Bryan Stevenson and the Memorial to Lynching Victims in Montgomery

On April 26, 2018, people began walking up a small rise in Montgomery, Alabama, into a structure unlike any other memorial in the country. Hundreds of rectangular steel columns, rusted to the color of dried blood, hang from a roof. At the entrance they stand at eye level. As the floor slopes downward, the columns rise until they hang overhead, and visitors find themselves looking up at them the way crowds once looked up at bodies hanging from trees. Each column carries the name of an American county and the names of the people lynched there. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was built by a nonprofit law office, not by a government, and the lawyer who willed it into being had spent three decades doing something that at first seems unrelated: trying to keep people off Alabama's death row.

In short: Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery in 1989 to defend people facing execution, and his work in courtrooms led him to the history of lynching. The memorial and museum EJI opened in 2018 argue that slavery, racial terror, segregation and mass incarceration are one continuous story, and that a country has to tell the truth about that story before it can repair it.

A lawyer who went south

Stevenson grew up in rural Delaware, in a community where he attended a segregated elementary school in the years after Brown v. Board of Education was supposed to have ended such things. He went to Harvard, earning degrees in law and public policy, and during law school took an internship with a group in Atlanta that represented people on death row in the South. That experience, he has said many times, changed the direction of his life. He met a condemned man about his own age and realized how few people stood between the prisoners and the execution chamber.

After graduating, Stevenson worked for that Atlanta organization and then moved to Montgomery, where in 1989 he founded the office that became the Equal Justice Initiative. Its mission was simple to state and nearly impossible to carry out: make sure that everyone facing a death sentence in Alabama had a real lawyer, and challenge the conditions and sentences that the state's courts imposed on the poor.

Alabama was a hard place to try. It had no statewide public defender system, and capital defendants were often represented by appointed lawyers with little time, money or experience. Alabama also allowed judges to override a jury's recommendation of life imprisonment and impose death instead, a practice the state did not end until 2017. Stevenson's office took cases most lawyers would have considered lost.

Walter McMillian and a town that knew

The case that made Stevenson nationally known began in Monroeville, Alabama, the small town where Harper Lee grew up and set To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1986, a young white woman named Ronda Morrison was murdered at the dry cleaner where she worked. Months passed without an arrest. Then police charged Walter McMillian, a Black man who owned a pulpwood business and who had angered some white residents by having a relationship with a white woman.

The evidence against him was thin and came mostly from a man facing his own charges. Witnesses placed McMillian at a church fish fry, miles away, at the time of the murder. He was held on death row before he was even tried. A jury convicted him and recommended life imprisonment; the judge overrode the jury and sentenced him to death.

Stevenson took the appeal. Over several years, his team found that the key witness had recanted, that prosecutors had withheld evidence and that the case had been built on pressure rather than proof. In 1993, after about six years on death row, McMillian walked free when the state dropped the charges. The story became Stevenson's 2014 book Just Mercy, and later a film.

It would be easy to tell this as a story about one bad prosecution. Stevenson tells it as something larger. Many people in Monroeville, Black and white, understood that the system had picked a convenient defendant. The town that celebrated a novel about a falsely accused Black man had produced one of its own, and the institutions meant to catch the error were the ones that made it.

Children sentenced to die in prison

EJI's work widened as the years went on. One of its most consequential efforts concerned children. In the 1990s, many states began allowing or requiring adult sentences for teenagers, and some imposed life without the possibility of parole on people convicted of crimes committed at fourteen or fifteen.

Stevenson argued before the Supreme Court in Miller v. Alabama, decided in 2012. The Court held that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for people who were under eighteen at the time of their crimes violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, because judges must be able to consider youth and its characteristics. That decision, and a 2016 ruling making it retroactive, opened the way to resentencing hearings for many people who had been told as children that they would die in prison.

He also kept working on individual cases that seemed hopeless. Anthony Ray Hinton spent about three decades on Alabama's death row for two murders he did not commit, convicted largely on a flawed claim that bullets matched his mother's revolver. EJI's work led to his release in 2015 after the state dropped the case. It is hard to sit with that number. A man went into prison in his twenties and came out nearly sixty.

From the courtroom to the history

Stevenson has explained that the more cases he handled, the more he noticed a pattern. The presumption of guilt that followed his clients into courtrooms, the casual acceptance of their deaths, the way juries and judges treated Black defendants and Black victims differently: none of it began with the modern criminal justice system. It had roots.

So EJI started researching. Its staff spent years combing newspaper archives, court records and local histories to document racial terror lynchings: public killings, often attended by crowds, meant to terrorize Black communities and enforce racial hierarchy. In 2015 the organization published a report documenting thousands of such lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction and the middle of the twentieth century, a count higher than earlier scholarly tallies, and it later extended the research to other states.

