The Movement is Not Dead: Bryan Stevenson on 2020, Backlash, and What Comes Next

The murder of George Floyd and the protests of 2020 sparked a nationwide movement for racial justice and reckoning. Just a few years later, many of those hard-won conversations are being rolled back. Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, joins Katie to ask: is the movement truly over, or are we now in the midst of the harder, but essential, struggle to make it endure? He shares why learning is itself an act of resistance, what each of us can do to push back against false narratives, and how history can inspire courage for the battles ahead.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
If in this moment of crisis, in this moment of
conflict and controversy, in this moment where democracy is being threatened,
we remain silent. I don't think it's just apathetic. I
don't think it's just cowardly. I think it's dishonorable. And
So if we are Americans committed to a future, if
we are Americans who believe in freedom, of quality and justice,

(00:24):
we have to now speak out. We have to do things,
and we have to be prepared. That may mean things
get uncomfortable, but we have behind us generations who did
those uncomfortable things to make this nation the nation that
it is in hopes that we would continue that struggle.
And so that's what I'm embracing in this moment.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Curic, and this is next question.
I've probably interviewed thousands of people over the years, but
whenever anyone asked me who my favorite is, I don't
even have to think about it. It's Brian Stephen. He
has an extraordinary presence in a way of taking the
most painful and confounding issues we face as a country

(01:07):
and helping us see them with clarity, perspective, and even
a sense of hope. Brian is the founder of the
Equal Justice Initiative, where he has spent decades taking on
some of the hardest work imaginable, challenging racial injustice, mass incarceration,
and the death penalty. His work has given voice and
dignity to people who are too often forgotten. It also

(01:30):
inspired the creation of the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama,
which forced us to confront our history honestly while pointing
us toward healing and hope. And of course, his best
selling memoir Jess Mercy, has become a touchstone for so
many people around the world. We really covered a lot
of ground in this conversation. We talked about the troubling

(01:54):
things we're seen in this country right now, the progress
that's been made or being reversed, the regressions that are
just as real, and where we go from here. I
hope you enjoy our time together as much as I did.
Brian Stevenson. I am so thrilled to have you here.
Thank you so much for coming by.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
It's good to be with you.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
And there's so many things I want to talk to
you about, because I can't tell you how many times
I've thought about you and how you might be reacting
to a whole host of things that are happening in
this country under the Trump administration. I also think back
on when I really got to know you and what

(02:39):
the environment was in this country, and that was around
twenty eighteen, I think, and there was a sense then
that this country might be finally coming to terms with
its past and confronting racial injustice head on. And now,

(03:03):
just what seven years later, we're seeing a retreat and
even a reversal, not only from policy issues like DEI
and police reform, but from even acknowledging our country's history
of systemic racism. I have one question for you, Brian,

(03:25):
what the hell is going on? And I really have
been looking forward to talking to you and almost having
a therapy session with you, if you will well, I.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Think your question frames the moment we're in really perfectly.
Throughout most of American history, we have been silent about
the harms of our history, about all of the damage
that was done, about the false narratives that we embraced
to justify the displacement of millions of Native people when

(03:59):
Europeans arrived. You know, there were millions of indigenous peoples
here before Europeans arrived, we wanted their land, We wanted
this and so even though we created a constitution that
talked about equality and liberty and justice for all, we
didn't apply those concepts to Native people. We instead created
this narrative of racial difference. And I think that was

(04:22):
like an infection that took root in America and behind
that kind of misguided narrative where we said that Native
people are savages. Indigenous peoples are not like the rest
of us, so we don't have to extend to them
a quality liberty and justice, and we can force them
off their land, and we can reduce their population, we

(04:43):
can do all of these terrible things. That same narrative
was used to justify two hundred and forty six years
of slavery. And I continue to believe that the great
evil of slavery wasn't the forced labor, the bondage, the violence,
the cruelty that was horrific. I think the greatest evil
of slavery was the narrative that was created to justify enslavement.

(05:05):
Because people who enslaved other people didn't want to think
of themselves as immoral or indecent or unchristian. And how
do you think of yourself as a decent person when
you see mothers being pulled away from their screaming children,
knowing those mothers will never see those children again because
you chose to sell them. How do you think of
yourself as decent when you see the cruelty and the violence. Well,

(05:26):
you need a narrative, and we created a false narrative
that black people aren't as good as white people, that
black people are less capable, less worthy, less human, less evolved,
and that narrative of racial difference was the great evil
of slavery in America, and it outlasted the Civil War.
The North wan the Civil War, but the South wan

(05:48):
the narrative war. Because after the Civil War, even our
commitment to use law to protect formally enslaved people failed.
The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection to formally enslaved people,
the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote, were
quickly abandoned by our US Supreme Court and other court
legal institutions who sided with states' rights over the US Constitution.

(06:14):
And that's what led to that century of violence and lynching.
It's what led to Jim Crow, It's what led to
racial segregation. It led to the silence about this history
and our textbooks and schools. It led to bias against
other immigrant groups when they came to this country. Asian people,
even ethnic minorities like the Irish and the Italians were

(06:37):
initially targeted until they adopted whiteness or adopted an identity
that wasn't other, wasn't racially different. And that was our
history and continued to be our history. And I think
the consequences of that are really painful. We did horrific
things to black and brown people. Millions of black people

(06:59):
had to flee their homes in the first half of
the twentieth century because of terror of violence that raged
uncontrolled throughout the American South. They went to Chicago and
Cleveland and Detroit and Los Angeles and Oakland, not as
immigrants looking for new economic opportunities, but as refugees and
exiles from terror of violence in the American South. And
they weren't entirely welcome in those places, and they were

(07:22):
put in what you could call the equivalent of a
refugee camp. And we see the footprints of those camps
in South Side of Chicago and East Saint Louis and
poor neighborhoods across the urban north and West. They abandoned
lands that they owned, and therefore were denied the opportunity
to create wealth for their children and their grandchildren. And
we have a wealth gap in America today that is

(07:43):
rooted in the displacement of millions of black families who
could have used their land to create wealth, but were
denied that because we didn't commit to their constitutional rights.
In the fifties and sixties, you began to see some
organizing to push back against that, and the heroic Civil
rights movement tore down the legal architecture of racial segregation,

(08:05):
of that narrative of racial difference, but the idea was
still with us, the practice was still with us.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
The cultural conditioning.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
The cultural conditioning. That's exactly right, and so for the
last sixty and seventy years we've been continuing to experience
those harms. And when women and people of color got
into the workforce, got into places they had historically been excluded,
and they outperform their white male counterparts, they should have

(08:35):
been promoted, they should have been celebrated. But because of
these narratives, we didn't trust women and people of color
to have the leadership positions they deserve because they were
more skilled, and we denied them those opportunities, and so
then we began to realize that that wasn't right, that
wasn't fair, and that was the genesis behind DEI. That's

(08:56):
when we started to say, oh, you know what wrong
to not put the most skilled person in the position
of leadership just because she's a woman, or because this
person is black or brown. And that was an effort
to begin repairing the harm that is connected to this
narrative of racial difference.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
But I think Brian, a lot of people thought, well,
don't put the less skilled person just because they are
a minority in that position. I think that's how so
many people interpreted that's right.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
DEI efforts, that's right, And I think we have to
fault the corporate bodies and the institutions that started implementing
these policies because what they should have said is we
have done wrong. We've had lots of women in our workforce,
We've had lots of people of color in our workforce
who were more skilled, and yet they were passed over

(09:51):
for promotion. They weren't given leadership opportunities because of their race,
because of their gender. We made that mistake, we did
something wrong, and now to repair that by committing to
correcting that cultural conditioning. But they didn't want to admit
that they had done things in a bad way. They
didn't want to say we backed it poorly. I got

(10:13):
on a plane recently and I was sitting next to
someone and the pilot came on. The pilot was a woman,
the co pilot was a black man. And the person
sitting next to me turned to me and said, oh,
my god, did you see who the pilot and co
pilot is? And I said I did. He said, Wow,
this is going to be a really scary flight. You know,
they're not skilled and qualified to fly this plane.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Come on, someone said that to you.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, yes, that's exactly right. What And I said to him,
I said, oh, sir, when I saw that woman and
I saw that pilot, I actually relaxed because I knew
that they were likely more skilled than most other pilots,
because for an airline to give them this opportunity, they
had to outperform their counterpoints. That's been my experience is

(10:58):
that you actually have to do a little bit better
when you're a person of color, when you're a woman,
and so I actually feel more comfortable than I would
ordinarily feel.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
And what did he say?

