Quotes from Bryan Stevenson

You can't segregate and humiliate people decade after decade without creating long-lasting injuries.

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.

You can't demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth - people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.

I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.

We're all burdened by our history of racial inequality. It's created a kind of smog that we all breathe in, and it has prevented us from being healthy.

The opposite of poverty is not wealth. … In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.

There were people in the South who were ardently opposed to slavery. And maybe, if we get into truth and reconciliation, those will be the people we want to name schools and streets after.

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.

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.

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.

One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.

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.

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.

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?

It saddens me that African Americans - when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination - African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

Slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved.