Hi, my name is Bryan Stevenson,
and I'm the founder and executive director
of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.
I'm also the author of "Just Mercy."
This is a critical moment in our nation's history.
There is a need for reckoning with our history
of racial inequality and racial injustice
that is dramatically on display in our streets.
We are a nation that is not free.
We have been corrupted, polluted by our long history of racial injustice.
There are things we haven't talked about that we need to talk about.
We are a post-genocide society.
When Native people came to this continent,
we killed them by the millions
through famine and war and disease.
But we didn't call it genocide.
We said those Native people are savages,
and we used that rhetoric to create this ideology of white supremacy.
It allowed us to enslave black people
for two and a half centuries.
And the great evil of American slavery wasn't the involuntary servitude.
It wasn't the bondage,
It was this fiction that black people
aren't as good as white people.
That black people are less deserving,
less evolved, less capable.
And that ideology of white supremacy
survived the Civil War.
I've often argued that slavery doesn't end in 1865,
it just evolves.
We were promised freedom and the right to vote.
But what we received was terror and violence and lynching.
For nearly a century, black people were pulled out of their homes,
they were beaten, they were hanged, they were drowned.
They were menaced and traumatized.
That terrorism went uncorrected.
It would be the police sometimes that would step away
and allow the mobs to pull black people out of the jail,
where they would then literally lynch them on the courthouse lawn.
In the 1950s and '60s, courageous black people
challenged this legacy of Jim Crow and segregation,
put on their Sunday best to protest non-violently,
and they would pray and they would fight and they would march.
And they'd be on their knees sometimes
and still get battered and brutalized by police officers.
The laws changed, but that narrative persisted.
And even today there is a presumption
of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned
to black and brown people.
And you can be an actor, you can be a musician,
you can be teacher, you can be a clergy member, you can be an engineer.
It doesn't matter how hard you work or how much money you acquire,
you will go places if you're black in this country
and you'll have to navigate these presumptions of dangerousness and guilt.
I've gotten old enough to tell you
that it's exhausting.
Things need to change.
We need an era of truth and justice in America.
We need to commit ourselves to being honest about our past, to reckoning with it.
In South Africa, there was a period of truth and reconciliation.
In Rwanda, in Germany,
there has been truth and justice.
In Germany, there are no Adolf Hitler statues.
In this country, the American south
is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy.
Truth and justice is sequential.
You can't have truth and reconciliation.
You can't have truth and reparation.
You can't have truth and restoration at the same time.
These things are sequential.
You have to tell the truth
before you get to the restoration,
before you get to the reconciliation.
I'm excited because in this moment,
we have an opportunity to do more, to do better.
I believe there's something better waiting for us in America.
I think there's something that feels more like freedom,
feels more like equality, feels more like justice waiting for us.
But to get there, we're going to have to commit
to reckoning with our history,
to telling the truth about our past,
to engaging in important dialogue and conversations.
I'm excited that you are having some of those conversations,
you are part of this effort.
I want to thank you for that
and invite you all to come and see us in Montgomery.
But more than that, to invite you to continue
being part of this process to change America,
to lift up truth and justice.