Bonnie Boswell Reports | Bryan Stevenson and Pastor James Lawson

(singing) Wade in the water Wade in the water.

Children.

Wade in the water.

God's going travel the water.

Wade in water.

Wade in the water.

Hello.

I'm Bonnie Boswell.

Today I'm going to introduce you to two men generations apart who have been in the vanguard of the social justice movement.

Now, I grew up in segregated Kentucky and segregated Chicago, so I know firsthand racism can stare you in the face.

But in the 1970s, eighties and nineties, it was sometimes harder to call out.

My brother, an off duty policeman, in Chicago, was killed by a white officer.

He was trying to help.

Bill was shot six times.

They called it friendly fire.

But let's fast forward to 2020.

The murder of George Floyd and others killed by police just sickened people.

Many Americans and people throughout the world said, "enough."

"No more standing on the sidelines."

"What can I do?"

Pastor Jim Lawson and attorney Bryan Stevenson are two people I think have real answers.

In 1960, Jim taught college students like the young John Lewis, later known as Congressman John Lewis, the philosophy and strategy of nonviolent protest.

They desegregated downtown Nashville in just ten days.

Martin Luther King called this a model of a movement.

He also called Jim the leading nonviolent theorist in the world.

Martin said quietly to me, "Don't wait."

"Come now."

"We need you."

From then till now, Jim has fought for justice and equality.

I consider him my personal mentor.

Bryan is a new hero of the movement and the subject of a movie Just Mercy He is a lawyer who specializes in getting people out of jail for crimes they did not commit.

He has helped overturn laws that allow juveniles to serve life sentences.

He founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

These spaces use art and storytelling to help Americans come to terms with our history of enslavement, lynching and segregation as steps toward reconciliation.

I want of these men to come together to give their perspective on today's challenges and to help us strengthen our resolve to work for the common good.

Jim and Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

You both have been working for social justice for years.

I mean, this is hard and often frustrating work.

So I want to know, how were you able to work for justice year after year?

I got into this work when I went to death row in the 1980s as a law student and was put in a small area with a condemned man.

We started talking and it turned out we were exactly the same age.

I was a law student at Harvard Law School.

And after 3 hours, the guards got mad because I hadn't ended the visit.

And they came in the room and they took this man and they threw him against the wall.

They put his arms back and they put the handcuffs back on his wrists.

They wrapped the chain around his waist.

They put the shackles on his ankles and they were treating him so violently.

And I begged them to be gentler, but they ignored me.

And the thing he did then shaped my career.

I'm pressing on the upward way New heights.

I'm gaining every day.

And I knew that my journey was tied to his journey because I realize that if he can't get to higher ground, I can't get to higher ground.

And it radicalized my interest in the law.

I went back to Harvard Law School.

You couldn't get me out of the law school.

Library because I needed to know everything.

Jim, you started the practice of nonviolence when you were only ten years old.

A white boy called you the N-word and you hit him.

But your mother later said, "Jimmy, there must be a better way."

So you found a better way.

The way of nonviolence.

I want to know, how have you persevered for more than 80 years.

So the fight against evil wrong, injustice is not merely something that I have come to do because I want to do it.

No, it's because for human beings to come alive and to reflect the glory of life, these oppressive systems from the past, which none of us have created, must be demolished and allow us to replace them with new ways in and for our total human community.

Part of my own inside cultivation has come from that because at age four in my dad's church in Massillon, Ohio, I knew the spiritual "Wade in the Water."

I knew the spiritual "Go Down, Moses."

I knew the spiritual "Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep No More."

I knew "Steal Away to Jesus."

Now, some in the past have dismissed spirituals as being too passive.

But Jim, you remind us these songs were used to signal when it was safe for enslaved people to escape.

These were protest songs, songs of peace and hope.

All of those songs were sung in the middle of slavery, but as a part of the way by which the slave oriented his or her own life in the direction of equality, freedom justice and hope.

