Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson is the most important civil rights lawyer in America — a man who has spent his career fighting for the people the legal system was designed to forget: the wrongly convicted, the desperately poor, children sentenced to die in prison, and the mentally ill condemned to death row. His organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, has won reversals, relief, or release for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won landmark Supreme Court rulings.

Born in Milton, Delaware, in 1959, Stevenson attended Eastern University and Harvard Law School. While still a student at Harvard, he took on his first death row case and found his calling. He moved to Montgomery, Alabama — the cradle of both the Confederacy and the civil rights movement — and founded EJI in 1989.

Stevenson's 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, became a bestseller and was adapted into a film starring Michael B. Jordan. But his most ambitious project is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, opened in 2018 — the first memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching in America. Over 800 steel columns hang from the ceiling, each representing a county where a racial terror lynching took place. The memorial forces America to confront its history of racial violence with a directness that no other institution has achieved.