UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Bryan Stevenson for American Injustice: Mercy, Humanity and Making a Difference, 5 p.m. Friday, April 30, in a virtual format.
One of the nation’s visionary legal thinkers and social justice advocates, Stevenson has spent nearly four decades seeking to eradicate racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.
The program will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Christopher McAuley, UCSB associate professor of Black Studies. The event is part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Race to Justice series.
Tickets are $10, general public, free for UCSB students (registration required). Tickets and information available at 805-893-3535, or www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
A MacArthur Fellow, Stevenson is an attorney; human rights activist; and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. He spearheaded Alabama’s Legacy Museum, and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first national memorial to victims of white supremacy, which opened in 2018.
Stevenson is the subject of HBO’s 2019 documentary “True Justice,” and his bestselling memoir “Just Mercy” was adapted into a feature film of the same name.
Stevenson is an acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.
Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief or release from prison for 135 wrongly-condemned prisoners on death row, and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.
Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia; and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children age 17 or younger.
Stevenson has also led the creation of two cultural sites, The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching and racial segregation and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.
Stevenson’s work has won him numerous awards including 35 honorary doctorates, the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Prize and the ABA Medal, the American Bar Association’s highest honor. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and Harvard School of Government.
UCSB’s McAuley received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan. McAuley’s areas of research are northern and southern African politics, world systems theory, Black intellectual history, Caribbean and Latin American political economy and economic history of the Americas.
In 1990 he received the Ford Foundation and Center for African-American and African Studies, University of Michigan Summer Research Fellowship in Ghana. His publication “The Mind of Oliver C. Cox” appeared in 2004. He is working on a comparative study of the politics and scholarship of Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois.