My mind is in a flux. Before meeting Bryan Stevenson, America’s best-known death row lawyer and, some argue, its most effective social activist, I have been cramming homework. I rose at dawn to devote the morning to Stevenson’s Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery. The exhibit’s journey, which takes you from the Atlantic slave trade to Jim Crow segregation, ending with today’s era of incarceration, will stick with me for a long time. To many among the droves that come from far farther afield than Alabama, it gives a crash course in an American history they barely knew. Few museums can top this for impact.
I meet Stevenson at Aya, a restaurant named after an African plant, with a menu you rarely find outside the Deep South. It is part of the Elevation Convening Center and Hotel, which is owned by the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson’s non-profit group. As its name implies, the establishment sits atop a hill overlooking the city. The state’s gleaming white Capitol looms prominently. Stevenson’s museum is a few blocks from that. Martin Luther King Jr’s Selma-to-Montgomery march, which catalysed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, went down this hill. After a drizzly morning, the sun has come out. King’s destination is visible.
Opposite the hotel is Montgomery Square, Stevenson’s newest exhibit, which has just opened. In the middle sits a partial sculpture of Rosa Parks, the African-American woman whose refusal in 1955 to give up her seat for a white passenger triggered the 13-month bus boycott that brought the civil rights struggle to national and worldwide attention. The city remains majority Black. Parks’s hands are holding up her passenger ticket number, 7053, which was how she and thousands of other battered and bruised arrestees were booked by Montgomery’s all-white police.