Bryan Stevenson on America’s Retreat from Racial Justice
Katie Couric
September 25, 2025
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kT_NVj14qw&t=11s
Next Question with Katie Couric
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.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
He initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which honors the names of each of the over 4,000 African Americans lynched in the twelve states of the South from 1877 to 1950. He argues that the history of slavery and lynchings has influenced the subsequent high rate of death sentences in the South, where it has been disproportionately applied to minorities. A related museum, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, will offer interpretations to show the connection between the post-Reconstruction period of lynchings to the high rate of executions and incarceration of people of color in the United States.
A graduate of Eastern College (now Eastern University), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, he has won the American Bar Association's Wisdom Award for public service, the ACLU's National Medal of Liberty (1991), aMacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award (1995), the Reebok Human Rights Award (1989), the Thurgood Marshall Medal of Justice (1993), the Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award (2000), the Olof Palme Prize (2000), Stanford Law School's National Public Service Award (2010), and the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers named him the Public Interest Lawyer of the Year (1996). He has received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and Georgetown University Law School. In addition to directing the Equal Justice Initiative, he has been a visiting professor of law at the University of Michigan School of Law and lecturer at Harvard and Yale Law Schools.
He is a co-recipient of the 2009 Gruber Prize for Justice. The Gruber Foundation Justice Prize is presented to individuals or organizations for contributions that have advanced the cause of justice as delivered through the legal system. The award is intended to acknowledge individual efforts, as well as to encourage further advancements in the field and progress toward bringing about a fundamentally just world. In 2010, the NAACP honored Stevenson by awarding him the William Robert Ming Advocacy Award for the spirit of financial and personal sacrifice displayed in his legal work.
He spoke at TED2012 in Long Beach, California, and received a standing ovation.[3] Following his presentation, over $1 million was raised by attendees to fund a campaign run by Stevenson to end the practice of putting children in adult jails and prisons.
In November of 2018, Stevenson received the Benjamin Franklin Award from the American Philosophical Society as a "Drum major for justice and mercy" . This is the most prestigious award the society gives for distinguished public service.
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)
When the United States Congress eliminated funding for death-penalty defense for lower income people after Republicans gained control in the 1994 mid-term elections, Stevenson converted the center and founded the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery. In 1995 he was an awarded a MacArthur grant and put all the money toward supporting the center. He guaranteed a defense of anyone in Alabama sentenced to the death penalty, as it was the only state that did not provide legal assistance to people on death row.[8] It also has the highest per capita rate of death penalty sentencing.
Bryan Stevenson has been particularly concerned about overly harsh sentencing of persons convicted of crimes committed as children, under the age of 18. The US Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons (2005) that the death penalty was unconstitutional for persons convicted of crimes committed under the age of 18. Stevenson worked to have the court's thinking about appropriate punishment broadened to related cases applying to children convicted under the age of 17.
EJI mounted a litigation campaign to gain review of cases in which convicted children were sentenced to life-without-parole, including in cases without homicide. In Miller v. Alabama (2012), the US Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision that mandatory sentences of life-without-parole for children 17 and under were unconstitutional; their decision has affected statutes in 29 states. In 2016, the court ruled in Montgomery v. Louisiana that this decision had to be applied retroactively, potentially affecting the sentences of 2300 people nationwide who had been sentenced to life while still children.
By August 2016, EJI has saved 125 men from the death penalty. In addition, it has represented poor people, defended people on appeal and overturned wrongful convictions, and worked to alleviate bias in the criminal justice system.
Bryan Stevenson: "The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war" on history of racism
by David Morgan
June 24, 2019
CBS News
Bryan Stevenson, an attorney and the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative who is the subject of the new HBO documentary "True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality," says that it is imperative that Americans confront the brutal, ugly truth of our country's history.
"We need to understand the greater evil of American slavery wasn't involuntary servitude and forced labor; it was this idea that black people aren't as good as white people, that they're not fully human. The Supreme Court said we're three-fifths human, and that created this ideology of white supremacy that we never addressed. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. They weren't required to repudiate and acknowledge the wrongfulness of bigotry and slavery. They actually glorified that era, and that created a century where black people were pulled out of their homes, beaten, drowned, hanged in this era of terrorism, but we haven't talked about it."
The new documentary includes his fight to create the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country's only memorial dedicated to lynching victims.