I'm just so pleased to hear Reverend Lawson talk, though, because I think what he's articulating is a kind of truth about this kind of spiritual yearning that sustains you and I relate so much to growing up.

I grew up in a segregated community where black kids couldn't go to the public schools.

You know, we were marginalized.

We couldn't go to the polls.

But in the black church, there were these places where you were allowed to feel fully human, fully whole.

My first favorite songs as a child in Kentucky were spirituals.

But I was also inspired by the dignity of family members who refused to allow segregation to change them.

Now, when my uncle Whitney Young, was a boy, he got angry when a restaurant owner told him and friends they would have to eat outside because they were black.

But when Uncle Whitney reported this insult to my grandfather, he said, "Son, never let anyone drag you so low as to hate them."

"And don't get angry.

Get smart."

Well, these became our family mottos, standards of behavior Uncle Whitney used when he became one of the Big Six leaders during the 1960s civil rights movement.

This idea of never giving in to anger but still pushing for justice we can see today.

We see it in the George Floyd protests, the largest protest to date in U.S. history.

And 95% of them were peaceful.

Black Lives Matter carried on more than 5000 demonstrations in more than 2500 locations involving more than 15 to 25 million people to have a BLM demonstrating in the streets which therefore causes the conversation publicly around the dismantling of the wrongs that torture far too many people.

Erica Chenowich which a Harvard University she and many others are saying that the violence came mostly from the culture of violence from antifa from looters, from anarchists.

And I've talked to those such people for 20 or 30 years up and down the West Coast and the nonviolent struggle allows for a conversation that is authentic that gets to the heart of the matter, to the soul of the matter and allows us to make progress while it retains its humanity and its inclusive compassion for itself and for all others, for all the neighbors that, incidentally, is the heart of good religion.

Given all the tension we see in the world and the divisiveness, why is the philosophy of nonviolence still important to talk about this moment?

Well, we continue to see racial injustice.

You see unarmed black people being shot by the police.

You see people in power using that power to find new ways to disenfranchize the poor.

You see communities of color being targeted by those who hate.

It's very easy to have that same emotional response to wanting to do something reactive that is violent.

But we have to remember the source of that power that that Reverend Lawson is such a powerful architect for, because it is the thing that allows us to get to someplace better.

It's the thing that allows us to save ourselves and save our communities.

And save our states and save our nation.

There's an example of the transformative power of nonviolence.

And David Halberstam's book, The Children.

It's a book about your work in Nashville, Jim.

Halberstam writes, On the day of the Nashville sit in, John Lewis admitted he was scared to go to jail.

But your workshops taught him because he stood for was noble and that he would be protected.

So after his release from jail later that day, John Lewis said, I didn't feel small any longer.

I never had that much dignity.

It was something exhilarating So tell us about the kind of personal growth that he's talking about.

Jim.

I've come to acknowledge that nonviolent struggle is the way that we human beings can best see our own life transformed on a regular basis in our learning.

But the way in which even those with whom we vigorously disagree have the space to engage in the same essential characteristic of the human journey, normally change personal and social and political change.

That sometimes is conflictive and hard.

But with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, Martin Luther King Junior introduced into the American popular scene nonviolent struggle.

So Bryan Stevenson's Work Equal Justice Initiative is a piece of work that batters away at the way in which racism has criminalized too many people all the time, and his work helps to emancipate them.

That is constructive work.

That is a part of the methodology of nonviolence.

Now Brian, you've said one thing we overlook is that enslaved African people never doubted their humanity.

They maintained their sense of self before, during and after enslavement.

So why do you think that's important?

And when emancipated black people at the end of slavery made the choice not to retaliate against the enslavers, not to seek vengeance against the enslavers, which you could certainly understand them wanting to do, they revealed a commitment to this country, to a new to a new America, to a new society.

And they committed themselves by 1867.

80% of black men had registered to vote black people accepted the call to elected office.

