Photo credit: Rog and Bee Walker for EJI
In this episode, we visit the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, including the newly opened Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site on the banks of the Alabama River. We interview their founder, the lawyer and civil rights hero, Bryan Stevenson, who says that a founding narrative of racial difference was created in America that “was like an infection. I believe the infection has spread. We've never treated that infection and the consequences of it are still with us today.” The US has never created cultural sites that have “motivated people to say, ‘Never again can we tolerate racial bigotry, can we tolerate racial violence, can we tolerate the kind of indifference to these basic human rights’. So, that's what we're trying to achieve.” Hope and resilience inform the Legacy Sites. “I've always argued that hopelessness is the enemy of justice and that hope is an essential feature of what we do. I have to believe things I haven't seen,” Stevenson says. “I think we need an era of truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair,” Stevenson adds. “But we can't skip the truth-telling part.”
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests]
This time we’re in Montgomery Alabama, visiting the Legacy Sites. These three distinct spaces include The Legacy Museum, which focuses on 400 years of American history from enslavement to mass incarceration; The National Monument for Peace and Justice, which is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynchings; and the newly opened Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site on the banks of the Alabama River.
We are hugely honored to be joined by Bryan Stevenson, who founded the site and the nonprofit law office, the Equal Justice Initiative. Bryan is known to many as the author of the memoir Just Mercy[: A Story of Justice and Redemption], which later became a Hollywood movie focusing on his tireless work to save a wrongly convicted death row inmate.
Bryan is a civil rights hero and it means such a lot to me to be able to have this conversation with him. His impact and significance cannot be overestimated in the legal field but he says he realized during the Obama administration that we needed to move beyond the courts, and into the space of culture.
Let’s get going on this journey.
[Musical interlude]
[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]
“Hello and welcome to Montgomery, Alabama. It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the sky is brilliant blue, and there's a bit of a crisp spring chill in the morning air. I'm standing across the street from the hotel, there's a white wall with words painted in black, quoting the American poet Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
I got here late last night. It's been something of an epic journey. I traveled to London on Thursday, flew 10 hours to Atlanta on Friday, drove three hours to Alabama, and here we are this morning. The day is getting going here in Montgomery. You can hear the traffic all around me. The birds are singing. What a great way to start the show and the day. It's a short walk to the Legacy Museum. Let's go.”
Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for joining me today, Bryan.
Bryan Stevenson: I'm delighted to be with you.
Charlotte Burns: I've just got back from a visit to the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, and it's not a hyperbole to say that it was a life-changing experience.
Bryan Stevenson: Oh, well, thank you. It's great to hear that. We intend for them to have an impact on the lives of people and it's gratifying when people say what you just said.
So thank you.
Charlotte Burns: I bet you hear that from many people.
Bryan Stevenson: It's been affirming, but we do hear that from a lot of people. And in this country, of course, the education about this history has been so marginalized that most people don't know a lot about what they learn at the Legacy Sites and I think that contributes to the impact that it has on people. But we're also trying to make these spaces narrative spaces, and we don't have a lot of narrative cultural sites in America. Most of the museums are presented as showrooms or exhibits and you see something that can be beautiful and awe-inspiring, but they're not trying to tell a story that helps you understand where you are and how we got here, and we're trying to do that and because they’re journeys in many ways, I do think it inspires people to conclude that they end someplace that they haven't been before.
Charlotte Burns: I was reading something you said, the North wins the Civil War and the South wins the narrative war, because “not only did they not apologize, they actually doubled down and say what we did by enslaving people and forming this confederacy was noble and glorious and honorable.” That's really played through my mind as I've been thinking about the experience of the Legacy Sites and what you must have been dealing with as you were forming this vision of what you were trying to counteract with what you've been building.
You've got a monumental, quite literally, rebuke to this willful amnesia that is happening and in some instances, it's a silence, but like you say, it's more than that. There's an aggressive counternarrative of glory. Actually, if you visit the South, you tend to see the sort of beauties of the plantations and where the plantation owners lived. You don't see the degradation of what it was like to be an enslaved person. The history itself has remained so marginalized that as I walked around the Sculpture Park, it was like my brain was having a sort of psychic break on this gorgeous spring day, listening to the birds singing. It's this very beautiful pastoral moment. And you look at the Alabama River that's been a death conduit for so many people. As you look at that beauty it's hard to experience those two things at once, physically, as you're absorbing those stories: there are first-person testimonies, there's artworks and there's artifacts in the new Sculpture Park and to counteract that in the land itself is so profound.
Bryan Stevenson: I do think the great challenge we have in America is that we have inherited this long history of racial injustice, but we haven't addressed it. We haven't acknowledged it. And I think it has been consequential.
I don't think there's any place you can go in this country where you're not going to encounter the consequences of this long history of racial injustice. I think it's created toxins, pollutants that are in the air, and it's made our society less healthy than it needs to be to be fully committed to freedom and equality and justice. And it doesn't matter whether you're in California or the Northwest or the Midwest or the South or the East, you're in a space where for centuries this practice of racial bigotry, this narrative of racial difference, has defined the experience. And for a long time, we have been largely silent about it. Our foreparents didn't talk about it. The generations before us didn't address it. So we're now burdened by that history. And I think it creates much of the conflict, much of the division, much of the inequality, much of the injustice that dominates a lot of the institutional arrangements and policies that exist in this country.
For us, it's become a priority to confront that history, to talk about these things. I think it's essential that we talk about what happened to Indigenous peoples before Europeans arrived. There was a whole community of people here. Most estimates put the number at eight million Indigenous peoples on the land that we now call the United States before Europeans arrived. By the time we finish the 19th century, there are fewer than 300,000 Indigenous peoples left in this country and that's because they've died or been killed through famine and war and disease. They've been displaced. They've been moved off of lands. Treaties have been broken. They've been attacked, they've been abused. And we created a constitution that talked about equality and justice in the 18th century, but we didn't apply those concepts of equality and justice and liberty to Native people. We said instead, “Oh no, those Indigenous peoples, they're savages.” We created a narrative of racial difference instead and that narrative of racial difference was like an infection. And I believe the infection has spread and we've never treated that infection and the consequences of it are still with us today.