Stevenson said that, in order to address America's racial history, "We have to acknowledge that we are in a space that is polluted by our failure to deal honestly, and we have to make a commitment to that. Then we have to learn the details [of history]. We've lynched thousands of black people in this country for the first half of the 20th century. Six million black people fled the American South as refugees from terror and violence. It wasn't, you know, the Klan, it was people unmasked – law enforcement officers, teachers, criminal justice officials that tolerated lawlessness and mob violence – and we haven't acknowledged any of that. So, we're going to have to do that. The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard
"That's why we've opened this memorial. Most people in this country can't name a single African-American lynched between 1877 and 1950. And that's wrong."
"And then we're going to have to deal with this narrative legacy," Stevenson continued. "In Germany you can't go 200 meters without seeing a marker or stone placed next to the home of a Jewish victim. They want you to go to the Holocaust Memorial. We haven't created that in this country."
"Once the country acknowledges something, the question becomes, do you apologize for it?" said co-host Tony Dokoupil. "You pointed out in the documentary there's a lack of apology in our political culture today."
"I think we sometimes think when we say we're sorry that makes us weak," Stevenson said. "I actually think apology is the way you get strong. Show me two people who've been in love for 50 years – they've learned how to navigate the mistakes, that saying 'I'm sorry' is how you build trust. It's critical. We haven't done that. Even after the 1960s when we passed the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, we rushed to get past that without dealing with all of the damage that was done during that era.
"I grew up in a community where those signs, 'White' and 'Colored,' weren't directions, they were assaults. They created injuries. My parents were humiliated every day, and we haven't dealt with that."
Co-host Gayle King asked, "What do you say to people like Mitch McConnell and others that say this happened long ago, the people that are living today have nothing to do with the sins created back then?"
"We are still dealing with this," Stevenson replied. "There's a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to black and brown people. That's why we've have so many of these police shootings. That's why we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. It's why people like Anthony Ray Hinton, who's in the film, were wrongly convicted and condemned. And so that consequence of this history is everywhere. The projection is that one in three male black babies is expected to go to jail or prison."
Dokoupil said, "Part of the reason that's possible is because we've built a criminal justice system and a prison system that can house all those people, and one reason is the 1994 crime bill which subsidized the building of those jails and prisons. Should Joe Biden, who was a key sponsor of that bill and voted for it, apologize for it?"
"I think all of us need to take responsibility for the fact that we allowed this narrative of fear and anger, the politics of fear and anger, to replace the anger and resistance to civil rights," Stevenson said. "That's how we went from 300,000 people in jails and prisons to three million today. When we try to make this one person's responsibility, we miss the mark.
"We are all complicit in the way we have created mass incarceration. We tolerate the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and we all have a role to play in deconstructing that. I don't want to excuse anybody who was voting for the '94 act, but I do want to make us appreciate that this is a larger problem than just one act. It is a consequence of a legacy that we haven't addressed."
King said, "Part of the documentary shared your personal story, which I was also moved by, about why you do this work. It's so thankless. You receive a lot of criticism. Why, when you get beaten down, do you keep getting up and doing it?"
"I'm standing on the shoulders of people who did so much more with so much less," he replied. "I live in Montgomery, Alabama in the shadow of the advocacy of Rosa Parks and Dr. King and Jo Ann Robinson. I am just empowered by what they did. I wouldn't be here if lawyers hadn't come into our community to open up the schools that were segregated so that I could go to high school and college. I'm standing on those shoulders and I just feel an obligation to carry on this tradition, because there are too many other children in this country that would be denied their opportunities until we change and create new justice."
The documentary "True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality" debuts on HBO, HBO Go and HBO Now on Wednesday, June 26. To watch a trailer click on the video player below.
True Justice (2019) | Official Trailer | HBO
HBO
https://eji.org/news/fort-bragg-north-carolina/
“If a northern population…settled in Louisiana tomorrow, they would discover that they must till the land by the labour of the black race, and the only mode of making [them] work was to hold them in a condition of involuntary servitude.”1
Bragg added that, to prevent the abolition of slavery, he would fight against the Union “as long as he had a drop of blood in his body.”2
The Horrors of Slavery
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Southern enslavers like Braxton Bragg defended slavery as a benevolent system that benefitted enslaved Black people. Records from the era paint a much different picture, revealing American slavery as a system that was always dehumanizing and barbaric, and often bloody, brutal, and violent.