We sent African-Americans to Congress.

We believed in education.

Black schools started forming.

Howard University, Alabama State University.

As soon as black people got freedom, they began investing in education.

There was this commitment to family that we haven't acknowledged and all of that expressed a kind of humanity that was well understood within the black community.

And as we came out of that period, you began to see some people learning things that they didn't understand before.

And that reckoning started to take shape.

Now that we're having to reckon with the full humanity, the basic humanity and dignity of every person and the complexity of that is manifesting itself with more diversity, with more challenges to inequality and bigotry.

So what you're saying reminds me of the words of the poet Langston Hughes.

He said, America was never America to me.

And yet I swear, this oath America will be.

Hughes is saying that despite decades of mistreatment, black people still believe in the American dream of equality.

And not only that, he himself is determined to make that dream a reality.

And in that same way, when we see black, brown, women and so on pursue education, the right to vote, the right to better health care, this moves the ball forward for everybody.

We have millions of people think that white civilization is the hope of the human family and that it's being threatened now by the increasing visibility of the Asian, of the Hispanic, the Black have in many ways allowed their humanity to be deformed.

I maintain that there are four historic streams in America that have taught many, many people the spiritual poisons that hurt us today.

Racism, sexism, violence and plantation capitalism.

All four of these have a common theme that I'm superior and you are worthy of my mistreatment.

Male chauvinism teaches that the female gender is an inferior species of humanity.

Violence teaches that some people cannot be managed or controlled except through violence.

Plantation capitalism has consistently taught that most people are a piece of property and a commodity, and that only wealth allows a person to be human.

So what I'm trying to suggest is that the very structures we are trying to resist are the big teachers that judge some people as being worthy of inequality and injustice.

And some people need to be feared.

Well, I would argue that structures come from people's minds, so we have to challenge our way of thinking.

Greed fuels the exploitation of people and natural resources.

But greedy people don't become happy.

They just want more and it's never enough.

So this requires a change of mindset.

I once heard a president of the United States say that the poor are poor because of bad decisions.

How wrong that is, but how convenient that has been in the United States for too long.

Most poor people are poor and because of injustice, because of the heritage of slavery and bad wages for working people, and seeing ordinary people as a commodity and not as a living, breathing career eating singularity of life.

Bryan, if we agree, we want to disrupt the cycles of poverty and disenfranchisement what does that really look like to you?

What I believe is that the opposite of poverty isn't wealth.

I believe the opposite of poverty is justice.

When my dad died a few years ago, he died not owning the house that he built in the 1950s.

He fought in the Korean War.

He came back from Korea and he wanted access to the resources that the GI Bill gave white veterans.

But he didn't get those black veterans, didn't get access to mortgages and loans.

They didn't get the help that they needed to create families that would actually be able to pass wealth.

White veterans built homes and could leave those homes to their children, could begin to create wealth.

We don't want to just see banks do better with regard to diversity, equity and inclusion.

We want banks to actually repair the damage that has been done by denying equity and loans and resources to poor and minority communities.

I don't know why every African-American isn't automatically registered to vote in Alabama when they become of age.

It's the thing that we would do that would show a commitment to repairing a century and a half of disenfranchisement and instead of making that commitment, we've actually just found new ways to create barriers to voter registration for black folks.

And then we say, Oh, it's not about racism.

We act as if that's not connected to this history.

And if a corporation puts toxins in a river, they can't just come and say, Oh, we won't do it anymore.

They have to clean up that river.

They have to make whole the people that they made sick somehow in the justice context, we haven't actually had the conversation about what we do to repair the damage created by systems of impoverishment and devaluation.

And that's the moment that I think we're going to have to reckon with.

When we do that.

Not only do we make it better for those who have been historically excluded and marginalized but we make it better for everybody.

We actually create the kind of equity, the kind of community that allows us to have real fellowship with one another, real understanding of one another.

And that's the vision behind the beloved community that Reverend Lawson talked so powerfully about.