The report made an argument that a list of names alone could not. Lynching, it said, was not random mob violence. Many victims were killed for accusations that were never proven or for breaking racial customs, such as speaking out or failing to step aside. The violence drove millions of Black Southerners to leave for the North and West during the Great Migration. And in many communities, the killings were never acknowledged at all. There were markers for Confederate soldiers on courthouse lawns and nothing for people killed a few yards away.

What the memorial asks of visitors

The memorial is designed to make the scale of that history physical. Each county where EJI documented a lynching has its own steel monument. Near the hanging columns, identical duplicates lie on the ground like coffins. The idea is that each county will come and claim its monument and install it at home, and that the ones left behind will say something about the places that have not yet faced their past.

EJI paired the memorial with the Legacy Museum, which traces a line from the domestic slave trade, which had a major hub in Montgomery, through lynching and segregation to mass incarceration. Before the museum opened, EJI had also begun installing historical markers about the slave trade and lynchings around the country and collecting jars of soil from lynching sites, each labeled with a victim's name and date, a project that brings descendants and local residents to dig together. In 2024 the organization opened another site in Montgomery, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, focused on the lives of enslaved people and their resistance.

The critics deserve a fair hearing here. Some people have argued that focusing on the darkest chapters of American history encourages division or guilt rather than progress. Others, including some historians, have raised questions about how a private organization chooses which events to count and how to present them. Those are reasonable questions about any public history project.

Stevenson's answer is that truth-telling is the first step toward reconciliation, not a substitute for it. He often points to countries that have built memorials to their own atrocities: Germany's remembrance of the Holocaust, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Rwanda's genocide memorials. The aim, in his telling, is not shame for its own sake. It is the kind of honesty that lets people who disagree about the present share a common understanding of the past. And the memorial's visitors have included many white Southerners who came on their own, some of them descendants of people who stood in those crowds.

The line from lynching to sentencing

The hardest part of Stevenson's argument, and the part most relevant to criminal justice reform, is the connection he draws between that history and today's prisons. He does not claim that a modern prosecutor is a lynch mob. His claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: that a society which spent generations treating Black Americans as presumptively dangerous built habits of mind that did not disappear when the lynchings stopped.

He points to the death penalty itself. The Supreme Court in McCleskey v. Kemp in 1987 considered a study showing that in Georgia, defendants accused of killing white victims were far more likely to be sentenced to death than those accused of killing Black victims. The Court assumed the study was valid and upheld the sentence anyway, holding that a defendant had to prove intentional discrimination in his own case. Stevenson has called that decision a turning point that allowed racial disparities to persist without a legal remedy.

He also points to how many people in prison are poor, and how much of the system turns on whether a defendant can afford a lawyer who has time to investigate. The common thread is not one villain. It is a system that, left alone, reproduces the outcomes its history built into it.

This is where his most famous line comes in. In his book and his talks, Stevenson has said that "each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done." It is an argument for mercy, but also a practical one. If people are more than their worst act, then sentences that write them off forever, and systems that assume the worst about whole groups, are mistakes a society can correct.

The death penalty in Alabama has not stood still either. In January 2024 the state carried out the first execution in the country using nitrogen gas. The man executed, Kenneth Smith, had survived a failed attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2022, and at his trial the jury had voted for a life sentence, which the judge overrode under the practice the state later abolished. Alabama ended judicial override for future cases, but not for people already sentenced that way. For EJI, cases like his are the reason the history and the present belong in the same building.

Proximity

Stevenson often tells audiences that change requires getting close to the people affected, that you cannot understand a problem from a distance. In practice, that means visiting the prison, sitting in the courtroom, listening to the family of the victim and the family of the defendant, and noticing who is absent from the room where decisions get made.

That idea fits the memorial. It is in Montgomery, not on the National Mall. To see it, most people have to travel to a place where the history happened, walk through a city that was both a capital of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the bus boycott, and stand under names that might belong to someone's great-grandparent.

There is a lesson in it for anyone who wants to change criminal justice. The reforms that last are rarely written at a distance. They come from public defenders, families, survivors and formerly incarcerated people who know where the system fails because they have lived inside it.

What you can do

• Find the people near you who do this work. The organizations directory lists justice reform, civil-rights and legal aid nonprofits by state, including groups that represent people facing long sentences and help families through the system.
• Ask your state legislators where your state stands on the death penalty, juvenile sentencing and second-look laws that let judges revisit long sentences. Enter your address on the representatives page to get their phone numbers and contact forms and see their latest votes.
• Follow the Supreme Court's criminal cases on Court Watch, which lists this term's opinions with the Court's own summaries and the emergency docket, where many execution-related applications land.
• Look into whether your county has a historical marker for local lynching victims, or a community remembrance effort that could use volunteers. Local libraries and historical societies are often the place to start.
• Keep up with criminal justice reform reporting on sentencing, exonerations and the death penalty.