Speaker 1 (11:08):
He just looked at me. He said, well, I never
thought about it like that. But that is the consequence
of corporate institutions not saying we failed, we did something wrong,
we did discriminate, we did not give the most skilled
person the job because of their gender and their race,
and now we're going to commit to doing that. And
so instead of it being presented as a gimme to unqualified,

(11:34):
less skilled people because of their race and gender, it
was actually a remedy for harm that was done to
people because of their race and gender. And we don't
like owning up to the mistakes we made. And that's
the same thinking that was shaping other cultural institutions, educational bodies.
Textbook writers should have said, we failed, we did something

(11:57):
wrong by not talking honestly the history of America, and
now we're going to try to correct that by having
more comprehensive, more inclusive language and text and our books.
We've disfavored people because of their race and gender. We
skipped that part and we embraced this moment of response
without acknowledging the harm. Twenty twenty was a very powerful

(12:20):
example of that. You saw police violence manifesting in ways
it made it undeniable that there's a problem. When ab
at Arbury was shot while jogging, when Breonna Taylor was killed,
when George Floyd was killed, people were saying, we've got
to do something about this. And I wanted police departments
to say, you're right, We've got a lot of officers

(12:41):
that presume people are dangerous and guilty because of their race,
because of their color. You're right, we need to fix
a problem we have presuming dangerous and gilt based on race.
But instead we just talked about, you know, we're going
to do this, We're going to do that. And then
as the cultural environment shifted, there was this big push
against it, and people thought people who didn't deserve things

(13:03):
were getting things that they don't deserve, when in fact
we were addressing long standing problems that have long existed.
I went to Harvard Law School. I've got a lot
of degrees and awards. I've won cases at the US
Supreme Court, and I've been in courtrooms representing clients, getting
there early, sitting at defend's council's table where the judge

(13:25):
will walk in and immediately get mad at me. The
judge will look at me and say, hey, hey, you
get back out there in the hallway. I don't want
any defendant sitting in my courtroom without their lawyer, and
I have to stand up and say, well, I'm sorry,
your honor, I am the lawyer. I didn't introduce myself.
My name is Brian Stevenson. I have to try to
de escalate this situation, and I was doing that recently.

(13:47):
I was in a courtroom in the Midwest and the
judge started laughing, but it wasn't an apologetic laugh and
it kind of angered me. And the prosecutor started laughing.
They thought it was so funny, and I was sitting
They're getting angry, and then I thought, oh no, Brian,
you can't get angry. You need to smile. You may
need to laugh. And I felt that way because my

(14:09):
client was not going to be able to leave that county.
I was able to leave that county and never come
back based on the way I was treated if I
chose to do that, but my client was going to
have to stay there. So when they were laughing, I
smiled and then I eventually chuckled. Client came in. We
did the hearing, but I remember sitting in my car
after that hearing, thinking, Wow, here I am this middle

(14:30):
aged black man. I'm in my best suit actually argue
the case of the Supreme Court that we were trying
to implement. I got all of these degrees and awards,
and I'm still required to laugh at my own humiliation
to do justice for my client. That's not right. That's
not fair. And I'm getting old enough to know that.
When you have to constantly navigate presumptions of dangerousness and

(14:52):
guilt because of your color, when you have to tell
your children how to survive or police encounter, what to
do and what not to do, how they can't do
the things that their white friends can do because they're
going to be burdened with this presumption. When you have
to constantly navigate this world, it's exhausting. And I want
something better. I want something better for everybody. And that's

(15:13):
why the commitment to truth telling, the commitment to building
institutions that help us understand the harms of history, is
such a priority. It's why we were making necessary progress
in twenty eighteen, and I think some people again misinterpreted it.
You know, we opened our sites and I talk a

(15:34):
lot about this, and I think sometimes when people hear
me talking about slavery and lynching and segregation, they think
I want to punish America for this history. Have no
interest in punishment. My interest is liberation. My interest is
getting us to get to the point where we are
unburdened by this history. I want the children of my

(15:56):
grandchildren and their children to be born into ay where
they or not presumed dangerous or guilty because of their race.
I want us to get to the point where we're
not breathing in the pollution created by this long history
of racial injustice that we just haven't addressed and so
it's still with us. I want us to get past
that fear that is everywhere because we have these unaddressed

(16:19):
problems created by our history.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Hi. Everyone, it's me Katie Couric. You know, lately, I've
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(16:54):
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happier and healthier. Addressing these problems, though, Brian, for some Americans,

(17:21):
I think sent them into this shame spiral and a
feeling that, hey, this was a long time ago and
this has nothing to do with me. So I think
there was a shame element that people felt was imposed
on them, that they rejected, and then I think that

(17:44):
morphed into demonizing these efforts, this acknowledgment and a deeper
understanding about our past with the word woke, and that
has become obviously not even a talk whistle, but a
loud signal that the pendulum had simply swung too far.

(18:08):
And I'm curious to get your thoughts on that the
rejection or discomfort people felt, and if there were instances
where this evolution and this deeper understanding could have been
less jarring or offensive for people. I know that's a

(18:30):
strange question because it was neither jarring nor offensive for me,
and I am grateful for everything that I've learned and experienced,
But I'm just thinking about what I've heard people say yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
I think what was jarring for people is that throughout
most of our history people have never really had to
encounter this. But it's also not unprecedented. In the nineteenth century,
when abolitionists began saying slavery is moral, it is unacceptable,
it has to end. In the regions of this country

(19:07):
where the whole economic infrastructure was built on enslavement and
the forced labor of people who had been abducted and kidnapped,
that was a moment of crisis, and so they started
banning books on abolition. They made it illegal for enslaved
people to be in possession of literature about abolition. Even

(19:28):
white people in the South could be arrested and prosecuted
if they were in possession of these materials. They just
could not accept a world where the basic economic infrastructure
would be attacked, and then with that led to war.
When we got on the other side of that, people
in Congress passed all of these laws, civil rights laws.
There was a Ku Klux Klan Act that was passed

(19:50):
to protect formerly enslaved people from mob violence and lynching violence.
But it was again a narrative. People were rejecting and
instead of saying we reject all of the bigoted thinking
that supported enslavement. People tried to hold on to it,
and they were rewarded by retreating from those laws, and
so a new narrative emerged that you know, nothing that

(20:14):
bad was done by the Confederacy who rebelled against this country.
The insurrectionists who led that weren't bad people. It wasn't treason,
it was something else. And that loss caused narrative, and
those people were empowered, and then we created this codified
racial hierarchy. That same resistance that we're seeing was also

(20:35):
on display in the nineteen fifties and sixties when black
people in Montgomery said it's not right that we have
to give up our seats on buses to white people
because we're black, And they said it's not right that
we don't get to vote in this country when we
are citizens and have had that right for one hundred years,
and they started marching and engaging in non violent protests.

(20:58):
There was a sense that, oh, this is a crisis.
We've got to do everything we can to stop this,
and ultimately those voices of change, the abolitionists during the
time of slavery, those who fought against lynching, those who
fought against racial segregation in Jim Crow prevailed, and I
want to say right here we will prevail again in

(21:19):
this moment of resistance. But right now we're in the
heat of the battle. Those same voices that are saying, oh,
you can't talk about slavery, you can't talk about lynching,
you can't talk about segregation, are, in my judgment, replicating
the behaviors of people in power that go all the
way back to the time of enslaving. It's no different

(21:40):
than those who enslaved other people saying no, we can't
have abolitionism, we can't have an end to slavery. It's
no different than those who did nothing. When white mobs
formed outside of churches and schools, in jails and pulled
people out and tortured them on the courthouse lawn. That
was lawlessness. It was the opposite of public safety. It
was terrorism that we tolerated for decades. When people said

(22:05):
we're not going to ride these buses, We're going to
boycott the buses. They were saying, no, you can't do that,
and they use threats and violence. They arrested people. Doctor
King was arrested for driving thirty miles an hour in
a twenty five mile an hour zone. This is nineteen
fifty six. He's a young twenty some year old, twenty
six year old preacher. Then they started arresting people because
they were saying this is wrong. Those civil rights protesters

(22:28):
like John Lewis were getting arrested and beaten. That was
a violent response to trying to get us where we're
trying to go. So I think we have to understand
that history as we understand what's been happening over the
last decade. So finally, in twenty fifteen, for the first time,
we create a museum in the Smithsonian Complex that's about

(22:49):
the history of African Americans. And it can't be an
honest museum if it doesn't talk about that period of enslavement,
if it doesn't talk about terror, violence, if it doesn't
talk about pggregation, if it doesn't talk about those hardships.
And then we started seeing other cultural institutions, and then
people started talking about how do we recover, how do

