Legendary civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson has saved more than 135 wrongly convicted prisoners on death row. He's the subject of a new documentary that looks at racism in the criminal justice system — this is his story.
True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality debuts on June 26th on HBO.
True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality debuts on June 26th on HBO.
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00:00I don't believe that the opposite of poverty is wealth.
00:02I believe that the opposite of poverty is justice.
00:06And when we do justice, we deconstruct the conditions that give rise to poverty.
00:26Very depressed and racially segregated neighborhood.
00:29He had another winter school that actually was segregated,
00:31and then he was just young enough to start going to non-segregated schools.
00:35Working in the Deep South, he came to realize that really the legacy of slavery wasn't a legacy, it was the present.
01:36I was sitting there in agony, thinking about why I do what I do.
01:41I kept thinking about how broken he was.
01:45My clients have been broken by poverty, broken by disability, broken by trauma, broken by bias and discrimination.
01:51But what I realized that night that I'd never realized before is that I do what I do because I'm broken too.
02:36I don't think we've created many places in America where we tell the history of slavery, or the history of lynching, the history of segregation,
02:43in a way that motivates everybody, black, white, brown, young, old, to feel inspired to say, never again.
02:51We have this history of racial inequality, and we've done some terrible things.
03:07I don't believe we're free yet.
03:09We're in this precious, sacred place, but we're not yet free.
03:12There's a history of racial inequality that's created a kind of smog in the air, and it's everywhere.
03:21For more UN videos visit www.un.org