The Life of Civil Rights Hero Bryan Stevenson

Brut America

Legendary civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson has saved more than 135 wrongly convicted prisoners on death row. He's the subject of a new documentary that looks at racism in the criminal justice system — this is his story.  True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality debuts on June 26th on HBO.

Transcript

00:00I don't believe that the opposite of poverty is wealth.

00:02I believe that the opposite of poverty is justice.

00:06And when we do justice, we deconstruct the conditions that give rise to poverty.

00:26Very depressed and racially segregated neighborhood.

00:29He had another winter school that actually was segregated,

00:31and then he was just young enough to start going to non-segregated schools.

00:35Working in the Deep South, he came to realize that really the legacy of slavery wasn't a legacy, it was the present.

01:36I was sitting there in agony, thinking about why I do what I do.

01:41I kept thinking about how broken he was.

01:45My clients have been broken by poverty, broken by disability, broken by trauma, broken by bias and discrimination.

01:51But what I realized that night that I'd never realized before is that I do what I do because I'm broken too.

02:36I don't think we've created many places in America where we tell the history of slavery, or the history of lynching, the history of segregation,

02:43in a way that motivates everybody, black, white, brown, young, old, to feel inspired to say, never again.

02:51We have this history of racial inequality, and we've done some terrible things.

03:07I don't believe we're free yet.

03:09We're in this precious, sacred place, but we're not yet free.

03:12There's a history of racial inequality that's created a kind of smog in the air, and it's everywhere.

03:21For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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