(23:10):
we repair? And I don't think that is inherently jarring,
it's not inherently problematic, But when you've been silent forever,
when you've never had to do it, it can feel
that way, and so I don't think it was a mistake.
I don't think there were errors made. I think we

(23:30):
just didn't help people understand the things that they need
to understand, and we're still in the early stages of that.
I mean, for me, I think about this from a
faith perspective, and I think faith communities have a larger
role to play in this moment than they have embraced.
But in my faith tradition, as a Christian, you can't
come to my church and say I want heaven and

(23:53):
redemption and salvation, but I'm not going to admit to
ever doing anything wrong. I'm not going to acknowledge any sin.
The clergy in my church will lovingly tell you that
it doesn't work like that, that you can't actually experience redemption.
You can't experience all of the beautiful things if you're

(24:13):
unwilling to repent, to confess, and you shouldn't feel bad
about confession. You shouldn't feel bad about repentance because that's
what opens up.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
Your heart and that should feel cleansed.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
You should feel clean. That's how you get to experience
grace and mercy. It's the beautiful transition that allows you
to walk out anew different changed and we haven't done that.
We've denied people in this country that moment of transformation,
and individuals have had it, communities have had it, a

(24:47):
lot of people have had it, and they feel energized
by it. I look at Germany. I just got back
from Berlin two weeks ago. It's a nation that ultimately,
not immediately, but ultimately said we have to repent, we
have to confess, we have to acknowledge that we were
the villain of the twentieth century and we did something horrific.

(25:11):
And when you go to Berlin, you can't go to
two hundred meters without seeing markers and stones and monuments
dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
I know they are everywhere.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Everywhere. They have memorials for Jewish victims, for gay victims,
for the Roma, and for the Centi. And there's this
reckoning with that past. In Germany, every student is required
to study the Holocaust. You can't graduate.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
And I think it's even in elementary school, and.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Even in elementary school. When I was at the Holocaust,
when I saw elementary students coming to that space, and
there are no Adolf Hitler monuments in Berlin. There are
no statutes honoring the Nazis. They're not naming military bases
after the perpetrators of the Holocaust. There's a reckoning and
because of that, we see Germany as an ally. I

(25:59):
encourage people to go or Brilliant, it's a beautiful city.
We see them as someone we can work with, even
though not that long ago they were gripped in this
politics of fear and anger, this narrative of hatred and violence.
But there's been redemption. And I live in a region
and you know, this region where our landscape is still

(26:21):
littered with iconography celebrating the perpetrators of that narrative of
racial difference, of that ideology of white supremacy, of that
hate and violence.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Montgomery, Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
And I think because we haven't reckoned, we're still held back.
And so what I think we have to help people
understand is that you don't have to fear truth telling.
And it's interesting because in most areas of our life,
we know that truth is important in relationships, personal relationships.

(26:54):
You know, in a marital relationship, if you make a mistake,
if you say something you shouldn't say, you hurt your
partner in any kind of way. The only way you
get past that is by talking about it. You have
to say I'm sorry, I didn't realize I made a mistake,
and you have to get to the point where there's forgiveness.
If you show me to people in a loving relationship

(27:16):
for fifty years, I'll show you two people who have
learned how to apologize to one another to get past
the inevitable mistakes and hardships. It's how you build something stronger.
And I do believe that the truth sets you free,
allows you to get to a place. And I am persuaded,
and I think what I and others are trying to do.

(27:36):
I am persuaded there's something better waiting for us in America.
I don't think our best days are behind us. I
think there's something that feels more like freedom, more like equality,
more like justice, more like healthy living, more like a
healthy community, And it's waiting for us. But we won't
get there if we're still burdened and bound by the

(27:58):
history of harm, that we won't let go, that we
won't acknowledge.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Why is it so hard? You know? I agree with
your assessment of Berlin. You look at places like Rwanda.
Why is it so difficult for Americans to acknowledge these
painful chapters? And then there's the other side of the
coin of people who say, Okay, we get it, we

(28:26):
get it, let's move on, which is something that I
hear from people. And how do you balance those two things, Brian?
The need to understand, value, appreciate, accept and learn from
your past mistakes, but also taking that and moving forward

(28:46):
and not focusing on it so much that the moving
forward part is difficult to do.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, well, I do think it's important to understand the
differences between America and most of the places that we
now acknowledge as having gone through transitional justice. In South Africa,
a black majority took over. It was no longer a
country ruled by a white minority, and so you had
a truth and reconciliation process because that black majority realized

(29:15):
it was important to create space for the victims of
apartheid to give voice to their harm. In Rwanda, there
was a military intervention and so the victims of that
genocide became empowered, and so that powerful genocide museum was
something that a new order was able to facilitate. The
Nazis lost the war and because the Nazis lost the

(29:37):
war and the Allies insisted on some confrontation of that history. Eventually,
not immediately because there was resistance to truth telling in
Germany in the nineteen sixties and seventies, but eventually things changed.
But there was a shift in power, and the wrongdoers,
as it were, the people who were directly responsible for

(29:59):
that injury and harm, lost power, and a new regime
came in and it became easier for them to facilitate
it because they disassociated themselves from that prior regime. That
hasn't happened in America. It could have happened after the
Civil War had we made reconstruction work. But because we

(30:19):
retreated from reconstruction and our courts gave in to states' rights,
the very same architects that had tried to preserve slavery
that evolved enslavement, evolved into this world order that looked
very much like slavery. We created constitutions that literally said
they were about white supremacy. We created and mandated racial hierarchy.

(30:42):
And then even after the Civil Rights movement, when we
had a moment in the nineteen sixties to finally transition ourselves,
there was no real denunciation of segregationists. There was no
repudiation of Jim Crow and white supremacy. We didn't distance
ourselves from this that We just tried to accommodate those

(31:04):
who had been resistant. We tried to kind of make
them feel okay, and that was the priority.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
What do you mean accommodate those who had been resistant?

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Well, I think you know. Every Southern legislator in Congress
voted against the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four,
most every Southern voted against the Voting Rights Act. And
we didn't say, how can you represent this country if
you're going to deny the right to vote to US citizens.

(31:35):
We had the Justice Department become the institution in power
to enforce these things, and they were constantly saying, you
can't do that, you can't do that in the seventies
and the eighties and the nineties. But we never made
it so that people felt like it was wrong to
resist implementation of the Voting Rights Act or Civil Rights Act.
My school didn't integrate until a decade after Brown Versus

(31:58):
Board of Education. Schools and Bama didn't integrate until the
nineteen seventies, and rather than embrace integration, As you know,
most white parents pulled their kids out of those schools
and put them in all white private academies with the
hope that they could shield them from integration that goes
on today. The schools in Montgomery, Alabama are as racially
segregated today as they were seventy years ago. There was

(32:21):
that resistance even then, And sometimes I joke because if
we really wanted that moment to turn into something like
what we've seen in other countries, we would have thought
about it differently. I think it would have been appropriate.
Fred Gray, an amazing lawyer, my friend and mentor, still
actively practicing law in his nineties, and who was of

(32:42):
course one of the critical lawyers around Browner versus Gaale,
the case that involved in Montgomery bus boycott, all of
those litigations. I keep saying to mister gres and mister Gray,
we need to get back to nineteen sixty five. We
need to get in a time machine, and we have
to make some different arguments, because I think what we
should have demanded of the states that had violated the
rights of African Americans for so long is something remedial

(33:06):
like I don't think it would have been wrong to
say in nineteen sixty five, then all of these states
that had disenfranchised almost all of the black population. You
have to automatically register black people when they become eighteen
years of age. You have to do something that acknowledges
the harm of a century of violence and disenfranchisement, not

(33:26):
just for them, but for you, so that you're not
confused about the fact that what happened over the last
century was wrong, was unconstitutional, was un American. And now
to get to something better, we need to do something remedial.
If I make a mistake and bump into somebody on
the street and they fall and injure themselves, I can't

(33:48):
just keep walking and feel good about myself. I first
have to say I'm so sorry. Please know I did
not intend to run into you. If I hear that
they're really injured, I want to keep up with them,
and I'm doing that for them, but I'm also doing
it for me. And we never created that opportunity in
the nineteen sixties for all of these effects. They didn't

(34:08):
want it, so we were going to have to push them.
But because we didn't do that, we didn't just continue.
And then not that much later, they were trying to say, oh,
we don't need that Voting Rights Act anymore. Shelby County
is a twenty thirteen case that went to the US
Supreme Court where they were arguing, oh, we don't need that.
It's been oppressive, it's unfair to us. That just says
we're still rooted in that idea. So in that regard,

