Words matter. These are the best Bryan Stevenson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If we had done the work that we should have done in the 20th century to combat our history of racial inequality, no one could win national office after demonizing people because they’re Mexican or Muslim. We would be in a place where we would find that unacceptable.
You can’t segregate and humiliate people decade after decade without creating long-lasting injuries.
The great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude or forced labor. I really believe that the true evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference that we created to justify it.
I grew up in a segregated community: I couldn’t go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town.
I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough. She was strong. She was powerful.
Slavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved.
My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.
That’s my mission: I really want to get in the heads and hearts of kids and persuade them that they can believe things they haven’t seen, they can do things that maybe others haven’t done before them, that they are more than their worst acts.
We’ve done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality… You see it in the South, but it’s everywhere.
Most parents have long understood that kids don’t have the judgment, the maturity, the impulse control and insight necessary to make complicated lifelong decisions.
Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
I believe that each person is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.
I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger.
You can’t understand what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, you can’t understand what happened to Eric Garner in New York City, without understanding this narrative of racial difference that was created during the slave years.
I’m not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth – I’ve come to believe… that the opposite of poverty is justice.
