of
memorials to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And when I
looked at the landscape of Montgomery, this is the city
that it has fifty nine markers and monuments through the Confederacy,
And when I moved here in the nineteen eighties, you
couldn't find the word slave, slavery and slaveman anywhere in
the public landscape. Our three largest high schools were named
(39:11):
after Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Sidney Lanier are all
Confederate leaders, and we didn't acknowledge the history of the
Civil rights terror and so.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
We felt like that had to change.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
So we've done a lot of scholarship, and then we
felt like we needed to create cultural institutions that help
people reckon with the truth. I think the thing about
truth and justice, truth and repair, truth and redemption, those
things are sequential. You've got to have the truth part
before you can get to the beautiful our words. And
when you skip the truth and you just try to
do repair and remedy, it doesn't work. So we believe
(39:44):
we have to create these truth telling spaces. When I
came back from South Africa in Berlin, I couldn't think
of cultural institutions that were klent talking honestly about the
legacy of slavery or lynching. And that was the reason
why we created these spaces. And I'm excited. I manered
because people are coming and we're getting amazing feedback. And
this truth telling, I believe is what our generation must
(40:08):
commit to create the world that we want to create.
I tell people the purpose of our museum and our
memorial and our new sculpture park. The purpose is to
create a world where the children of our children are
not going to be presumed dangerous or guilty because they
their color. I want to create a world where no
one can go through what mister Hinton had to go through.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
We have to create a.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
World where all kinds of people are liberated from the
biggotree that comes when we accept these narratives of racial inequality.
And it's both black and white people. You know, the
white kids who were taught that they're better than everybody
else because they're white. They were basically taught that they
could only love a certain kind of person. They couldn't
love anybody and everybody. They could only have a certain
kind of narrow existence. And I think that's cruel. We
(40:50):
want to break that down. But to do that, I
do think we have to go through this truth telling
process people. So it's hard, it's challenging, it's uncomfortable.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
And I get it.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
But we can't make the truth comfortable just so people
will embrace. We've got to make it what it is.
And the reality is is that it's those uncomfortable truths
that inspire us to do the great things. It was
never comfortable to be off the buses for three hundred
and eighty one days. It was not comfortable to walk
from Selma to Montgomery. Nothing about justice and change and
progress in this country that's been meaningful has ever been comfortable, convenient,
(41:24):
or easy. And so that's what we want people to
embrace if they're going to be part of this struggle.
And so, yeah, I'm really proud that we now have
a landscape that I hope can really advance this era
of truth and justice that I believe our nation desperately needs.
Speaker 5 (41:39):
It's not about collective guilt, it's about collective responsibility.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
I tell people all the time that we don't talk
about slavery and lynching and segregation because we want to
punish America. We talk about these things because we want
to liberate America. I believe something better is waiting for us.
I think that there's something that feels more light freedom,
more like justice, more like equality and community, and.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
It's waiting for us.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
But we can't get there if we don't have the
courage to turn back and deal with these burdens that
are holding us back, this history that is holding us back.
Speaker 6 (42:11):
Anthea's want just to transition to you for a moments.
Your story, of course is at the Legacy Museum, and
now we all know that you're this remarkable community educator
traveling the country to speak about your experiences, and of
course that also advocate against the death penalty. So thank
you for that. When you stand in front of audiences,
especially young audiences, and share what happened to you, what's
(42:32):
the one thing you want them to especially remember.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
I won't be able to remember what I went through,
and I want them to realize that they have the
power to change it. Well, no one else could go
through what I went through. And I try my bis
to encourage them to get out and vote. If they're
not a registered voter, get out and vote and learn
(42:58):
to run for office. And I think if we can
get young people motivated to pick up politics and be
in it for the right reason, then I believe that
hope that I have, mister Stevenson, have you have? Our
young people is yearning to do things great. And I'm
(43:22):
one of those who encouraged those young people to don't
sit back, don't just talk, get out and do. And
every time I leave a university or somewhere where I
had the privious to talk to young people I love.
Three months, four months, six months later, I get an
email or letter saying, mister Hinton, I listened to you.