(34:30):
we have not done what these other countries have done
because we have not been required to do it. And
too many people have tried to embrace that history as
if something there was nothing wrong with it, which is
why I do react in a negative way when I
hear someone say make America great again. It's that last

(34:51):
word that gives me problems. Make America great, I'm all
for it again is what confuses me, because what is
the era of greatness that we're somehow trying to get
back to. Hopefully not the pre civil rights era when
black people were humiliated on a daily basis. Hopefully not
the first half of the twentieth century when millions of

(35:13):
black people were fleeing their homes and lands because of
mob violence and racial terror violence. Hopefully not the nineteenth
century when four million black people were enslaved living in
horrific conditions being brutalized and violated. I need to understand
what that again is referring to. But because we're romanticizing
our past and we're glorifying our past, we're not disconnecting

(35:38):
from that harm of history.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
But I also feel like in many ways we're erasing
our past. If you look at what the administration is doing,
whether it's in national parks, military installations, libraries, museums, schools.
The recent discussion about removing that photo, that very very
famous photo of the slave with welts all over his

(36:03):
back that I think is currently at a civil rights
monument or a civil rights location in Georgia. What is
going on? Yeah, what is going on? Did you predict this?
You're such a student of history. Did you say it's coming?

Speaker 1 (36:20):
I sort of did. I mean, you know the reason,
you know, I spent my career as a lawyer. As
I mentioned, I'm a product of brown versus board of education.
I grew up in a community where black children couldn't
go to the public schools. I was in a community
where very few of the adults had high school degrees,
not because they weren't smart or hard working, but there
were literally no high schools were black people in our

(36:42):
county when my dad and his generation were coming up,
and it took lawyers coming into our community to open
up the public schools. If you took a vote in
the mid sixties when I was a little boy about
whether kids like Brian could go to the public schools
because the county was a eighty percent white and twenty
percent black, we would have lost the vote. People weren't

(37:04):
going to vote to integrate the schools. It took the
rule of law. It took lawyers enforcing the Supreme Court's decision,
and without Brown versuspot of education, without those rulings from
the court, we would not have had that civil rights revolution.
And so I became a lawyer because I wanted to

(37:25):
use that saying power to help other disfavored people, marginalize
people who we still have in this country. And I
spent the first part of my career representing people on
death row, children prosecuted as adult, people who had been
wrongly convicted and unfairly sentenced, because I knew that the
law would protect them in ways that the legislature might not,

(37:48):
that politics might not because of the way politics plays out.
And we've had a lot of success. But about twelve
thirteen years ago, I remember distinctly waking up one day
we had lost a case that I thought we could
have won five years earlier, a decade earlier. I could
sense that many courts were getting tired of trying to

(38:09):
insist on full compliance with the law, full compliance with
the Constitution, full compliance with equal protection. And I remember
waking up thinking, you know what, I'm worried that we
might not be able to win Brown versus Board of
Education today. I'm not sure today our court would do
something that disruptive on behalf of a disfavored, politically marginalized,

(38:34):
politically disempowered group of people. And that made me worry.
And what that made me recognize is that we were
going to have to get outside the courts and begin
doing what I call narrative work to help us understand
why it's important that we believe in equality, why it's
important that we believe in fairness, Why it's important that

(38:54):
we reject racial bigotry, that we reject violence, that we
reject hatred. The war by part, I'd assumed, and it
was becoming clear that even in our legal system, people
were retreating from that, and that was the genesis of
the narrative work. That was why we started issuing those reports.
It's why we built a National Memorial to Peace and Justice.

(39:16):
It's why we built a legacy museum, It's why we
built Freedom Monument, Sculpture Park. It's why right now I'm
really focused on creating an infrastructure and cultural institutions that
tell the truth because I think we are in a
narrative struggle in America, and we are either going to
embrace the politics of fear and anger that have led

(39:37):
to so much division and I think inequality and injustice
over our history, or we're going to have to embrace
something more hopeful, something that we haven't quite seen yet,
but we can imagine that gets us to a healthier place.
And the book banning that you're talking about, in the
erasing that you're taught, it's just a classic strategy. It's

(39:58):
what people with pass have always done when they're threatened
by ideas that I don't think they can actually compete with.
It's going to be hard to persuade me that people
actually believe that inequality is better than equality, that freedom
is better than isolation and bondage, that treating people fairly

(40:21):
is better than only treating some people fairly. And that's
the ideology behind equality, racial justice, treating people as human beings.
You know, you don't have to be you know, LGBTQ.
Nobody's going to force you to adopt an identity that
you don't want. But it doesn't mean that people who

(40:43):
have that identity should be mistreated, should be the objects
of hatred and scorn, and should be threatened and menaced.
I don't think that's consistent with an ideology that most
people want. But if we can turn it into something else,
banning and erasure, is it a classic strategy. It was
what again and slavers did in the nineteenth century when

(41:05):
confronted with the threat of abolition. It's what the Lost
Cause narrative was all about. Was about erasing any idea
that the Civil War was about slavery or about racial hierarchy.
It's what the Civil rights movement, you know, the White
Citizens Council that formed all over the country. They persuaded
themselves that this wasn't because a racial bigotry. It's because

(41:26):
this is our right, this is our states rights. It's
because of the god you know, sanctioned order between the
races and they some of them wanted to believe that
that's what black people wanted, and it's that kind of
false narrative. So censure, censoring, and erasure a book banning.
It's just a classic strategy. And I think what's scary

(41:47):
to me, that's what the Nazis did in the nineteen thirties.
When you're unhappy and don't want transparency, you try to
ban people from seeing what you do, which is why
journalists have been such a critical part of the struggle
for justice in so many parts of the world.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
And the journalists are being threatened, they are and they're
being silenced, or they're being plowed and they're being canceled. Yeah,
how concerned are you, just as someone who deeply understands
and appreciates the Constitution these threats to free speech and

(42:26):
what many of view as corporate corruption that we're witnessing
now in America.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah, Well, it's absolutely disheartening to see so many companies
that were so proudly proclaiming their commitment to DEI so
quickly eradicate any of that. To see so many academic
institutions retreat from the kind of commitment to diversity within
the classroom as if somehow diversity is a bad thing,

(42:55):
And you know, I think anybody who experienced that realizes that,
you know, it's not that that person got a seat
that belonged to somebody else. Is that you will learn
things you cannot learn. If everybody in your classroom is
just like you, You're not going to learn really important
things about the human experience. If everybody is the same race,

(43:15):
and the same gender, and the same idea and the
same faith, you're going to miss out on a lot
of the understanding that you need to function in a
world that is very, very diverse.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
What about this whole notion, Brian, that universities have turned
into what is the word that they always use in
doctrination camps that I heard David Brooks say in an
interview that eighty two percent of college students and I'd
like to find out where you got this statistic feel
they have to kind of not lie but not speak

(44:05):
honestly about their political beliefs for fear of being canceled
or mocked or thought of less than I'm curious how
you would look at that situation.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
I don't think there's any question that not just on
colleges and campuses. We have made honest discourse harder in America.
I think that actually relates more to social media and
the way in which we've created a new hierarchy of
who succeeds, who becomes the most influential. We've created this
currency where the more you shun, the more you cancel,

(44:43):
the more you disparage, the more you ridicule and critique
those with whom you disagree, the more power you get.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
And do you think that's on both sides?

