Throughout his career, Bryan Stevenson’s rigorous focus on criminal justice reform and human rights has been aimed at putting himself out of a job. “Sometimes somebody will write something really kind and nice, and a young person will say, ‘I want to do what you do,’ and I’m really honored by it,” he told me recently. “But I want to create a world where nobody has to represent people on death row because we abolish the death row. I’ve always wanted to believe that we’re close to getting to a point where we can eliminate this problem.”
Humanitarian, visionary, patriot, civil rights leader, and American saint: These are just a few of the terms one hears when asking about Bryan Stevenson, 64. He is known not just for winning cases at the Supreme Court through his work with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the organization he founded in 1989 to end mass incarceration in the United States and achieve criminal justice reform, but for pioneering a new cultural landscape to address racial and economic injustice. Through a unique merging of law, information gathering, and art, he has fundamentally transformed our understanding of opportunity, equity, and justice in America.
Stevenson’s work has also expanded the scope of the philanthropic universe. When he began, fundraising for criminal justice reform was not the movement it has since become. For evidence of how radically it has changed, one need only look to the landmark work of Agnes Gund. In 2017 Gund created the Art for Justice Fund, which supports artists and advocates working to end mass incarceration and the inequality embedded in the criminal justice system, using the $165 million proceeds from the sale of her Roy Lichtenstein painting Masterpiece. Her motivation for this inspired act? Reading Stevenson’s best-selling memoir, Just Mercy, alongside Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and watching Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th.
Stevenson’s gift is understanding the power of narrative, especially how to craft stories with data. In 2015 EJI painstakingly exposed just how severely the U.S. had underestimated the number of people killed in a heinous form of injustice—the domestic terror of lynching—and its impact on cementing narratives of racial difference. When EJI released Lynching in America, a report about this history, his team received more calls and emails than they ever had before.
Most notably, Stevenson has harnessed the power of art. In 2018 EJI began constructing three sites in Montgomery, Alabama: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors the unmarked lives taken from the history of lynching; the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration; and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. Known together as the Legacy Sites, each one—through artworks, memorials, and narratives—addresses the way the history of human trafficking evolved into the racial regime of Jim Crow, which defined the narrative of who counts and who belongs in the United States.
Malike SidibeBryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative has expanded its mission over 35 years, launching groundbreaking education, anti-poverty, and legacy programs. Officine Generale pants ($560).
Since the opening of the National Memorial in 2018, more than 2 million people have visited the Legacy Sites. The demand has been so high that the Legacy Museum had to be expanded. The original building could accommodate 300 people; now it is set in a 50,000-square-foot building that can accommodate 1,200 at a time and welcomes more than half a million visitors per year.
Getting the sites built presented many challenges—especially financial ones. “I often say we didn’t take a penny of state or federal funding for any of our sites, and it sounds so dramatic,” Stevenson tells me. “The truth is, we were never offered a penny by any state or the federal government for our sites.”
Darren Walker, who is president of the Ford Foundation and a thought leader who has transformed the thesis behind the work of philanthropy, was one of the first to realize just how much support the projects would require. He recalls meeting with Stevenson in 2016 and being stunned by his “grand, almost improbable vision.”
“What kind of mind generates this kind of ambitious project in Montgomery, a place where the first Confederate White House is, as well as countless monuments to the Confederacy and no acknowledgment of the plight of enslaved people,” Walker says. “It was such a radical vision, in the best sense of the word.” He committed Ford Foundation funding that day. He had also brought a possible donor to the meeting, who arrived skeptical. That individual left committing $10 million. “That’s the power of Bryan Stevenson,” Walker says.
The revolutionary nature of Stevenson’s vision for EJI required every penny. Even acquiring the land on which the Legacy Sites now sit “always came at a higher cost than what was expected,” Stevenson says. “I’m even going to make the point: higher than what was appropriate.” The real estate had one value that was publicly disclosed, but when a private owner learned that EJI was involved, the price always increased and became “exorbitant.”
“That’s the other part of the story,” Stevenson says. “To reclaim this narrative, this history honestly, will cost us something. There’s a role for philanthropy in that. There’s a role for advocacy in that.”
“Bryan’s work, building the EJI Legacy Sites, is the most powerful 21st-century example of what philanthropy can do when it is invested in visionary, transformative leadership,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. This is high praise coming from Ifill, who helped inspire Stevenson’s idea for the memorial with her 2007 book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century.