So repairing the damage is the key but there's another idea we want to lift up.

During the years you and I work together, Jim, you always said we could improve life in this country if we embrace the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the idea that all people are created equal, that we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, it must be said that many of the framers of the declaration, like Thomas Jefferson, enslaved people, and that that is the essential American paradox, this gap between democratic ideals and practice.

What I hear you saying is that the concept of equality is central to our identity as a nation and should become our point of unity.

I think if there's something that troubles me greatly, is the extent to which we have not made that Declaration of Independence preamble a very a widespread part of our talking and our education.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

That's a massive statement that was adopted by the 13 Colonies.

It is a theological spiritual, philosophical, political statement.

When I look at America, it seems to me we're still falling for the playbook of "divide and conquer" again.

Racist talk in the past and in the present distracts many poor people from identifying the source of their trouble.

As Jim says, the working poor can't put food on the table because of unfair wages and affordable housing and the lack of good childcare.

Those things are the work of people who have power policymakers, not other marginalized people.

That's part of the challenge that we face, is to get people to understand that there is something healing in truth telling.

You're not going to get to justice.

You're not going to get to reconciliation until you commit to truth telling.

What happened indigenous people when Europeans came to this continent was a genocide, and we haven't talked about that.

The legacy of Jim Crow, you know, which destroyed and crushed so many aspirations, but also created this comfort level with racial hierarchy and bigotry and discrimination that we're still trying to deal with.

That's why we've opened the museum in Montgomery.

That's why we built a memorial in Montgomery.

That's why I want people to read the teachings and writings of Reverend Lawson.

That's why I want them to understand the heart of the civil rights movement.

It is not just because I'm nostalgic.

I believe that that knowledge of that institution, of that commitment, of that struggle is essential for helping us to find our way forward.

And I get excited when I talk about it because I believe in what it can achieve for us in this moment.

So we, the people, have to stop falling for the distraction, the divide and conquer.

Okeydoke.

Honestly, I think it starts by appreciating how much we humans have in common with each other.

I mean, 99% of our DNA is literally the same as the person sitting in front of us or the person across town from us.

And that other 0.1%.

Well, that's slight difference, is to be celebrated.

Honestly, diversity makes life interesting.

Now, Bryan you believe in the power of information.

Also, the truth will set us free.

So I want you to talk about that.

It's interesting, in our public discourse, we don't actually talk about things like love as a as a centering value in a community.

But I think we should but we've become so paralyzed by a lot of the small issues that we don't even talk about these big aspirations.

And that's why I've decided to commit to staying on the side of love.

I want to stay on the side of justice.

And that's the beautiful thing is when you see freedom made man is to manifest in a place where you were told that freedom is impossible.

It's just life changing.

And I feel so fortunate to be in a world where that kind of gift, that kind of modeling has been offered to me by Reverend Lawson and what he represents, not just the generation, but what he represents.

And that's why it's such an honor to be in a conversation like this.

I applaud you, Bryan.

Well, I wanted to affirm what Bryan has said spiritually, theologically, politically, and in terms of the power of the law for transformation, personal and social.

I like to say that you are a life singularity.

That in your birth, all that you needed of life that could allow you to excel in living and loving and doing and being in that your singular life.

Thank you, Jim Lawson, and Bryan Stevenson, for helping us understand these times and inspiring us to take action.

Very welcome.

Thank you, Bonnie, for bringing us together.

I think we each have an opportunity in whatever space we occupy as parents, neighbors, coworkers, citizens, we can all make a difference.

Just as Bryan and Jim have done.

We can stand on the side of justice, compassion and truth-te And when we do, I think we can all say "America will be."

Thank you for joining me at home.

I'll see you again.

On another edition of Bonnie Boswell Presents (singing) the water God gonna trouble the water God gonna trouble the water God gonna trouble the water This episode of Bonnie Boswell Presents is made possible by the Ford Foundation.

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