Speaker 1 (44:53):
Oh? I do, absolutely, I absolutely do, And I mean
I don't think a decade ago I would have predicted
that the Republican Party would become so singular in its
perspective on a range of complex issues. But you have
to kind of point out that that is largely what

(45:15):
has happened. And I don't believe that many of those
folks who make the votes they make believe that that's
the right thing to do. But because of the threat,
the menace, the culture we have created around only one perspective,
they give into that. I think the same thing can
happen in a classroom and did happen in classrooms. But

(45:37):
I don't think that's the problem. I think that's the
symptom of the larger problem that we haven't been curious
about the truth, the complete truth. And I think on
the whole, academic institutions have been moving toward more complex,
more nuanced presentations of history and understanding and art and

(46:00):
literature and all these sorts of things, and some people
experience that as canceling because they can't just walk in
and say, well, i'm the son of so and so
and so I get to lead this. People are like, well, yeah,
we don't care who you're the son of. We need
to know what you can do. And that's a more
complicated world than the world that some people might have
experienced before. But I don't think that's dishonest. I don't

(46:22):
think that's unhealthy. I actually think that is how you
make progress. Have there been excesses, of course, of course.
I remember in twenty twenty people were saying all kinds
of things that were not rooted in what I believe
is a genuine understanding. I mean, people were saying, well,
we're not going to be non violent anymore, We're going

(46:44):
to embrace violence. You know. I think a lot of
that happened, But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be
engaged in that truth telling, and so for me, the
retreat of these institutions. And so to get to the
first part of your question, you know, how do we
respond in this? And I think this is true for journalists,
it's true for corporate leadership, it's true for academics. I

(47:08):
think we have to stick to our truth. I don't
think we can let threat and menace and intimidation silence us.
I don't.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
But that's not happening.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
Well, it's not happening a lot of places, but there
are some places that are doing it. Not every law
firm gave in to the mandate that they abandon any
pro bono work on behalf of immigrant communities or migrant
communities or people. A lot of law firms said, no,
we're not with that. Perkins, Cooey and Seattle said we're
going to resist, and a lot of law firms join

(47:38):
them in that resistance. A lot didn't, but a lot
said no. Harvard eventually said no, we're not going to
sign your agreement. A lot did, but some didn't. I
can speak for our cultural institution, the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama,
we are not going to retreat one inch in the

(48:00):
full and honest telling of American history. We're going to
actually do more to help people understand the harms of slavery,
the harms of lynching, the harms of segregation, the harms
of racial injustice and racial inequality. And I think journalists
can't give in to that censorship. It'll be uncomfortable, it

(48:20):
will get really challenging, But that's the way justice has
always prevailed.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
It's not really the journalists, it's their corporate overlords.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
Understood, understood, And that may mean we have to find
other vehicles for journalism. We have to find other platforms
for truth telling. We may not be able to remain
under a tent that is so corrupted by threat and
menace and intimidation that it's a greed and greed that
it's no longer a place where you can be an
honest journalist. I felt that way about a lot of

(48:50):
the institutions that I encountered along the way. But that
doesn't mean we can't be truth tellers. And I think
this is an when truth tellers have to step forward.
That's what the fifty thousand people who decided not to
ride the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, were. They said, we
have a truth, and the truth is that it's wrong

(49:12):
for you to exclude us and to humiliate us because
of our color. And we don't have money, we don't
have power, we don't have corporate backing, we don't have
a government that will intervene on us. But we have
our bodies and we're going to use these bodies and
stay off of your buses. And they did it for
over a year, walking three miles a day in the morning,

(49:34):
working ten hours, walking three miles at night, and that
resolution ultimately prevailed. The civil rights movement the nineteen fifties
and sixties didn't have corporate sponsors. Everybody talks like they
were on the side of doctor King, but nobody was
on the side of doctor King or very few people
in power. They didn't have corporate backers, and the church,
the White Church, was largely against them. There were people

(49:57):
who were high profile supporters. They use what they had
and they didn't have very much. And I just feel
like I stand on the shoulders of people who did
so much more with so much less. They had to
face such a greater threat. They would go places and
they'd be on their knees praying for the right to vote,
and they'd get beaten and battered and bloodied, and they'd

(50:17):
go home, wipe the blood all, change their clothes, and
go back and do it again. And if they could
do that, I don't get to say I can't do
what I have to do in this moment.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Do you think the civil rights movement could happen today?
It seems like there are very few people with that
level of courage and commitment to fight for something that important.
There seems to be a lot of apathy.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Yeah, I think it'll be a different movement today. But yes,
I absolutely do think it can happen. You know, in
twenty twenty when people took to the streets, wasn't just
black people. I think a lot of older white American
and young They were just appalled that we're still seeing
this kind of abuse of people and they wanted it

(51:08):
to end. And I don't think you absolutely have to
manifest your concerns in that way, but you do have
to manifest them. I mean, we have come apathetic. You're
absolutely right. I mean it was interesting to me in
the last two elections talking to people who so it
doesn't matter I don't like this person and I don't
like that person. I'm disgusted with this and that it's

(51:31):
just interesting. I come from a political tradition because you know,
my great grandparents were enslaved, couldn't have the chance to vote.
My grandparents had to deal with terror of violence. My
parents lived through Jim Crow and segregation. I just grew
up so excited about the opportunity to finally have the
right to vote. I would never dream of not voting.

(51:51):
And even if I have to choose between bad and worse,
I'm going to go vote for bad because that's better
than worse. My opportunity to get to someplace better will
be increased with this outcome rather than that outcome. I've
never been so privileged to expect, so entitled to think
that I'm going to have just the perfect person. And

(52:12):
until I have that perfect person, I'm not going to
exercise my right to vote. I've never been so privileged
to think that I get to have only vote for
the people who have everything aligned with my values. I've
never been that privileged. It's always been a struggle, and
justice is a constant struggle. So we have to get
past that apathy, and we are going to have to

(52:33):
find our courage. I think a lot of people felt
that it wasn't going to be a problem for them,
whoever won the election. And what's interesting to me is
seeing all of these communities of people who thought they
were insulated from the consequences of some of these narratives.
The federal workforce, hundreds of thousands of whom have now

(52:55):
lost their jobs, cultural leaders, people engage in aspects of
American society and the health construct and the sciences, some
of those academic institutions. No one thought that farmers, exactly,
people who do business on an international scale now contending.

(53:16):
And so it was apathy that made you think that
it wasn't going to be consequential. Now, when you're experiencing
these things, the question is are you still apathetic or
are you now motivated to do something, to say something,
to contribute to something that is more consistent with these values.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
And on the cusp of our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
I think people didn't realize how fragile democracies are.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
It is absolutely right. I mean, I think this is
a very critical moment in American history, and for two
reasons I'm not sure are well understood. One. Throughout my lifetime,
we always had a court that was going to always
put the rule of law in the constitution over ideology,

(54:02):
and I think a lot of people are now questioning
whether that's still true.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
And are you questioning, Oh, I absolutely am?

Speaker 1 (54:08):
I absolutely am. I mean, for a court that has
talked so much about wanting to get to a colorblind society,
something I think that is kind of misguided. But I
get it to just two weeks ago, and upholding the
administration's immigration raids to legitimate the use of race, national

(54:31):
origin language as a basis for stopping someone to commit
these raids is pretty devastating because it is completely inconsistent
with that idea that the Constitution does not tolerate bias
based on race. I think what the Court did two

(54:52):
weeks ago is an echo of what the Court did
in the nineteen forties in a case called Kamatso when
the government said we're going to round up every person
of Japanese ancestry and we're going to put them in
concentration camps. We're going to put them in these camps.
And it was wrong, it was bigoted, it was unjust,

(55:12):
and the Supreme Court gave in to it because the
prevailing political ideology was all about retribution against the Japanese
for their attack on Pearl Harbor. They gave in. And
what's fascinating is forty years later, fifty years later, the
court was prepared to say, oh, you know what, that
was wrong. We made a mistake. We should not have
done that. And now I think just two weeks ago,

(55:35):
by saying it is appropriate for these agents to consider race,
identity language as a basis for detaining someone, stopping someone
as part of this immigration rate, we have legitimated that
kind of racial bias. We've given the government the opportunity
to consider race in detention, arrest, suspension and all of

(55:59):
these things. And Justice Soto Mayor wrote a powerful discent.
So the first thing that troubles me is that without
a court to constrain and hold on to the parameters
of democracy, we become much much more vulnerable than we
would otherwise, Which means that the other way which we
hold on to our democracy has to be expressed through

(56:21):
our vote, through our willingness to get out and make
our perspective clearly known. And even there you're seeing all
kinds of manipulation. I mean, this whole thing we're seeing
where states are being asked to manipulate their congressional districts
in such a way to guarantee that one party wins
and the other party loses. I mean, that's no different

(56:43):
than the poll tests and the literacy tests that were
used by states for decades in the first half of
the twentieth century. If you were against that and against
the racial bigotry behind that, you have to be against this.
It's no different than what happened after Reconstruction when we
disenfranchised black people through threat and violence, intimidation, and so yes,

(57:04):
this is going to be a gut check for our democracy.
I think we have to be hopeful that we will prevail.
And I am hopeful, and I think my hope rests
not in what I see in front of me, but
it rests in what I feel pushing behind me. I've
been talking about this. I was just at Harvard. It

(57:25):
was very honored. They gave me a ward, and I
told them that when I went to Harvard Law School.
On the first day, they put us in groups to
try to make us comfortable, and the student group leader
was supposed to just orient you, and my group leader
took twelve us out and she asked the students, why
are you in law school? And all of my classmates
started talking about why they were in law school, and