It was that infection, that narrative of racial difference, that caused us to tolerate two and a half centuries of slavery. And I do think the great evil of slavery in America wasn't the forced labor, the bondage, the humiliation, the degradation—all of those things were terrible—but I think the greatest evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify enslavement. Because enslavers didn't want to feel immoral or unjust or unchristian when they enslaved other people and so they needed a narrative to help them reconcile to the optics, the visuals, the pain and suffering that they saw all around them. When mothers were being separated from their children who were about to be sold, when family members were being torn apart, when siblings and parents and all of these communities were being devastated by the auction block, they needed something to help them accept the pain and suffering they saw around them, so they created a false narrative. And this false narrative was essentially this myth that Black people are not as good as white people. That Black people are less capable, less worthy, less deserving, less human, less evolved. And that narrative gave rise to this ideology of white supremacy, this narrative of racial hierarchy.
And I do believe that it was so powerful that it survived the Civil War. That's why I say that the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. That idea of racial hierarchy survived and even many abolitionists who didn't believe in slavery didn't necessarily believe in racial equality. That narrative actually was in the North as well.
And so after emancipation, you have four million formerly enslaved people. Congress passes a 14th Amendment to protect them through the Equal Protection Clause, and then a 15th Amendment to provide them the right to vote. But Reconstruction crumbles, and we're unwilling to enforce those rights. And so within 12 years of emancipation, Black people are disenfranchised. They're being terrorized. And for the next century, you have racial terror violence employed to maintain this racial hierarchy. Thousands of people are pulled out of their homes, burned, drowned, tortured, lynched on courthouse lawns. And that's why we created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
They do what they're doing in this country because we haven't told that narrative. And so, yes, part of what we're trying to do with this park is to correct that. And, I initially looked at acquiring a plantation. I was really intrigued by the authenticity of the place. But when I go there, there was just no way around the built environment that the home of the enslaver is always going to be the center. The environment is always going to be organized around highlighting the lives of those who enslaved, rather than the lives of those who were enslaved. And that's why we felt the need to create a space like Freedom Monument Sculpture Park that has that authenticity.
As you noted, we’re proximate to the Alabama River, which was the trafficking portal for thousands of people who were sold and separated during the 19th century, and the rail lines which brought tens of thousands of people into bondage in the deep South. And so we had to build from the ground up a new narrative about what it was like to be enslaved and this one is focused on the lives of enslaved people. And that's the importance of using first-person narrative and telling these stories through the perspectives of people who have been enslaved and those are perspectives that most people have never heard. And they just are unfamiliar with that kind of presentation.
Charlotte Burns: That's what occurred to me walking around the space. I read something you wrote that you said: “Museums have had 150 years to tell this story and they haven't. Historians have had 150 years to present this in a way that's accessible. So we just took over. It felt like we had to resist the conventions.”
And walking around the sites, I was thinking that I don't think I've ever been in a museum where there's so few objects. And as you go around the museum, you begin, you do your usual kind of kerfuffle that you do at any museum of turning your phone off, have you been to the bathroom, put your water away. And then you're immediately in the Atlantic Ocean. You're immediately devastated and stripped away of any sense of distraction, of anything other than sorrow and staggering loss. You're confronted immediately with numbers: 12 million people were kidnapped. Two million of them died in watery graves at the bottom of a cold, unforgiving Atlantic that you're watching and you're listening to the noise of this immersive, horrifying ocean. And the rest of them, and you feel like you're about to walk into what they experienced, as you indeed do, have horrors ahead of them. So to survive is not necessarily a fortune.
[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]
“So you're joining me now after the Legacy Museum. And it's really hard to describe the effect of the museum. I've been there for around three, three and a half hours. It's a very intense experience and it's a museum unlike any other. There's very few objects. It's a narrative museum, essentially. And it strikes me that it's a museum presenting the case for the prosecution, giving us evidence and testimony to give a new and unflinching narrative that there is no room to look away from. This is the brutal history of slavery in America.”
Charlotte Burns: I was thinking, obviously your background: you've argued in front of the Supreme Court on six occasions, you've changed laws in America. You've saved people's lives, quite frankly, and you bring that prosecutorial vision, it seemed to me, to museums. From the second you walk into the museum, you're a witness. You can't get away from these numbers: 12 million people kidnapped; nine million people terrorized during racial violence of lynching; 10 million people segregated; eight million people incarcerated during the mass prison system of the current day. You look at the brutalities of racial violence in America, beginning with slavery, but moving through where we are today. It's never really ended.
And I thought, I've never been in a museum like this in my life. It's a prosecution and it's so compelling. This is evidence and this is testimony and there are numbers and they're so massive. It's millions and millions of people, but then it's broken down with these first person narratives. I'm not sure how you had the vision to do this. It obviously comes from your experience as a lawyer, but how did you go from the Equal Justice Initiative to representing people in courts to conceiving of an entirely new kind of cultural institution?
Bryan Stevenson: First of all, I appreciate your description of going through the museum. That is very much what we intended. The transformation, the idea to get involved in what we call narrative work, really grew out of my own experience. I'm a product of the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down racial segregation in education.
I grew up in a community where Black children could not attend public schools. So I started my education in a colored school. There were no high schools for Black people in our county when my dad was a teenager, so he couldn't go to high school. I grew up in a poor, racially segregated community where most of the adults didn't have high school degrees, not because they weren't smart or hardworking, but because there were literally no high schools for Black people.
And then these lawyers came into our community and made them open up the public schools. And these lawyers were able to enforce the rule of law, even against a majority of the people not wanting that. So the county was 80% white, if you had a vote on whether kids like Bryan Stevenson could go to the public school, we would have lost the vote. But these lawyers had the power to insist on our rights, even against a majority and that's how I got to go to high school. That's how I got to go to college. And I went to law school interested in accessing that power those lawyers used when I was a little boy to help other disfavored people.
And when I graduated from Harvard Law School in the 1980s, it was clear to me the community of people who were most at risk in American society was this growing population of people being sent to our jails and prisons. The prison population had been largely stable in America throughout most of the 20th century, but that began to change in the 1970s, when you had politicians from both political parties arguing that people who are drug addicted or drug dependent are criminals and should be punished for that.
And we began sending hundreds of thousands of people to our jails and prisons. And then there was this competition on who could be the toughest on crime, and the politics of fear and anger emerged in a way that we started tolerating things we wouldn't otherwise tolerate, accepting things we wouldn't otherwise accept. And before you knew it, the imprisoned population in the United States had grown from less than 300,000 to 2.3 million. And we became the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We're still the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. And it had horrific consequences for communities all across this country.