“Philanthropic support has allowed Bryan to do work in Alabama on his own terms—an astonishing and historic feat,” Ifill says. “Rather than working within the existing frame for civil rights work in Alabama, Bryan simply rose above it and built a new framework. That is not easy. And it’s not cheap.”
“Bryan has had a tremendous impact on the urgency I have about the need to continue to evolve philanthropy toward more justice, not just charity,” Walker says. “Rockefeller and Carnegie talked about philanthropy addressing root causes, but Bryan is the person who helped me understand that the root causes of poverty and inequality are historic, systemic, and just beneath the surface of so many of the problems our country faces.”
Today most of the support for EJI comes from individual donors offering gifts from $5 to $1,000. “Donations of trust,” Stevenson calls them. But it took foundation funding and leadership to build the infrastructure that the individual donations now support. Along with Walker, Stevenson credits several others who rallied behind him early on, including Laurene Powell Jobs, who hosted an event in 2017 to introduce his work to others. “Bryan is a visionary leader who understands that the fate of the American experiment is inextricably rooted in our history,” Powell Jobs says.
Locating the Legacy Sites in Montgomery was a deliberate decision. Visitors can see the history of racial inequality in the city’s buildings and on its streets. The EJI headquarters, for example, is in a building that warehoused enslaved men, women, and children as they were trafficked and sold. The building sits on what is still called Commerce Street, the main thoroughfare for the slave trade in the city and a gateway to the rest of the South. The city was also the home of the civil rights movement, with the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott. Just blocks away is Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor.
Malike SidibeStevenson’s gift for narrative has helped reshape philanthropy. Brunello Cucinelli Turtleneck ($4,100).
For many, the Legacy Sites have become a pilgrimage site. That is very much the case for Anthony McGill, a leading soloist and principal clarinet in the New York Philharmonic. He first met Stevenson when they both received the Justice Award at John Jay College in 2016, and then again two years later at a concert in Chicago where Stevenson was playing with Wynton Marsalis. McGill remains in awe of what he saw that evening. “To have his great mind, and to also have a musical mind to sit down and play the piano with Wynton Marsalis,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. McGill has played with Marsalis himself, but he says, “I had music in front of me. Bryan just sat down and played.” They all chatted after the show, and McGill made plans that very evening to visit EJI. He didn’t know what he would encounter, but he felt called. After his experience—four hours in the Legacy Museum, and feeling broken open while at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice the next morning—he met with Stevenson in his office and was inspired to help others in the world of classical music experience what he did.
“His technique is his legal work, but the essence of what Bryan does is ask, ‘What do we hold in our hearts?’ Art lets you access that.”
For the past two years McGill has brought classical music executives, performers, educators, and arts administrators to Montgomery with him—100 the first year, 130 the next. Stevenson understands the difference between “the technology of the thing” and “the soul of the thing,” McGill says. “His technique is his legal work, but the essence of the thing—this is me thinking about what he said—is, ‘What do we hold in our hearts?’ Art lets you access that.”
In America the subject of race has long been framed as a “conversation” everyone needs to participate in. One of Stevenson’s most enduring contributions has been to issue the urgent reminder that dialogue about race is not enough. The history has to be seen, understood, and processed in public, he tells me. “The facts will lead you to a path, and that path is for everyone. It’s a path that you must navigate to get to where we’re trying to get to as a country.”
“That we both felt the pull of art doesn’t surprise me,” Sherrilyn Ifill says. “What does always leave me in awe is Bryan’s unrelenting energy and determination once he’s ‘seen the vision.’ He is at once the most sensitive, relaxed, and lovely human being, and also the most ruthless and unyielding soldier in the fight for justice.”
The work of art and culture in the cause of justice is the latest and perhaps most critical chapter in the civil rights movement of the United States. Art is what can shift the soul. The result is work that has reverberated through the nation’s cultural landscape and will stand for generations. It is one of Stevenson’s gifts to the future.
“We’re really just in the early stages of the narrative struggle,” Stevenson says. “These institutions have to live on long past when I’m gone.”
Gillian Laub/Malike Sidibe/Peggy Sirota
Photography by Malike Sidibe
Styled by Jason Rembert
In the top image: Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative has expanded its mission over 35 years, launching groundbreaking education, anti-poverty, and legacy programs. Zegna jacket.
Grooming by Vicky Steckel at Bryan Bantry. Shot at Corner Studio
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
SARAH LEWIS is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster), and the forthcoming book Vision & Justice (One World/Random House). Lewis is the editor of the award-winning volumes, “Vision & Justice” by Aperture magazine and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over 3 million views. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.
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