(57:46):
each one of them started talking about how they were
the son or the daughter, or the grandson or the granddaughter,
or the nephew or the niece of a lawyer. And
I started squirming because I knew I wasn't related to
any lawyers. And after the six or seventh student in
both these family connections, I really started to panic. And
then I realized something I hadn't even realized until that moment.
What I realized was that not only was I not

(58:08):
related to a lawyer, I realized I'd never even met
a lawyer. And by the time they got to me,
I felt so diminished. I didn't answer the question. I
told a joke. I just tried to get out of there.
And afterward I called my mom. I said, Mom, I
don't belong in this law school. And my mother, of course,
one of these beautiful mothers, she said, what are you
talking about. You belong wherever you go. You're the smartest

(58:30):
person in the world. You could do anything you want
to do. Now you go back there and you tell
them why you're really in law school, and I felt
better after I talked to my mom, but I knew
I couldn't organize another meeting with these law students, and
so I just went on about my business. But two
weeks later, I still felt the weight of the dishonesty
I had engaged on my first day. So I found

(58:51):
some of the students in the group. I said, hey,
can we have a little meeting. I just want to
tell you something about the person. It was so awkward,
it was so challenging, but they were kind and they
allowed me to have this meeting. And what I told
them I said on the first day of law school,
I wasn't fully honest. I didn't tell you why I'm
in law school. And I said, I'm not related to
a lawyer. I've never even met a lawyer. But my

(59:11):
great grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia. And even
though my great grandfather was enslaved, he had this hope
of freedom, and it was so powerful. It weighed on
him so much he risked his life to learn to read.
It was against the law. It was illegal for enslaved
people to learn to read or write. You could be sold,

(59:32):
you could be killed if you were discovered trying to
learn to read and write. And my great grandfather had
a hope of freedom so powerful he learned to read
in the eighteen fifties. He didn't know civil war was
coming in a decade, but he learned to read and write.
And after emancipation, my grandmother told me that once a
week my great grandfather would allow people from the community
who didn't know how to read to come over to

(59:54):
their house and he would stand on the porch and
he would read the newspaper to them. And she said
she'd love the fact that her father knew how to read,
and people would be so grateful and so happy. They
would bring food and bring gifts just because he was
helping them to know what was going on. And my
grandmother said, as a little girl, she wanted to learn
to read, and so whenever he would start reading, she

(01:00:15):
would push her siblings aside. She would sit next to him,
and she said she would wrap her arms around his
leg and put her head next to her leg, because
she thought you learned to read by touching somebody while
they read. And he figured out what she would say.
He said, no, Victoria, that's not how you learned to read.
I'll teach you how to read, and he taught my
grandmother to be a reader. My grandmother worked as a
domestic her whole life. She'd cleaned other people's houses and

(01:00:37):
did domestic work, but she was a reader. She had
ten children. She demanded that all of her children be readers.
When I would go visit my grandmother, sometimes she would
come out on the porch with a stack of books
and she would make you read something before she let
you in the house. She was very tactical. She said, Ryan,
what do you want me to make you for dessert?
And I'd come up with something it didn't even make sense.

(01:00:58):
She said, okay. She'd go in the kitchen. It would
smell so good. She said, okay, Brian, come on, it's ready,
And there she'd be with those stack of books, and
I'd have to read something to get that good smell
in dessert in the kitchen. As I said, I grew
up in a really poor, racially segregated community. You did
not see a lot of hope outside the door. Most
of the adults worked in the poultry plants. People had

(01:01:21):
out houses, didn't have running water. It just wasn't a hopeful.
You didn't see a lot of that, But my mom
went into debt when we were like small kids, eight nine,
ten years old. She went into debt. I'm not sure
she ever was able to pay for these things. My
mom went into debt and bought us the World Book Encyclopedia,

(01:01:42):
and we had those books in our house. And I
told my classmates, I said, I never met a lawyer,
never kind of related to a lawyer, but I read
all about the lawyers in the World Book Encyclopedia. And
you know, I can't lie. As a ten year old,
I didn't always understand because you know, Christmas comes along,
you go outside and your They're like, well, I got
a bicycle, I got a basketball, I got a baseball.

(01:02:03):
I'd have to say, well, I got Volume G of
the World Book Encyclopedia. But I told them, I'm in
law school because I read about the lawyers and the
World Book Encyclopedia, and I read that they could help
people who are experiencing harm, they could open doors for
people who are being excluded, they could do something about
bigotry and discrimination. And because I've seen that, that's why

(01:02:25):
I'm in law school. And in many ways, I feel
the hope of the enslaved behind me. When I talk
about slavery in our cultural institutions, I think, actually it's wrong.
I think memory and truth telling is what we owe
the ten million black people who were enslaved for two

(01:02:48):
hundred and forty six years in this country, the ten
million black people who endured the immense suffering and constant
sorrow of slavery, we owe them the truth of their story.
And when we try to diminish it, when we try
to center it, when we say stop talking about it,
not only is what we're doing dishonest, I think it's unjust,
and if I care about justice, I have to lift

(01:03:09):
that up. And I feel them behind me, those people
we're trying to bring attention to, who are the victims
of terror, of isolence and lynching, those people who fled there.
I feel them behind me. The people I grew up with,
who had to endure the humiliation and degradation of segregation.
I feel them behind me. And so when I have

(01:03:30):
to speak and people say be quiet, when I have
to stand up and people say sit down, I've gotten
to a point in my life when I don't ever
feel like I'm standing alone. I don't. I don't even
think i'm speaking just for myself, and I think we
all have to tap into it. You don't have to

(01:03:51):
be African American, no matter what your background are. Most
of us are where we are because generations of people
family non family, have lifted us up, have put us
in positions where we could do things to make the
world better, to do things better, to create something healthier.
And I think we dishonor them if in this moment

(01:04:13):
of crisis, in this moment of conflict and controversy, in
this moment where democracy is being threatened, we remain silent.
I don't think it's just apathetic. I don't think it's
just cowardly. I think it's dishonorable. And so if we
are Americans committed to a future, if we are Americans
who believe in freedom, of quality and justice, we have

(01:04:33):
to now speak out. We have to do things, and
we have to be prepared. That may mean things get uncomfortable,
but we have behind us generations who did those uncomfortable
things to make this nation the nation that it is
in hopes that we would continue that struggle. And so
that's what I'm embracing in this moment, That's what I'm

(01:04:54):
holding on to in this moment.

Speaker 2 (01:04:56):
That's so moving, and I so appreciate you saying that,
because so many people say to me, what can I do?
What can I do? And they really feel powerless and
they feel at a loss, and they know what they're
witnessing is wrong and scary and bad for this country,

(01:05:18):
but they don't know how or where to channel it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
The one thing I like to tell people, too, is
that learning is an action item. When you educate yourself,
you're actually doing something. And there's so much we need
to know about what democracy requires, about what history can
help us with that I think will be important as
we prepare to meet this moment. And no one can

(01:05:41):
actually prevent you from learning. At EJI my organization, we
have something called a History of Racial Injustice. It's a
calendar and every day we put out something that just
documents parts of our history where we fail, where we
didn't do what we should have done. And I think
we need to learn that history. We need to know
that language. It facilitates conversation that we won't otherwise be

(01:06:05):
capable of having. It allows us to rebut some of
the bigotry and some of the misrepresentations of who we are,
and it's a very small thing, but I think at
a minimum, we should commit to learning our past and
understanding our history so we are better prepared for the
moment we're in and better prepared to create a healthier future.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
And perhaps inspired by absolutely who came before us. Hi everyone,
it's me Katie Couric. You know, if you've been following
me on social media, you know I love to cook,
or at least try, especially alongside some of my favorite
chefs and foodies like Benny Blanco, Jake Cohen, Lighty Hoyk,

(01:06:49):
Alison Roman and Ininagarten. So I started a free newsletter
called good Taste to share recipes, tips and kitchen mustaves.
Just sign up at Katiecuric dot com slash good Taste.
That's k A t I E c o U r
I c dot com slash good Taste. I promise your
taste buds will be happy you did. I want to

(01:07:20):
ask you about a couple of other issues that of course,
when I read or think about these things, I'm always
like ww bs s, what would Brian Stephenson say? And
one is this cultural whiplash that we've seen when it
comes to mass incarceration and crime in general, and I've

(01:07:44):
seen this shift all the work that you've done with
mass incarceration and minimum mandatory sentencing, and I see the
country moving in this direction of we're not being tough
enough on criminals, prisons are revolving door, We're seeing people

(01:08:04):
who should be in prison committing crimes, who have been
in and out and in and out. And I'm curious
how you see that arc of history unfolding, Brian, because
I saw Ben Shapiro on Bill Maher the other night
and I was like, I wish Brian was here to

(01:08:24):
debate him. But he said, you know, people say we
can't incarcerate ourselves out of this problem, but we can,
he said, And I'd love you to share with us
how you see this kind of about face and this
focus on crime. And for example, the situation in Charlotte

(01:08:45):
that got a lot of attention, the twenty three year
old Ukrainian immigrant who was fatally stabbed on a light
rail train by a man with the significant history of
arrests who struggled with mental illness, and a lot of
people are seizing on that case as evidence that criminal
justice reform has gone too far. So tell us what
you're thinking about this.