There are 80 million people in America that have criminal arrest histories, which means that they can't get jobs as easily, they don't get loans as easily. 800% increase in the number of women being sent to jails and prisons, even though 80% of these women are single parents with minor children, impacting a whole new generation. The Bureau of Justice projected in 2001, that one in three Black children is expected to go to jail or prison during his lifetime, and all of these data were the consequences of this new world.
And so we've been fighting, I've been fighting, my whole career to provide aid to those wrongly convicted, unfairly sentenced, illegally condemned, and we continue to do that work. But about 13 or 14 years ago, I began to fear that we couldn't win Brown v. Board of Education today. I began to worry that our courts today wouldn't do something to protect the rights of disfavored people, marginalized people without power. And that made me realize that we were going to have to get outside the courts and engage in this narrative struggle that we had largely just been watching. And when we chose to do that, it became clear to me that race was the most critical narrative issue still looming in America. Our unwillingness to confront this history. And that's what pushed us into doing the scholarship, the research. We now have the most comprehensive data on lynching in the country, uncovering these narratives that are presented in the sites.
To be honest, I wasn't sure it was going to have the impact until we decided to put up some markers in Montgomery.
So, when I moved here in the ‘80s, you couldn't find the word “slave,” “slavery,” or “enslavement,” anywhere in the city of Montgomery. We have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy. All of these icons that you described that elevate and celebrate those who perpetuated this idea of racial hierarchy, the authors of white supremacy. Those who sought to, fought to defend slavery are all celebrated. And you couldn't find the word “slave,” or “slavery,” anywhere in the city, and so we put up markers in 2013 and I was really surprised by the impact it had on the community. This is a majority Black city and people came out and they were very emotional because they are the descendants of the people we were talking about and no one had talked about them before. And that's when I began to see the power of public history and public memorial.
And so we started a project to put markers at lynching sites across the country, and I was very moved by what happened when you went into a community and just erected a marker that talked about what happened to a person, that reminded people, that educated people, about the history of terror violence in that community. And then the idea emerged that we're going to have to do this, comprehensively for the nation. I just knew that no one else was really doing this.
I went to South Africa and saw the Apartheid Museum. I was very moved by what I saw there. I saw what they had done in Berlin to reckon with the Holocaust. In Berlin, you can't go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones that have been placed near the homes of Jewish families. The Holocaust Memorial [Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe] sits in the center of the city. There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. There's this reckoning which makes it comfortable for someone like me, an African American, to be walking through those streets. And we haven't done that in America. And that's what motivated this idea of creating these sites.
[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]
“The museum gives us numbers that are staggering to show the evolution of terror. From the terrorizing of nine million Black people, by the threat of lynching violence, to the segregation of 10 million people, to mass incarceration now with more than eight million Black Americans now under criminal control.
The numbers are so massive—millions and millions of lives—that it's hard to grasp their meaning, but the museum tells their stories in heartbreakingly effective ways. For instance, in a section detailing Reconstruction, we see the collapse of that initial optimism. Within a decade Congress has abandoned any promise of assistance. A timeline wall shows Black Americans’ struggle for rights alongside unchecked racial terror. There's another wall that's a sickening array of newspaper headlines such as mob howls in delight as he dies, skinned him alive in Kentucky. There's a video room where we sat weeping as we watched videos of families of lynched men tell their stories a hundred years later. We see photos including of mass mobs watching a man being murdered on a ten-foot platform, onto which are painted in large white letters the word “justice.”
It makes me think about the slippery nature of words, about justice, about being on the right side of things. And here in Montgomery, Alabama, history and the fight to be on the right side of things is all around us.”
Bryan Stevenson: My hope is that we can change the relationship to the history. We don't want people to just learn about it. We want them to think about it differently, feel it differently, understand it differently, and then be motivated to act differently. The powerful thing about Holocaust museums, and there are scores all over the world, is that whatever your background is, when they're done effectively when you get to the end, you're motivated to say, “Never again.” And we haven't created cultural sites that have motivated people to say, “Never again can we tolerate racial bigotry, can we tolerate racial violence, can we tolerate the kind of indifference to these basic human rights.” So that's what we're trying to achieve.
[Musical interlude]
Bryan Stevenson: Just one quick story. That wall of water is in response to my own experience in a changed relationship with the Atlantic Ocean because I went to Africa for the first time when I was in my late 40s, early 50s. I'd never been to the continent. I flew to Nigeria. I was supposed to speak in Abuja, at a human rights conference. I misconnected in Lagos. A young lawyer picked me up and just decided to show me all of Lagos, even though it was 11 o'clock at night and he was wonderful. And he would take me into communities and he would say, “Hey, there's a Black American lawyer. Come out and meet the Black American lawyer.” And eventually I said, “Look, I got to get a little rest. I got to get a little rest.” He said, “Okay, just one more place.” And that young lawyer took me to the beach in Lagos, in Nigeria. Not a particularly pretty space, the concrete slabs, it wasn't beautiful, but we climbed over the slabs. He asked me to come down to the ocean with him. It was dark and the moon was shining across the ocean and I didn't understand why we're there. And he'd been so gregarious and talkative the whole night, but when we got on that oceanfront, he got very quiet. I noticed that he had a tear running down his face. And then he turned to me, and he said, “I brought you here to say I'm sorry, this is where we lost you.”
And I realized, for the first time in my life, that I was standing on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, this body of water that separated me from my ancestors, from my families, from my languages, from my people, permanently.
I grew up on the Atlantic Ocean in this country and never thought about the ocean as this body that separated me from a legacy, a history that was not born by slavery. And it just changed everything. I began thinking differently about the ocean. I started thinking about the millions we have spent looking for trinkets from the Titanic and the absence of any spending to reckon with the two million bodies buried at the bottom of the ocean.
And then I realized, standing on that beach, that this young lawyer in Nigeria, who had said, “I'm sorry, this is where we lost you,” I realized it was the first time in my life that anyone had ever said “I'm sorry,” about the history of enslavement. First time. And so for me, it became necessary for people to begin to think differently about that ocean, what it means to kidnap and abduct people, to take away people from their lands.
