Bryan Stevenson highlights racism, inequity in criminal justice system in Stanford talk

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, brought his rallying cry for justice to Stanford on Wednesday as he discussed the motivations and challenges behind his decades-long advocacy for the poor and incarcerated.

"We are all carrying this illness, this disruption that has created a narrative of racial indifference, and because of that, we continue to suffer," Stevenson said, referring to how the legacy of slavery continues to haunt our society.

"Slavery has not ended; it's evolved."

As such, Americans need to resurrect the narrative about race because the consequent problems of bias persist not only in the criminal justice system but also in our daily lives, he said.

"On Monday, I won't get to celebrate Martin Luther King Day because in Alabama, it's Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day," he said, adding how 59 markers of the Confederacy remain in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

Stevenson, author of the New York Times bestseller Just Mercy, is a public interest lawyer whose efforts and leadership have resulted in major legal victories eliminating unfair sentencing and confronting abuse of the incarcerated. He is a law professor at New York University and a graduate of Harvard Law School.

His talk, "Just Mercy: Race and the Criminal Justice System," marked the 11th Annual Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Speaker Lecture at Stanford and was jointly sponsored by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the university's new OpenXChange initiative.

In addition to the 600 audience members who filled Cemex Auditorium for the lecture, nearly 900 others tuned in to the live webcast of the event, which is still available for viewing.

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