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
I mean I think unfortunately, over the last seventy years,
one thing that's become really clear is that bad crimes
have resulted in bad policy. So if you focus on
one crime and that's going to be your justification for
a whole new set of policies, those policies are going
to be flawed because you need a bigger picture.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
Okay, what do you mean by that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
Well, throughout most of the twentieth century, we had fewer
than three hundred thousand people in our jails and prisons.
We did not incarcerate a ton of people. We reserved
incarceration for people who were a threat to public safety.
That changed in the nineteen seventies when politicians from both
political parties began arguing that people who are drug addicted

(01:09:48):
and drug dependent are criminals who should be punished, and
we started filling up the prisons with hundreds of thousands
of people dealing with addiction and dependency. Now, we could
have said that people suffering from addiction and dependency have
a health problem and we need a health care intervention,
but we said they're criminals, let's use punishment. There are

(01:10:10):
countries around the world that said addiction and dependency is
a health problem, and they've had phenomenal success at reducing
the number of families that are impacted by opiod addiction.
They've had phenomenal success at improving public safety because they
dealt with a health problem as a health problem rather

(01:10:31):
than that's exactly right. And then we expanded that in
the seventies and we started wanting to punish people who
have other kinds of issues, children dealing with trauma, and
our prison population went from three hundred thousand in the
seventies to over two million by the end of the
twentieth century, and we did not become safer. If anything,

(01:10:52):
we became less safe. So we did not incarcerate ourselves
out of that problem.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
Can you tell me how we became less safe as
those numbers rose.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
Yeah, because we were essentially creating situations where we were
putting people who didn't need to be in prison in
prison where they would be threatened and abused and traumatized.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
And become criminals.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
And when they came out of prison, they were more
likely to offend than they would have ever been if
we'd never sent them.

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
To prison, if we'd gotten them different kind of help.

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
That's exactly right, Or even if we had said, you
know what, we're not even going to punish you. We
would have made them less likely to commit an offense
than when you put somebody in an environment where they're
constantly being threatened, when they're being minutes, where sexual violence
is a way of life, where they're being dehumanized and
abused and traumatized. You know, trauma is the source of
so much of the criminal behavior that people want to

(01:11:46):
get rid of, and we don't appreciate that. There is
a strategy for helping someone with a trauma disorder, but
it is not threatening them. You know, our combat veterans
when they come back, those who come back with post
traumatic stress disorder, they have that disorder because they were
in a situation where they were constantly being threatened and menace.
Their brain starts producing cortisol and adrenaline to help them

(01:12:09):
cope with those threats. And then when they're removed from
that situation, their brains are still in that hyperactive space
where they're being flooded with cortisol and adrenaline. And so
when somebody does something just a little bit wrong, they overreact,
they maybe even become violent. But that's a health condition
that requires a health response and the way you help
somebody but trauma is to not threaten them more so

(01:12:32):
in that regard, we created a world where I would
go into communities where my thirteen and fourteen year olds
that I would meet would say, we know we're going
to be in jailer prison by the time we're twenty
or twenty one, because that's what we see happening to
all the people in our community. So we're going to
go out here and get ours while we can. They
were actually being made so hopeless about the future that

(01:12:52):
embracing these pathologies of crime and boce became more rational
than resisting them. And you see that in so many
of the institutions. And only in the last ten or
fifteen years did we begin to recognize how building more prisons,
spending more money, taking money from health care, money from
human services, money from schools was not helping us. And

(01:13:15):
then we began doing things and guess what, the crime
rate began to drop. We actually saw improvements in public safety,
which is why it's so ironic, you know, talking about
hormonicent troops into bon Bonember is actually seeing the lowest
levels of violent crime in many categories in its scene
in decades. These reforms have actually made us safer in

(01:13:36):
a lot of ways, certainly healthier, because we're now spending
money on things that can actually help people. Does that
mean that people won't commit horrific crimes like the crime
in Charlotte apps No, We're going to continue to see
those crimes. We have a long way to go. How
we respond to those things is going to be the
metric future. But I also take great exception to taking

(01:14:01):
one crime and saying, well, this is the thing we
need to focus on. You know, even in this moment
of horrific violence. I mean, it's actually a bit provocative
to talk about one crime here and to ignore all
of these other crimes. You know. In twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen,
a young white man walked into Emmanuel Amy Church in Charleston,

(01:14:22):
South Carolina and slaughtered nine black people while they were praying.
Dylan Ruth, Dylan Ruth. A few years later, a young
man walked into a supermarket in Buffalo and killed ten
black people while they were shopping. A young white guy
goes to a black college campus in Florida, ends up
killing three people, not on campus. Nobody ever says, what

(01:14:44):
are we going to do about the racial bigotry that
is shaping the mindset of these young people and killing
so many innocent people. We didn't have that moment, even
when we were talking last and white men walked onto
the University of Virginia holding torches chanting anti Semitic and
racist things. Rather than see that as a threat that

(01:15:05):
our nation needs to reckon with, we tried to minimize it.
And so I just think it is dishonest to create
policies based on this one thing. And what I meant
by bad crimes. We've got crimes named after people who
were victims of horrible things. Usually they're victims of privilege.
They're victims who people can identify with, and they turn

(01:15:29):
into bad policies, and so I think we have to
resist that in this moment. I think if we're going
to get to a healthier place around crime and public safety,
we're going to have to stop talking about crime as
if we can put crimes in prison. That's what happened
in the eighties and nineties. Legislators started talking as if
they could put crimes in prison. Oh, I hate that crime,
child pornography, I hate that one hundred years this kind

(01:15:51):
of assault I hate that fifty years life without parole,
the death penalty. The truth is we don't have the
ability to put crimes in prison, none of us. You
cannot put a crime in prison. You can only put
a person in prison. And people are not crimes. People
can commit crimes. We can want to hold them accountable
for the crimes they've committed, but there's a gap. There's

(01:16:11):
a distance between what someone does and who someone is,
and that's where policies become bad. When a woman who's
been abused for twenty years wakes up one day, goes
into the room and shoots and kills her abuser, she
may not be threatened in that moment, and what she
does is a crime, and you can say that is murder,

(01:16:34):
but we have to think differently about how we're going
to hold her accountable than we would hold someone else accountable.
When a child that's been abused and traumatized, when somebody
is suffering from mental illness and dealing with psychosis does
something horrific like stabs someone to death in public transportation,
we can't ignore that psychosis, that mental health history in
thinking about what's appropriate. And so that's where we've been

(01:16:57):
trying to help policy makers. And guess what places across
the world that understand this have succeeded in lowering the
rates of incarceration and improving public safety. It's fun. You
go to northern Europe, it's rare. They don't have people
being shot and killed every day. They don't have the
kind of sexual violence we have in this country. You
even compare Vancouver with an American city across the border,

(01:17:21):
the homicide rates are radically different. And that's where I
think we just have to become sober. When people start
talking about really committing to gun control, gun safety, limiting
access to guns, that's when I'll know we're getting serious
about public safety in this country, because that's the recipe
for how we make our community safer, and nobody seems

(01:17:42):
to want to talk about that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
Let me ask you about two other events in the news,
the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the reaction to that
horrific event, which I see is two different situations and
two different points of discussion. He has been lionized, even canonized,

(01:18:05):
I think by many people on the right, primarily, but
I think others as well. And then he's been demonized
by people on the left. And probably others because of
some of the views he espoused. Where do you how
do you make sense of all of this? Brian?

Speaker 1 (01:18:27):
I think first of all, we should all be outraged
and heartbroken that we had witnessed the murder of someone
who was in a public space on a college campus.
Those kids will be traumatized for life. We ought to
be thinking about how we eliminate that from the American
experience entirely. And it doesn't matter who he is and

(01:18:49):
what his views are and what he said. That's a
tragedy that we all need to condemn and to acknowledge,
and truthfully, it transcends politics, as we saw a Minnesota
politician murdered in her home behind that kind of idea
that you can just kill the people you disagree.

