Date and Time:
Location:
Address:
Bryan Stevenson
Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative
American Injustice: Mercy, Humanity, and Making a Difference
Activist attorney Bryan Stevenson’s deeply moving book Just Mercy is about mass incarceration in America and the disconnection most experience with the realities of the criminal justice system. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, primarily due to the mandatory sentencing guidelines of thewar on drugs that began in the 1980s. Mr. Stevenson, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is the Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a law professor at New York University School of Law. He has won wide acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color, having won relief for over 100 prisoners on death row. Mr. Stevenson is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the American Bar Association’s Wisdom Award, the Olof Palme Prize, and the ACLU’s National Medal of Liberty, among many others.
Stevenson’s powerful 2012 TED talk, “We need to talk about an injustice,” has been viewed nearly 3 million times, and in it he persuades us to believe that our response to pervasive injustice must be deep engagement, that a person is always more than their worst act. Recently, Stevenson’s work at the Equal Justice Initiative bends towards trying to change the conversation about race in the U.S. He terms the era between Reconstruction and World War II an era of “racial terrorism,” and he favors the concept of “transitional justice” with a focus on the process of truth and reconciliation. Layering issues of poverty on issues of race, Stevenson observes that the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth – it’s justice.
NOTE: Bryan Stevenson spoke at two FAN events on Thursday, April 7, 2016.
Event 1: 4:15 PM, Evanston Township High School Auditorium, 1600 Dodge Ave.,Evanston.
Event 2: 7:00 PM, New Trier High School, Winnetka Campus, Gaffney Auditorium, 385 Winnetka Ave., Winnetka.
Event Sponsors
- Baker Demonstration School
- Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
- James B. Moran Center for Youth Advocacy
- Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender
- Loyola University Chicago School of Law
- North Shore Country Day
- Northside College Preparatory High School
- Temple Jeremiah
- the Women’s Center at Northwestern University
Upcoming Events
How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work
Jodi Kantor
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter
Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Award-winning journalist and bestselling author
ON ZOOM
Backtalker: An American Memoir
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum
Beth E. Richie, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Black Studies and the Inaugural Chair in Social Sciences and the Humanities at The University of Illinois at Chicago
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Ph.D.
James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University
Imani Perry, JD, Ph.D.
Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute
ON ZOOM