I'm one of the lost children of the African continent. The stolen children and we don't use that language, but it is accurate and descriptive. And so this new relationship becomes really important. We have all of that data about the ports in the United States, including many in New England and in Boston, and Connecticut, and Rhode Island. All of those coastal communities where the trafficking of human beings built an economic base that still thrives today and people don't know it. They don't understand that where they grew up in New Jersey was a place where the trafficking of enslaved people took place. And so that knowledge has to match the broader narrative. And I'm hoping it creates a new relationship. I hope everyone who leaves our sites is prepared to say, “Never again.” And we tolerate the kind of bigotry that allowed us to be so indifferent, so tolerant, so supportive of the kind of horrific violence that this history represents.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for sharing that story with us. It's so horrible that that's the first time anybody had ever said sorry to you. And I think there's something about the Legacy Sites that reflects the generosity of your wanting other people. There's an emotional generosity to the sites as well.
I want to ask you about how it felt for you, for somebody to say sorry to you, that it seems that you want to extend that grace to other people. And I know that there's an emotional resonance for you beyond that: you talked about the Simone Leigh sculpture at the beginning of the Sculpture Park. When you saw that in Venice, you wanted to run up and hug it and it reminded you of your grandmother and you've spoken about how she would give you these hugs and say, “Do you feel this?” Which was the strength and love that she would give you. And this strength in yourself. She always had this faith in you that you seem to have carried with you. And so to have that all those years later at the beginning of this site as this gesture that you're giving this hug to other people is personal and, you know, the personal is always political and is always profound.
Bryan Stevenson: Thank you. I appreciate that observation a lot. I am genuinely motivated by a desire to create a healthier society, to create a healthier country, a healthier world.
I don't talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because I want to punish America. I want to liberate us. I want us to get to something better. I genuinely believe that there is something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice. I think it's waiting for us, but I don't think we can get there until we reckon with the burdens, the harnesses, the shackles that have been created by this history that have created real harms and real injuries.
And in many ways, it is also the inheritance that I have received from people like my grandmother. When you think about this history, we try to tell the powerful truth about the harms created by slavery, about the bondage, about the violence, about being separated, about the cruelty. The laws of slavery were violent and horrific. We have that whipping post there, which was actually from the community where I grew up. And you could see it when you went into the town square. You see the dwellings, you see all of the labor, the cotton, the brick making. So we want all of the anguish and the suffering created by enslavement to be fully understood—the holding pen.
But we also want people to understand that despite that brutality, enslaved people found a way to love in the midst of sorrow. That's the real legacy of this community of people. That they could find ways to create relationships without love, without children to love, and spouses to hold on to, and parents to honor. It would have been impossible to survive the humiliation and degradation of enslavement. But through these relationships, there was this bigger idea, this greater idea, that one's humanity could not be taken away. And I inherited that capacity, that endurance, that strength, that resolve, that resistance, that beauty, as well as all of these other things.
And enslaved people had every right, after emancipation, to want retribution and revenge against those who had enslaved them. But instead, they chose citizenship. They chose education. They chose faith. And even though they made that very generous choice, they continued to be dishonored and disfavored and then disenfranchised and then abused and then violated and terrorized.
And in the 1950s and 60s, people in this community still believed enough in America to risk their lives, to push this country to own up to the constitutional obligations that were created a century earlier. And they went to places and they would be on their knees praying and get battered and beaten and bloodied by law enforcement officers just because they were trying to get a right that had been given to them a century earlier because they were arguing against segregation. And yet they had that commitment.
And so in many ways, it's hard for me to not honor that orientation, that disposition. And it's because I've been persuaded and it's just based on my work with people who are in custody, people in jails and prisons, people who have done some terrible things, that if you don't find your way to love, if you don't find your way to redemption, if you don't find your way to grace, if you don't find your way to mercy, you live a life of anguish and torment that can make you think life is not worth living. But when you experience redemption, when you experience grace, when you experience mercy, when you experience love, you have this capacity to overcome any of the hardships, any of the challenges. And that's a part of the story we can learn, that we need to learn when we study this history.
I think we need an era of truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair. But we can't skip the truth-telling part if we want those beautiful “R” words. You can't have repair without truth-telling about what's the injury. You can't have redemption without a willingness to acknowledge, to confess, to repent for the wrongdoing. You can't have restitution or restoration if you're unwilling to understand what the harm was, what the challenge, what the burden is. And a lot of people want to skip that truth-telling part and we believe that these sites have a critical role to play to insist that that not happen.
What we're trying to do in the US is very different than what happened in South Africa, where there was a shift in power after the collapse of apartheid. A Black majority took over governance. In Germany, the Nazis lost the war and the Allies insisted on a different world order. In Rwanda even, there was a military intervention, and those who had been victimized were then empowered to create a remedy, to create a way forward.
In the United States, those who benefited from enslavement, those who participated in lynching, those who gained power through racial segregation and disenfranchisement never lost power. They still have power. And so our task is in many ways harder, more challenging despite the reputation of the US and the rhetoric of our laws. We're trying to persuade people who are still empowered to maintain a certain kind of status quo to change. And that makes our task harder but no less necessary than it was in all of these other spaces where you see transitional justice, where you see reckoning with horrific human rights abuses in the past.
Charlotte Burns: When I read Just Mercy all those years ago, and I reread it recently—your memoir from 2014, which tells the story of your defense of an innocent man, Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to die for a crime he didn't commit—not only do you tell his story and your story and the story much more broadly of the American criminal justice system, you also show the impact on the community, because this is a man who was sentenced to die and lived on death row for decades, despite the fact that there were so many people with him, witness to the fact that he was not anywhere near the murder scene on the morning of the crime.
And so for all of those people, there's this sense that you capture in the book of, it would have been easier if none of us had known where he was, if we could suspect him too. And the impact of the intimidation of the violence, of the randomness, of the unfairness of the fact that a successful business person can ‘get above their station’ in the eyes of people in power and that they can be punished for it, is so harmful to everybody around them. And that harm and that violence is detailed so well in that book. And then so much more specifically in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]
“I've just left the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. There are rows upon rows upon rows of caskets suspended from a dark ceiling above ground that climbs at first and then gives the way to a slope. There's a kind of sweeping impression of a wave of silent coffins that now face the bright sun in the bright blue sky.
Upon each metal casket is inscribed the names of people who were lynched and the dates of their death. For example, 29 people were lynched just in Jefferson County, Alabama. And you wonder when you see names, whether they were father and son, mother and child, husband and wife, such as Minnie and William Ivory, both massacred on the 18th of November, 1920 in Coffey County, Georgia. As the signs make clear, this type of violence was accommodated by the courts, law enforcement, and white officials.