(43:45):
I decided that I'm going to law school and become
a lawyer and fight. This is what makes me get
up every morning. Be hoped for that our young people
is yearning to be great, and I hope that I
can just nudge them a little bit oh to be
that great. Wow.
Speaker 7 (44:03):
Amazing Brian and your ted talk that has been viewed
over nine million times. You said each of us is
more than the worst thing that we've ever done. After
representing over one hundred and forty people on death Row,
what have they taught you about what's possible when we
(44:24):
see people's full humanity.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Well, it's been the great joy of my life. It's
been a real privilege.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
People don't think, you know, the choice I made was
a particularly smart one because we don't you know, you
don't make a lot of money and all of that.
But I feel like I've been so privileged to stand
next to people who have been condemned, who have been marginalized,
who are disfavored, who are hated, Because what I've learned
is that when you stand next to someone who's hated
(44:52):
and disfavored and condemned, you can sometimes harness the power
of grace, the power of mercy, and really do some
being beautiful. And I now believe, more than I've ever believed,
that we are all more than the worst thing we've
ever done. I think if someone tells a lie, they're
not just a liar. I think if someone takes something,
they're not just a thief. I think even if you
(45:13):
kill someone.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
You're not just a killer. And we're required to know
the other things you are before we judge you.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
And when you have that orientation, the most beautiful thing
that comes from that is that you're able to avoid hate.
You're able to avoid the trap of hating someone because
they hate you. The burden that comes with filling your
heart with all of this violence and bigotry. That's the
(45:42):
power for me of doing the work that I get
to do. And then, you know, you get to meet
someone like an Anthony ray Hinton, someone whose remarkable heart
and character and spirit is as glorious as reflective of
God's power and grace and mercy as any place you
could go. You could go to all kinds of places
(46:02):
in the world. You go around people with a lot
of money, a lot of resources, people who have this
or that, and you might not find anything precious and
rare and beautiful like the soul of this man. And
so I feel really, really privileged. And you know, we
want these cases banning mandatory life sentences for children. And
the great privilege I have every day now at Eji
(46:24):
is that a lot of those folks who were told
they were going to die in prison when they were
children are now out and they're working here. So I
can walk down the hall and see somebody who was
supposed to die in prison, and the office doing intakes.
I can get on the shuttle buses where a couple
of my clients who were told they were going to
die in prison are now driving the shuttle bus. We've
got people working in the museum who were sentence to
(46:46):
life imprisonment without parole.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
I tell people, I haven't made a lot of money,
but I've made more than money.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Couldn't ever buy. And being able to see what justice
can create in the lives of people who've been treated unjusted.
Speaker 4 (46:58):
Beautiful.
Speaker 6 (47:00):
Well, Brian Anthony, thank you on our collective behalf, and
thank you on behalf of humanity for this incredibly powerful conversation.
We are inspired by your love, your conviction, your passion,
your energy. What began as a letter from a death
row inmate became a sixteen year fight for justice was
started obviously just as a regular lawyer client relationship has
(47:24):
become a bond of friendship, love and admiration and just
true partnership between the two of you. We've also been
educated on the fact that the rate of error for
death row inmates is one and eight, the quote that
those without the capital often get the punishments. But you've
also inspired us to look at the stars in the
moon every evening, to go walk and dance in the rain,
(47:47):
and never take for granted those things that we have
the ability to enjoy in life. Thank you for showing
us what's possible when somebody refuses to accept injustice. And
both of you thank you for being shining examples people
who refuse to live in despair but instead live with
the hope.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
A lot of gratitude to you both. Thank you, it's
great to be with you.
Speaker 7 (48:10):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so very much.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
If you enjoyed today's conversation, subscribe, share, and follow us
on at my Legacy Movement on social media and YouTube.
New episodes drop every Tuesday, with bonus content every Thursday.
At its core, this podcast honors doctor Kin's vision of
the beloved community and the power of connection. A Legacy
(48:37):
Plus Studio production distributed by iHeartMedia creator and executive producer
Suzanne Hayward Come executive producer Lisa Lyle. Listen on the
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Craig Kielburger
Marc Kielburger
Martin Luther King III
Arndrea Waters King
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