Enslavers had complete power over the Black men, women, and children legally recognized as their property—enslavers could force enslaved people to marry against their will, and enslaved people could do nothing when their spouses or children were sold away. Enslaved families were regularly and easily separated at an enslaver’s whim, never to see each other again.
Enslaved laborers faced constant surveillance, threats of violence, and the prospect of torture or death for failing to complete assigned tasks, visiting a spouse living on another plantation, learning to read, arguing with white people, working too slowly, possessing anti-slavery materials, or trying to prevent the sale of their relatives.
Before the start of the Civil War, Braxton Bragg was earning today’s equivalent of $1 million a year by exploiting the labor of enslaved Black people. He owned a 1,600-acre plantation in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, where he enslaved more than 100 people to do the backbreaking work of sugarcane cultivation. He named the slave labor camp “Bivouac,” a military term for a temporary encampment under little or no shelter.3
Conditions on sugarcane plantations like Bragg’s were especially brutal and often deadly. Enslaved men, women, and children were forced to work as many as 18 hours straight to plant, cut, crush, and boil the cane amidst hazards like snake-infested fields, open furnaces, and grinding iron rollers.4
To protect his investment in slavery, Bragg eagerly joined the Confederate cause and led Louisiana state troops in seizing a federal fort weeks before the state formally seceded. After the war ended in the Confederacy’s defeat, the federal government confiscated Bragg’s Louisiana plantation.5
Battlefield Failure
Born to a family of enslavers in North Carolina, Bragg was an Army commander in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. He forced several people he enslaved to go with him on the campaign—one was killed and another severely wounded. One person he enslaved managed to escape to freedom in Mexico during the conflict.6
Bragg was not popular among his troops and was court-martialed for disrespecting his superior officers. He ordered a firing squad to execute for “desertion” a 19-year-old soldier who had gone home to see his widowed mother. One of his own soldiers tried to kill him by putting a 12-pound artillery shell under his cot; the shell exploded but Bragg was not injured.
During the Civil War, Bragg served as a commander of Confederate forces. He eventually resigned after a humiliating defeat to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863 and became an advisor to Jefferson Davis. In that role, he issued orders on behalf of the Confederate president requiring that Black Union soldiers taken as prisoners of war be returned to their former enslavers and re-enslaved.7
In 1864, Bragg ordered Confederate troops to “surprise and capture if possible a garrison of Negro Soldiers” at Fort Pocahontas, Virginia, near Jamestown, where members of the U.S. Colored Troops were garrisoned. The rebel attack was repelled.
Honoring a Champion of Slavery
Despite Bragg’s poor track record as a military leader and legacy as a notorious enslaver and defender of racial hierarchy, Camp Bragg was established in 1918 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and became Fort Bragg in 1922.
For decades, the choice to name U.S. military bases after individuals who defended slavery and showed contempt for the lives and capabilities of Black soldiers has been criticized as divisive, dishonorable, and antithetical to democratic values.
In the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2021, a bipartisan majority of Congress voted overwhelmingly to end this painful legacy and established a Naming Commission to rename or remove all military assets that commemorate Confederate traitors.
In 2022, the commission recommended new names for nine Army bases, including Fort Bragg, which was officially redesignated as Fort Liberty in June 2023.
The renaming of Fort Bragg represented an acknowledgment of the name’s harm to decades of Black service members and community members.
“America should not have vestiges of slavery and secessionism and celebrate them,” Army veteran Isiah James, a senior policy officer at the Black Veterans Project, told PBS. “We should not laud them and hold them up and venerate them to where every time a Black soldier goes onto the base, they get the message that this base Bragg is named after someone who wanted to keep you as human property.”
Less than two years later, this progress was reversed.
In March 2025, at the urging of President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that Bragg’s name be restored to the base. To get around federal law, which prohibits naming military installations for people who fought against the U.S., the Defense Department said it was naming the base after Pvt. Roland L. Bragg, an infantryman in World War II.
But the Trump administration has been clear that its goal is to reimpose the names of insurrectionists who killed U.S. soldiers to defend slavery.
“This is about restoring all bases to their original names,” Hegseth told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing earlier this year.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised, “We’re going to change the name back to Fort Bragg.” In June 2025, President Trump gave a speech at the base, where he told service members, “Fort Bragg is in. That’s the name. And Fort Bragg it shall always remain.”
