by: Ellen C. Caldwell
for JSTOR Daily
Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) are slated to open the United States’ first slavery museum in 2018.
The museum is to be called From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and will go far beyond providing a terminal history of slavery. Rather, the museum aims to trace the effects of slavery reverberating in the present day, considering the United States’s various eras of “racial terror, segregation, and mass incarceration.”
In 2011, Stephen B. Bright wrote “Bryan Stevenson as Hero,” for Human Rights journal, citing numerous reversals of death sentences for which Stevenson and his EJI colleagues were responsible. Bright provides further examples of Stevenson’s social justice work, including his founding of EJI’s Post-Release education and Preparation program, a reentry initiative to help adults who entered prisons as juveniles with their unique reentry needs. Stevenson also started the “Black Belt Education Program,” which teaches students from Alabama’s rural Black Belt about social justice issues.