But at the end, we see some hope. We see reconciliation. There are plaques where we see the details of certain towns and cities that are commemorating people who were lynched. And they tell their stories now and their families finally have a chance to gather what was theirs, what was taken and pay their respects.“
Charlotte Burns: For people who haven't visited, it's a six-acre park. There's over 600 large corten steel monuments that naturally rust. When it rains, they run red onto the ground and each one represents an individual American county where racial terror took place. And they're inscribed with the names of individual people who were lynched and the dates upon which they were murdered.
And sometimes there are so many people that the font is tiny. It's like an undulating wave. At first you're on the same level and then these tower above you. There are examples given of why people were lynched: they were standing too long, they walked past the window, they didn't call someone “Sir.” This sort of absurdity of the violence. It's so stark as well. It's slightly abstracted. It's vast and it's colossal, but it's also so individual and you show the impact on community.
And again, in the Sculpture Park, and we see that also in the videos, for instance, in the museum, there are people who go to these sites and they talk about the patriarch of a family who was murdered 100 years before. People having this moment of reconciliation. And as I walked around Montgomery the next morning, I was thinking about history and people and thinking about how it's changed the town itself.
When you go around the museum, there's a map of downtown Montgomery in the 19th century and you see the thriving slave trade. And then, when you stand in downtown Montgomery, that's where the auction block was. And there's where the first shots of the Civil War were fired from a Confederate building. And there's where Rosa Parks began the bus boycott. And there's the church where Martin Luther King [Jr.] was a pastor. And there's where the March for Voters Rights from Selma happened. And this is just a street in America, there's no one else on it. And I was thinking, “Oh my goodness, like this is one street.”
And I think what these sites do so well is show the bigness of history, the millions of people, but the smallness, like these are people just being so persistently awful, or so persistently committed to narratives, or so persistently courageous. But it's just people on a street, and it's one street in America, and it's Montgomery, which you know better than anywhere else. But Dr. Martin Luther King [Jr.] said the climactic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil. And you're fighting them now.
And I thought, how is that impacting people in Montgomery, Alabama? You're reclaiming so much of the land physically and telling this story. You can't really understand it from photographs or the website, but when you walk around it, even just seeing that map in the museum and then applying that in my mind as I walked around downtown, it changes the sort of psychic landscape.
Bryan Stevenson: It does. And I, again, I appreciate that observation. A lot of people have asked me as well, why didn't you put these sites in Washington? They'd get so much more visibility there. It'd be a lot easier for people to find them there. And I think it's because these streets are the streets where thousands of enslaved people were paraded in couples and chains to warehouses where they were then held until the auctions. And you can see the space where the auctions took place. It is because these streets are burdened by that history of enslavement and the commerce of enslavement.
And we are so proximate to the violence that dominated America during the first half of the 20th century; Six million people fled the American South in response to the racial violence that's so tormented and traumatized people. And your description of the memorial is so accurate. We wanted people to have that intimate understanding that these monuments represent people who lost their lives and as they rise, we want people to understand that this violence, this terror, wasn't just directed at the people who were killed. It was directed at the entire African American community. They could have buried all of the lynching victims underground to keep it hidden, but they wanted to lift them up. Black people would be found hanged from bridges and trees and high places. And so in the memorial, we lift up those monuments to help people understand that the whole community was being taunted and tormented and terrorized by this violence, which is why we talked about the victims of lynchings being in the millions, not the thousands. Because if it's your brother, your sister, your neighbor, your cousin, the man down the street, the grocer, the person who speaks at church, if it's any of those people, then it has an impact on your own sense of safety and security, on your own sense of worth and value. And you have to understand that to appreciate the harm and so there is a real power in the place.
And I'll be honest, it wasn't the intention to have such a big impact on the community economically and culturally, it just became a consequence of what we were doing. We were really focused on the storytelling and making the spaces as honest and as compelling as possible. And then we were a little surprised when so many people came that the sales tax revenue jumped 24% in the first year. And when people didn't have enough places to stay, hotels started getting built—there've been six hotels built since we've opened. Restaurants opened. Businesses began because transportation and tourism and all of these other things created jobs for hundreds of people, and I'm really thrilled about that—even proud of that—although it wasn't the objective. The objective was the truth-telling.
We knew that to make the choice to come here, we had to do something that was a little different. It's not an easy place to get to, but I do think it's important. And for me, what gives me a lot of confidence about this project, about how these sites can be important in advancing this era of truth and justice, and truth and repair, what gives me confidence about that is that, by doing this in Montgomery, no one can say in America, “They could do that in Montgomery, but we can't do that in Oregon. We can't do that in California. We can't do that in Missouri. We can't do that in Kansas.” Because of Montgomery's history, because of all of those things that you observe when you walk around the streets, no one can say, “They can do that there, but we can't do it here.”
And my hope is that, when it's all said and done, they'll say the opposite: “If they can do that in Montgomery, then why can't we do it here? We must be able to do something here. It'll be a lot easier. It'll be a lot less complicated here.”
And I hope that motivates people to see the opportunities we all have to engage in truth-telling. This is often argued that learning is an action item. It's something to do. And when you learn, you empower yourself to be a different citizen, a different voter, a different thinker, a different teacher, a different advocate, a different everything. And that's what's needed, to get to a healthier place in this country. And I'm hoping that we can continue to play some small role in advancing that.
[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]
“That's an old American military airplane flying overhead: there's an air show in town, there's thousands of people here to witness the sort of might of the American military. And the entire weekend there's been modern and historic aircraft flying overhead. And I'm recording this opposite a steamboat. You realize through the museum that these feats of technological prowess, the train lines that were built by slaves, enabled the slave trade to flourish. These steamboats carried, I think at one point, 200 slaves a day into Georgia, and they allowed the slave trade to boom. I walked down downtown Montgomery, Alabama. The number of slave businesses in the area: cotton brokers, slave investors, cotton warehouses, cotton brokers, slave auctioneers, slave markets, slave depots. It was an entire economy run off the back of people. And between 1820 and 1860, Montgomery developed into one of the most active human trafficking sites in the country. And the Legacy Museum makes this very clear. It says, “Montgomery is a city shaped by slavery and the legacy of this horrific era is all around you.”
