It’s a tumultuous time in U.S. history. Droves of immigrants, some without any criminal record, are being deported to their home countries. Primary schools and colleges have been ordered to erase any trace of the diversity, equity or inclusion programs established amid a nationwide racial reckoning. Tariffs, or a the threat of tariffs, has scrambled the stock market and spooked manufacturers, domestic and foreign.
Amid all of this, Bryan Stevenson is calling on Americans to not "be governed by fear and anger."
“When you allow yourself to be governed by fear and anger, you start tolerating things you should never tolerate,” Stevenson told The Daily Progress. “You start accepting things you should never accept. This extreme punishment, this desire to humiliate people and to deport people even when they’re not a threat to public safety and to celebrate that as if somehow that’s a great thing to do is, I think, a consequence of fear and anger.”
It is easy to lose hope right now, the prominent attorney and author acknowledged. But, speaking on the west lawn of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Albemarle County Friday on the occasion of the Founding Father’s 282nd birthday, Stevenson stressed that "hopelessness is the enemy of justice."
Stevenson would know. He has made justice his life’s work.
Stevenson was not only the keynote speaker at the annual Founder’s Day celebration at Monticello Friday, but the recipient of one of three Jefferson Medals handed out each year by the two institutions charged with carrying on Jefferson’s legacy: the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, and the University of Virginia, the college Jefferson founded. The medals recognize three individuals for their contributions to the fields Jefferson prized most: architecture, citizen leadership and the law.
Steven was awarded this year’s medal for leadership, an honor he earned for his legal advocacy for low-income minority groups as well as men and women sitting on death row — the latter work via his nonprofit organization the Equal Justice Initiative.
As of 2022, the initiative has saved more than 130 people from execution, overturning wrongful convictions and working to reduce bias in the criminal justice system.
“There are forces in our country — very loud voices, very powerful voices — that are trying to silence citizen leaders who want to talk honestly about our history,” Stevenson said, addressing a crowd of roughly 200 gathered in a tent under an overcast sky. “They believe that ignorance is better than enlightenment, that forgetting things that can teach us what we need to know is a better path forward. They want to actually ban books and limit what is taught and limit what you learn.”
“I think we have to do the opposite,” he continued. “I think to honor Jefferson means we have to be committed to the kind of honesty that creates a wise and healthy nation.”
Authentic citizen leaders are those who commit to compassion, to reconciliation and, above all, to honesty, he said. That can mean different things, Stevenson added, whether it be speaking truth in a world of mis- and disinformation or correcting the lies that have been repeated through history to support systems of oppression.
When Jefferson himself defended the creation of UVa just a few miles away from his mountaintop estate, he was adamant: "Here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead."
With that in mind, Stevenson said, “Being in this space, we cannot ignore the burden, the stain, the pain and anguish that slavery created in America — 10 million Black people enslaved for 246 years."
“I don’t think the great harm of slavery was the involuntary servitude and the forced labor and all of the cruelty," he continued. "I think the great harm of slavery was the narrative that we created to justify enslavement.”
The false narrative that Blacks and other races are inferior to Whites did not always have a foothold in American society, but had a stranglehold on it by the time of Jefferson’s death. In his own lifetime, the author of the Declaration of Independence saw support for the abolition of slavery — and even the personal manumission of slaves — deteriorate. The man who tried on multiple occasions to abolish slavery in Virginia and elsewhere eventually surrendered the fight. Jefferson himself would promote the lies of Black inferiority that would prop up slavery and then Jim Crow and later redlining that kept men and women of color oppressed in American for centuries after his death in 1826 — lies that would allow him to comfortably own humans in bondage while privately calling the institution a "hideous blot" and "moral depravity."
Stevenson provided his rapt audience Friday a succinct but profound history lesson, beginning with the persecution of 8 million Indigenous people living in North American at the time of European settlement. Dishonesty and discrimination are woven into the tapestry of American history, he said.
It’s also woven into his own family history. Stevenson’s grandmother was born to a formerly enslaved couple who lived just 60 miles away from Monticello in Caroline County.
“My grandmother left this area after her uncle was the victim of a racial terror lynching not too far from here,” said Stevenson. “That trauma was something that many people carried with them — 6 million Black people fleeing the American South during the first half of the 20th century, and we never talked about it. We were dishonest about our lawlessness in this country.”
The cycle has been interrupted, at times, by the work of citizen leaders: abolitionists in the 19th century, organizers of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century and Stevenson today.
And not just Stevenson. The attorney and author was joined Friday by Martize Tolbert, who accepted the Jefferson Medal for citizen service — a newer honor that’s been awarded every year since 2022. Tolbert accepted his medal on behalf of the Fountain Fund, where he is the national director of client and community engagement.
Founded in 2017, the national nonprofit organization offers financial assistance to the 5 million formerly incarcerated people in the U.S., a group to which Tolbert once belonged.
After spending a decade in prison, Tolbert was confronted with the obstacles that often await those who are freed after time behind bars: unemployment, financial insecurity, housing discrimination and general prejudice.
“I was told my bad decisions would define me forever,” said Tolbert. “But that’s not the truth, and I know that because of the work of people like Bryan Stevenson, who has powerfully reminded us of this: ‘Each of us is more than our worst thing that we’ve ever done.’”
Two others were awarded Jefferson Medals this week: landscape architect Walter Hood and U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler. Kneedler spoke on Thursday afternoon in the UVa School of Law’s Purcell Reading Room. Hood spoke at UVa Friday afternoon in the auditorium at Old Cabell Hall.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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