Americans Won’t Be Free Until We Face Our Racist History
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Civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson wants Americans to look hard at the nation’s long, ongoing history of racism ― because, he says, without an honest acknowledgment of those wrongdoings, our past will be perpetuated in our present and we won’t be free to build a better future.
Bryan Stevenson sits in front of a wall of jars filled with soil collected from lynching sites across the country. Credit: Nick Frontiero, HBO
“True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality,” a new HBO documentary coming out June 26, digs into Stevenson’s work with the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, fighting racism in the criminal justice system for over 30 years, largely by defending poor, black people on death row.
But the film goes beyond Stevenson’s own story ― much of which is told in his bestselling memoir “Just Mercy” ― and forces the viewer to confront the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S.: from Native genocide to slavery, to segregation and lynching, and up to racism in the criminal justice system today. The film argues that unless Americans look at these issues square in the eye ― and unless people in power, including law enforcement and politicians, acknowledge them publicly ― the harms of racism will endure….
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