Charlotte Burns: Do you wish there were other museums like that? That's what occurred to me, that it's a shame that there's just one.
Bryan Stevenson: I certainly have felt the absence of these kinds of spaces. I do. I have. I think going to Johannesburg was so impactful because it was so unfamiliar, because that's a narrative museum that tells a powerful story.
I've been to Berlin two or three times now because it's such an unusual city in terms of cultural spaces. It's not just the Holocaust Memorial and that powerful museum. There's the topology of terror. The whole city is filled with spaces that are designed to help visitors and citizens reckon with that history. It's very deliberate, it's very intentional, and it's unavoidable. And we don't have that in the US.
So yes, I have missed that, and I continue to worry that our efforts at truth-telling in cultural sites have been insufficient. It's not enough just to have an exhibit with Black artists for a few weeks. I don't think that's sufficient. I don't think it's enough to kind of acknowledge some gaps. I think we have to do more than that because I do think culture represents what's important to a society. And if we think that racial justice is important, if we think that overcoming histories of violence and bigotry and segregation and enslavement is important, then there have to be cultural spaces that advance that cause.
I think one of the things that helped us—it was also the thing that made what we did so hard—is that we never took a penny of state or federal funding to build any of our Legacy Sites. And I always say it like that, but the truth is we were never offered a penny of state or federal dollars to build these sites, but it sounds better when I said we never accepted any state or federal funding. But that was in part because we wanted the latitude to tell the story the way we believe that the research and the scholarship demands, not based on what's comfortable for people, what's easy for people. And I hope that there's more of that, not just in the United States, all over the world.
I think there's a need for a deep reckoning with this history on the African continent. I think there's a need for a deeper reckoning with this history in Spain, in Portugal, in France, in Great Britain, and in all of the countries of Europe that were actively participating in the trafficking of enslaved people or benefiting from the cotton exports that were coming out of the plantations in the American South.
I think there's a need for that kind of deeper exploration, deeper reckoning. And so I do hope it inspires more of what we've tried to do.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: The museum is so narrative-focused and the Sculpture Park obviously brings much more art into it. Do you feel more comfortable as you've progressed through those years of opening with telling the story with art?
Bryan Stevenson: Yeah, that's a great question. Yes. The museum now has an art gallery. An earlier version of the museum that was much, much smaller that didn't have the art gallery and so when we opened the new museum, we really wanted to create that relief and we wanted to involve these amazing people, these storytellers. Artists have a powerful ability, an extraordinary ability to communicate these complex emotions. And we saw that at the National Memorial.
The very first sculpture was created by an artist, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, who we've worked with at all of our sites. It was really important to make the connection between lynching and enslavement and his sculpture did that so beautifully. And one of the most frequent comments we heard was, “I've lived in this country my whole life and I've never seen a sculpture that depicts the brutality of slavery, but the humanity of the enslaved,” and we need to see that to have the relationship with that institution that I think we need to have.
Hank Willis Thomas—who is also represented in all of our sites—and that powerful sculpture of these men with their arms up sinking into this slab, it's so evocative of the continuing legacy that's been created by this history where there's a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to Black and brown people.
So yeah, the art has become an increasingly important part of it. And we knew that a deep dive into the history of slavery, an immersive engagement with that history was going to be hard for people. And we wanted the beauty of art to help people navigate all the difficulty of that narrative.
And that's why Simone's piece, Brick House, is so perfect because it represents so much about the experience of Black women for centuries. A lot of the thinking behind it was shaped by her study of West African societies and architecture there and all of those kinds of things. But that's why it's such a perfect beginning because it tells about hardship and labor, but it also tells about beauty and strength. And, we are really thrilled to have a section that focuses on Indigenous peoples at the park and to have all of these wonderful Indigenous artists creating a visual to help people understand that story in such a powerful way.
[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]
“And here as you walk around as contemporary artists, we begin with this beautiful sculpture by Simone Leigh, Rose B. Simpson’s here, Rashid Johnson, and they present us with a different take on history. If the museum's about narrative, this is about narrative and objects. And it's a kind of poignant interaction of objects within the landscape, but also makes a case for the true arc of loss stretching back through civilizations, positing Africa as the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of humankind 5 million years ago, and talking about the loss when all those people were kidnapped, what was really truly taken, what was really truly lost.
Bryan Stevenson: And then, of course, the thing I'm especially proud of at the park is that, even though it's a hard story, even though the art and sculptures are helping us, there's never a moment when you can't look over and see the National Monument to Freedom, which is your reassurance that as hard as things are, as challenging as things are, freedom is coming. There will be emancipation, and there will be a legacy that survives this bondage and brutality. A legacy that is beautiful, a legacy that is vibrant, a legacy that is extraordinary, which is represented by all of us who are the descendants of enslaved people. Our foreparents didn't have that optic to look at. They didn't know that freedom was coming and yet they did it, which is why, I think it's possible for anyone and everyone to have the courage to walk through that space we've created and to reckon with all of the difficult aspects of this history and still have the courage, still have the comfort of knowing that freedom is coming.
And I think that's a really important component to the work I do. I've always argued that hopelessness is the enemy of justice and that hope is an essential feature of what we do. I have to believe things I haven't seen. Even creating these spaces, people were like, “You guys are lawyers. You don't know anything about museums and memorials. You should stay out of this.” And there were times when we had real doubts because we did most of this in-house, but I felt like we knew how to tell a story. I knew that we had done a lot of work and research and scholarship that we felt empowered us and positioned us to do something unique. And it's gratifying to have people coming and experiencing the sites in a way that motivates them to say, “Hey, this was really powerful.”
Charlotte Burns: I also love with the huge enormous book that you're referring to is that it's in a landscape that's littered by lots of people on horses. It's where the kind of literal approach of a lawyer becomes so interesting because it's this very stark, monumental, gorgeous object that's abstract, but also incredibly useful. It's like a living archive. You go, there are all the names.
After the Civil War, around four million newly freed Black people were able for the first time to formally record a surname in the 1870 census, rather than be recorded by a number for the first time. And 122,000 of those surnames are inscribed on the National Monument to Freedom. It's a 43-feet tall, 150-foot long wall, essentially that's an open book. Visitors can search for their names using QR codes. People have found their lineage and so it's a living archive. It's a really moving sort of triumphant rebuttal to these little men on horses around the place.