Speaker 2 (01:19:10):
With, and her husband and dog as Ahortman.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
It's all horrific. So I think all have to be
pretty clear in our condemnation of that kind of violence
and attacking people in that violent way. But when you
politicize these things in ways that are just not accurate,

(01:19:33):
when you say, oh, this is because of left wing
media or etce, when we don't say the same thing
when a Democrat or somebody progressive is murdered or killed.
What you do is you feed this kind of ideological warfare,
and I think that's really unhealthy. I think that is
also inconsistent with a thriving, healthy democracy. And then people

(01:19:57):
start reacting to that, and that's what we've seen happen
over the last few days, people reacting to what they
believe to be a distortion of what's really happening here.
I don't think you have to legitimate, accept or even
be silent about the views, the objectionable views, the bigoted views,

(01:20:24):
are the really painful and harmful views of someone like
Charlie Kirk. To mourn his death, to grieve his loss,
to condemn the act of violence that took his life.
I do think we have an obligation to call out bigotry,
to speak to speech that threatens and menaces and fuels

(01:20:46):
the kind of hatred that I see growing around our country.
And that doesn't end even though someone dies tragically. So
I don't think there's a real tension in that. I
think what's now a bigger problem, to be honest, is
whether the people who have power are going to use
that power to silence and to intimidate anyone who says

(01:21:10):
something that they don't agree with. I think that, to
me is for democracy in America is an existential threat.
If no one is allowed to say I disagree with
these views over here, if they're silenced, if they're kicked
off the air, if they're a journalist or on TV,
if they're menaced and threatened with violence, then we will
not become a healthy society. We will deteriorate in ways

(01:21:33):
that I think are really really.

Speaker 2 (01:21:34):
Tragic, which of course brings me to my final area
of discussion, which is Jimmy Kimmel. And this is something
also we were talking about about institutions capitulating and not
fighting back. Jimmy Kimmel, who knows what will happen. He's
been suspended. You heard the comments he made. He was

(01:21:54):
making I thought an observation of how the Charlie Kirk
tragedy was being used and exploited by some of Donald
Trump's followers, and basically he got pulled off the air.
And of course, if you know the backstory about Nextstar,

(01:22:14):
which owns a lot of ABC affiliates, wanting to buy Tegna,
which also would have exceeded their amount of coverage over
the country, that local news stations are allowed to have.
There seems to be a direct correlation, kind of a
quid pro quo to the FCC in terms of Jimmy

(01:22:36):
Kimmel's suspension. And we saw this earlier with George Stephanopolis,
we saw this with CBS and sixty Minutes comcasts fired
somebody Matthew Dowd, who I interviewed yesterday. I mean, this
is all very scary and very chilling. Can you put
in perspective, historically or otherwise, Brian, why this is so

(01:23:02):
threatening to the United States as a democracy.

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
I really was horrified by the Chimel firing. In particular,
when I heard about it, I thought, oh my god,
what did he say? And then when I read it,
I did interpret it as him actually trying to protect
those who were legitimately grieving the loss of this person
and their family, and condemning those who are trying to
exploit it for these political purposes. I was actually quite

(01:23:28):
shocked that corporation would then react in that way. I
think it's unjustifiable, and I do think it reinforces this
movement that we should all be quite concerned about. In
the nineteen fifties, when McCarthy was using the power of

(01:23:48):
that Senate committee to silence, intimidate, to coerce companies in
California to fire people based on suspicions and things like that.
Too many people in corporate America gave. They basically capitulated,
and it did irreparable harm to the lives of so

(01:24:09):
many creative people in this country. It did incredible harm
to free speech in this country. Very few people now
align themselves with McCarthy. Everybody likes to think, oh, I
would have been against McCarthy. You know, they see good night,
good luck of I'm with Edward Marrow. You know I
want to be on that team. And you don't get

(01:24:31):
to make that choice if you engage in behaviors that
replicate the same power dynamics. I think, you know, what
happened to law firms, what happened to academic institutions, is
now going to happen to big media conglomerates. We've already
seen what happened to public media, and these institutions are
going to have to genuinely understand what's at state, because

(01:24:56):
when you give away your integrity, when you give away
your commitment to honest journalism.

Speaker 2 (01:25:00):
Or when you sell it.

Speaker 1 (01:25:01):
When you sell it, that's right, when you sell it
or you get it, you don't get that back easily.
You do not get that back easily. Even if this
moment passes, which many people think it will, even when
we get to another place, you don't get to just
step back up and say, okay, never mind, let's go
back and Jimmy come on back, and people come on back.

(01:25:22):
You don't get to do that. And so the decisions
that you make will have consequences long beyond this moment.
And I just think this is a time for people
to think more deeply about the way in which they
respond to threat and intimidation and to the use of power.
Just because your corporation had just because you have money,

(01:25:44):
doesn't mean that you are not supposed to be held accountable.
That doesn't mean that you're not responsible. You know, I
was saying this to some young lawyers. We got people
wearing masks sweeping all across the country, just abducting people,
pulling people, and they think they have legal justification to
do what they're doing. And I've been saying, but there
may come a day when that's going to be questioned,

(01:26:07):
and someone's going to say you really did not have
legal justification for that, and you're going to be held
accountable for what you do. And I just think we
all need to go through that process right now. I
often say, you know, everybody today says, if they were
alive in eighteen fifty, they'd be an abolitionist. Most people say, oh,
I'd be against slavery if I was in eighteen fifty.

(01:26:30):
They were alive in nineteen twenty, most people say, oh,
I'd be against my violence and lynching. Everybody today says, no,
I'd be marching with doctor King across the edmun Petits
Bridge in nineteen sixty five. Well, you don't get to
claim that status if you give into greed, if you
give in to threat, if you give into intimidation, and
you do things that you know are not consistent with

(01:26:52):
your creed of honest journalism, with your creed of being
for the good of the community, for the good of society.
And I just think we have to push people to
understand the moral complexity of this. That is, it's not
just what's good for A lot of the firms say, oh,
we had to do it's for our businesses, But there
are things that are I think ultimately more important than money,

(01:27:19):
than profit. And I know that a lot of people
in the business world. I'm not in the corporate world,
are you know, kind of twitch when you say something
like that. But I just believe that you have to
be willing to do what's right, even sometimes when you're
going to lose more than you gain. That's the way
you build. I think an honest company, a company that endorres,

(01:27:40):
an institution, a brand that has integrity. I just think
that that has to be more central in the discourse
that we're having right now. And I think the rest
of us have to try to hold people accountable when
they fail, when they retreat, when they don't do the
things that they're supposed to do. We cannot forget. You know,
I'm still talking about things that happened a year ago,

(01:28:01):
but I think they're still important. I was just talking
about this recently, you know, when the candidate Donald Trump
talked about Haitians in Ohio eating cats and dogs, knowing
that it was false, knowing that that was just creating
bigotry toward that community. To me, that was really hard
how people would just kind of walk past that because

(01:28:23):
it had an echo of so many of the things
I grew up with about the black people in my
part of town and what they were doing over there,
and the false narratives that kept us from having We
have to hold people accountable for these things. We can't
just look past that. And I just think there are
so many examples now that are going to be tempting
to forget, but we're going to have to hold on
to them. And I hope corporate America does not fail

(01:28:47):
this test the way many people in corporate America failed
in the nineteen fifties when McCarthy was making threats, the
way many people failed at the turn of the century.
Many jailers and law enforcement failed when all to pulling
black people out of jails in prisons to lyne them,
the way that many companies failed in the eighteen fifties
when they put the profit of exporting cotton over the

(01:29:11):
immorality of enslaving human beings. This is a test, and
I do think we have to pay attention to who
passes and who fails.

Speaker 2 (01:29:22):
Brian Stevenson. Always great to see you. I hope it's
not as long as it has been the next time
I get to sit down and talk to you. Thank
you so much. Always love these conversations. I've learned so
much from you and I've grown so much from you,
and I'm grateful.

Speaker 1 (01:29:42):
Well, thank you, Katie. Always great to be with you too.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
Thanks for listening. Everyone. If you have a question for me,
a subject you want us to cover, or you want
to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world,
reach out send me a DM on Instagram. I would
love to hear from you. Next Question is a production
of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me,

(01:30:09):
Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz,
and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian
Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit

(01:30:30):
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