And then you end again pass that with Kehinde Wiley's An Archaeology of Silence, which is a person on a horse, and it's really interesting because I've seen that sculpture before in other spaces, but I think it's the most effective place I've ever seen that, which is this thing about context and place. It's a much different man on a horse and yeah, it's really wonderful. You said something about as a student, you were reading Russian literature and thinking about artists in specific contexts. And I was thinking about that when I saw Kehinde.
[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]
“We end with Kehinde Wiley, who takes the sort of triumphal man on horseback that is so familiar, the myth of the hero and that confederacy monument that we see all around or the war hero that populates so many towns and cities and instead presents a fallen, beaten Black American and this sort of grief-stricken image across a petrified looking horse. And it's a contemporary image showing that the suffering hasn't ended yet. It's a really poignant note to end on.”
Bryan Stevenson: I do think these are such extraordinary artists, and the quality and the skill in their work merits context. We want people to see all of the power, all of the brilliance, all of the genius that is in some of these objects. And sometimes they can be placed in spaces where that's obstructed by a lot of distracting things.
I love being able to create an environment where the beauty and the skill and the genius of these artists can be experienced fully. Rose. B Simpson's Counterculture, these majestic figures, eight feet tall, serving as guardians of the land, guardians of the river, guardians of the space. To put them in a natural environment like that, where there's so much to be on guard for, so much to be looking out for, I think just gives them a power that I find really moving, and really important.
We are adding even more sculptures. We still have 11 more sculptures that will be added to the park in the coming weeks and months and I'm excited for each and every one of them. Each contributes something new and important to the experience of folks who visit.
And again, I love your description of the National Monument. One of the things that we're now working through, we want people to have the opportunity to find their names, to find their lineage. And now we're allowing people to put flowers in the stream in front of it, to do something active, to do something tangible that expresses just acknowledgement, honoring, remembrance, admiration for those who survived, for those who endured. I think anyone who went through something as horrific as enslavement in a land that declares itself to value freedom above all things, deserves to be honored. I do think there's something powerful about it having the dynamism of telling you a little bit about your own history.
I was working on it for two years straight, and was involved in all of these details, and after we got the monument up and we started putting the names on, it was there on a Wednesday, where they hadn't gotten to the space where they were going to be adding my family name. I went back on the Thursday. I knew it was going to happen. I knew it was going to be there. But when I saw my name, Stevenson, on the monument, it still had a really profound impact on me. And I love that we can offer something like that to people who are the descendants of the enslaved and for others who have a relationship to this history, to this country who want to understand things more intimately, more personally. You don't have to be a descendant to have a powerful relationship and understanding of this history.
Charlotte Burns: How was it working with artists?
Bryan Stevenson: Yeah, it's been wonderful. We commissioned half of the pieces.
Many of the pieces existed, like Simone Leigh's and Kehinde's, and so we were able to talk to them about putting it in location. Most have been fantastic. Simone came down, was incredibly generous. I walked her through the space before there was much to see, and she saw the vision and contributed. Kwame is someone we've been working with for years and Alison Saar and so many of the other artists were just super excited about this. And so it's been fantastic. That's been one of the high points of the whole experience, is to get to work more closely and intimately with these amazingly talented people. Hank Willis Thomas came down recently, it was so wonderful to have him experience the space. We're going to be doing a big celebration on Juneteenth here in Montgomery and we're inviting all of the artists to be with us. So I'm looking forward to that.
[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]
So I'm at the end of the time here. I really don't think anything I say now is going to cover what it is to have visited because it's just too big. It's so devastating, but it's also kind of hopeful. And mostly you just get the sense this is unfinished business and it's just the beginning. I don't feel like these three sites are the only sites that are going to be here. This feels like the beginning of a total reclamation of the narrative of America. It's a much, much bigger project than the sculpture project. It's a much, much bigger project than this podcast, than my trip, than my feelings. So what I would say is come and visit and think about it.
Charlotte Burns: I have a feeling that there's much more planned. How much more can you tell us about your plans for the sites?
Bryan Stevenson: As I said, we have 11 pieces in the works, including a major piece by Charles Gaines we're very excited about that will come in later in the year. The next thing we're trying to do is to facilitate more conversation, places to process all of this. And so we're actually building something, a cultural center and an overnight space that’s called Elevation, that will open in early 2025, and there'll be a hotel rooms, but more importantly, meeting spaces for people to dialogue and discourse because we want groups to come. We want schools to come. We want companies to come and really engage and then process. Then we're going to continue to find ways to make the information we've developed more and more accessible to more and more people. We have a calendar that we put out something every day to educate people about the history of racial injustice. Folks can go to our website EJI.org to sign up for that. And we're now doing animations to bring that history to life in new ways. And we're very excited about that.
And I'm quite interested in talking about this narrative, this challenge, this burden in more global settings. And so I would like to see something happen in Africa. I would like to see more happening in Europe. I'd like to see a greater commitment from the global community implicated by this history. All of that is on the agenda. We've got a lot of other things that we're trying to do. I'm still representing people facing execution, still representing young people prosecuted as adults, still contending with the legal system that too often treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. So those are standing, continuing challenges. Our narrative agendas is still quite full and still quite ambitious.
Charlotte Burns: How do you find the time for all of this, Bryan? How do you fit it all in the day?
Bryan Stevenson: It's hard. It's really hard. The day starts very early and it tends to end very late. But I feel really privileged to do what I do. As a kid growing up, the people who sometimes had really challenging weeks and challenging days would come into the church and after the end of their testimony, they'd start singing this song where they'd say, “I wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.” And that's how I feel these days.
I'm very excited about the opportunity we have to contribute to this narrative work, to contribute to the cultural landscape. It's something I never imagined would be something I could do. And yet here we are. And so that makes it exciting, even though it is at times exhausting.
Charlotte Burns: Your path has evolved so much. You've obviously had an ability to follow that path as it's moved before you. How have you known to shift as things have moved, to have that faith in following? To go from representing people in court, to becoming more of a public figure, to writing a memoir, to opening cultural narrative spaces? That part of you that was thinking of the, “What if I was to open a museum?” If you were going to give advice to anyone thinking of following their “What if that was an idea?”, what would it be?
Bryan Stevenson: It's a really great question. I think the upside to my legal work is because we've always been in hostile environments, we've always been in spaces where people are quite resistant to what we're trying to do. We've had to think really critically about what's the best way to do this? What's the most effective way to do this? And so being strategic and tactical is something we've had to be from the very beginning because we knew where we were going and who we were representing was not going to be welcome, was not going to be favored.
And I think that's just allowed us to really step back and think in a very critical way, “Should we do this? Is this going to be effective? Is this going to work? What's going to be the obstacles? What's going to be the challenge?” And when you go through that kind of process, and you're persuaded that you should do something, you do it with the confidence that you've at least given a lot of thought to what the problems might be.
And that approach has certainly been part of what has pushed us. There's still that moment where you have to just choose to believe something you haven't seen. To do something you haven't done, to be uncomfortable. And that would be my advice, is you have to be willing to be uncomfortable. You have to be willing to do things that are inconvenient. You have to risk sometimes to achieve things that I think a community needs, a world needs, a client needs, and you shouldn't be fearful about that. I've stood with people who were pulled away and executed, and I have no regrets about being with them in that moment, affirming their humanity and dignity, even in a place that was inhumane and completely undignified. I have no regrets about that. And if anything, it was important for me that before someone was killed in that horrific way, that they knew that their life was valued at least by one person and I think I represent more than one. And so that challenge can be a real challenge. But I think when you understand your purpose, it becomes possible to do the things that might seem impossible to other people.
Charlotte Burns: You talked about how maybe 13 or so years ago, you thought Brown v. Board of Education ruling may not be upheld. I know you've said that justice is just this constant struggle. How do you feel from where you stand? You just talked about identifying the complexities. What are the challenges right now that you would advise people to think about, to guard against? If you were one of those sculptures, what are the things that we should be on guard for together?
Bryan Stevenson: Yeah. I do think this is a really difficult moment globally because there is this rise in what I call the politics of fear and anger. And you've got people all over the world that are trying to govern through fear and anger. And what they know and what we've seen historically is that when people allow themselves to be governed by fear or anger, they do start tolerating things they should never tolerate. Across the globe, I think we have to challenge the politics of fear and anger. We cannot be governed by fear. We cannot be governed by anger, and those who want to govern that way, I think we have to push back against.
We need to govern from hope and from compassion and from belief that we're capable of doing more, being more. This is the first time in my life that I'm living when we have a US Supreme Court that is quite hostile to expanding rights for the poor and the disfavored, and that means our work is going to get harder. There's a counternarrative that has emerged after a lot of the protests in 2020 that's trying to again ban books and ban teaching but I don't see that as the defining aspect of this society. Those counternarratives are responses to the forward progress of narrative. And that's always been true.
In the American South, they banned the existence of abolitionist literature in the American South. You could get killed for having a pamphlet or any of these things. That was the response. The Congress refused to pass a federal law to stop lynching because they were using everything they had to block that. During the civil rights era, you saw the white citizens councils and the reinforcement of these politicians committing deeply to segregation forever.
So the counternarratives that we're seeing in this moment are just, for me, evidence that there is this storm gathering, this momentum pushing societies in new and different ways that are unnerving people, but that's what it's going to take. And this is not a tsunami that will kill and destroy. This is a wave that will liberate and uplift and, in many ways, nurture the kind of, I think, healthy society, healthy community, healthy world that most of us want to live in. And that's what we have to keep persuading people, is that there is this better thing coming.
But I do think we have to be attentive to these politics of fear and anger because I see so much of that in the world right now.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Bryan, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Bryan Stevenson: The ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night is that we are actually going to see some really challenging retreat from these basic rights that we thought we had established. There's this kind of new desperate effort at using retreat, ignorance, denial of access to information that will be effective in some communities. We've already seen it in states across this country, and we're going to have to be attentive to that, combat that with more than what we typically like to expend. We typically like you to say, “We'll just see what happens.” We can't do that anymore.
The thing that gets me up in the morning is to know that we're now living at a time where there are narrative forces that have never existed before. There are art columnists and podcasters that are going around the world and telling important stories and talking to people that would have never been heard a generation ago. There are lawyers, there are journalists, there are teachers. These artists in our sculpture park, there wasn't a generation of artists creating art like this 60 years ago that had the freedom to do what these artists are doing. So all of that speaks to me of this new era that we can marshal and we can mobilize to do things that we've never been able to do before.
That's the exciting part of the time we're living in now.
Charlotte Burns: Bryan, I cannot thank you enough. You are truly a hero of mine and so many people. I'm an unabashed fan and so thank you so much for making this time. It's such important work and it's been a true privilege to be able to talk to you about it. And anybody who hasn't been should absolutely go. Make the time, go to Montgomery, Alabama. Take a walk.
Bryan Stevenson: Well, thank you, Charlotte. I appreciate that. I've enjoyed talking with you and appreciate the opportunity.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much, Bryan.
Bryan Stevenson: Welcome.
[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]
“Okay, I'm back where I started, under the words of Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” It feels different to read that now than it did 25 hours ago, or whenever it was I started here in Montgomery, Alabama because as you walk around this place, history is so big and so small. And it's just people doing these extraordinary, hateful or amazing things. And some of that's happening right now here in the work that's happening on these Legacy Sites, and more than any museum experience or art experience, coming here, you're really coming to witness something, which is the reclaiming of history and the reclaiming of the narrative and a big narrative. America. The American economy. The American people. Freedom. Rights. And it's an amazing thing to witness. And I'm really, really glad I came.
It's a bright blue day once again. And that's what's so amazing. The horrors of history. The sun does not set, the sun shines, no matter what cruelties go on.
I have to run, I have a plane to catch.”
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: What more can I say? My huge thanks to Bryan Stevenson and what a trip if you ever get the chance to go. If you’re enjoying this season’s ‘what ifs,’ you can delve into our back catalogue—we have fantastic conversations including Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation; the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, Koyo Kouoh; and the wonderful Kemi Ilesanmi.
Next time we’ll be talking to the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier ahead of her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The time is always now to act. The time is always now to look beyond yourself. We need to reform how we mediate and tell stories. We need to reform how we disseminate information to Americans. We need to reform our education system. We need to reform how we value photographers in this society, how we value photographers in the art world, how we value the very people who are at the bottom. We need a real reform of all these value systems. And this exhibition offers a blueprint, a pathway, and a bridge to achieving that.
Charlotte Burns: That’s such a brilliant conversation to come. Do join us next time on The Art World: What If…?!
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.
[CORRECTION] The Art World: What If...?! Season 2, Episode 13: Bryan Stevenson