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Just Mercy: new film that captures the start of a brilliant civil rights career

<span>Photograph: Matt Licari/Invision/AP</span>
Photograph: Matt Licari/Invision/AP

In an emotionally charged scene in the new movie Just Mercy, Jamie Foxx, cast as a death row prisoner named Walter McMillian, accosts the young lawyer who has taken up his case with an uncomfortable truth about being black in the deep south.

“You don’t know what you’re into down here in Alabama,” he warns. “Here you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.”

That phrase could stand as a catchphrase for the ingrained racial injustice that Bryan Stevenson, the rookie lawyer played in the film by Michael B Jordan, has devoted his adult life to fighting.

From his first meeting with McMillian in 1988 to his star billing today as a one of America’s most incisive commentators on race and inequity – and now as a fully fledged Hollywood icon – Stevenson has never taken his eyes off the prize.

His epic six-year struggle to prove McMillian an innocent man provides the narrative arc of Just Mercy. It is based on the 2014 memoir of the same name in which Stevenson, 60, relates how he came to find himself representing some of the most godforsaken prisoners in the country.

He was 23 and a student at Harvard law school when his professor suggested he take an internship in Atlanta, Georgia, with a not-for-profit legal firm. The firm’s director, a towering figure in death penalty jurisprudence named Stephen Bright, took Stevenson under his wing and taught him justice, southern-style.

Lesson one, Bright told him, was: “Capital punishment means, ‘Them without the capital get the punishment’.”

Bright remembers his new intern as a slightly lost soul in search of a purpose in life. Those existential doubts vaporised as soon as Bright dispatched Stevenson to Alabama to investigate its death row.

“When Bryan started looking into what was down there, ye gods! It was horrible!” Bright told the Guardian. “People were being sentenced to death in a perfunctory fashion represented by lawyers who had no idea what they were doing.”

Bright recalls his young charge returning from a prison visit in an excited state. “This man is innocent,” Stevenson said. “I know he is innocent.”

The man in question was Walter McMillian who had been sentenced to death for the 1986 murder of an 18-year-old white woman. When Stevenson began looking into the case he was struck by a legion of inconsistencies and ironies.

The main irony was that the murder happened in Monroeville, home town to Harper Lee, which just went to show how much Alabama had taken to heart the moral of To Kill A Mockingbird. Even before he got going on the case, the trial judge – aptly named Robert E Lee Key – tried to talk Stevenson out of it. “Why the hell would you want to represent someone like McMillian?” the judge said.

Undeterred, Stevenson began digging into the record and discovered that not only had McMillian been found guilty in a trial lasting all of two days, but the defendant had a rock-solid alibi with dozens of witnesses. The prosecution relied on a jailhouse snitch who was offered money and freedom to provide false testimony against him.

Exposing the racial animus at the heart of the death penalty was not easy. There were bomb threats and many disappointments and legal setbacks along the way. But in 1993 McMillian was exonerated and walked free. As Stevenson writes in Just Mercy, “there is light within this darkness”.

Bryan Stevenson at the Prison Reform Trust office in London.
Bryan Stevenson at the Prison Reform Trust office in London. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

At this point we must say goodbye to Jamie Foxx and Michael B Jordan. It’s a measure of the exceptional nature of Stevenson that just where the movie ends – with the good guys winning their death row battle – his own story begins to get all the more interesting.

Stevenson has gone on, post-McMillian, to create an entire operation dedicated to uncovering miscarriages of justice in the deep south. Back in the 1980s he had a poky office and a single assistant; today the organisation he founded, Equal Justice Initiative, employs 140 people, many of them whip-smart lawyers in his own mould.

EJI has won reversals or release from prison for more than 135 wrongly convicted prisoners. Among them was Anthony Ray Hinton, who like McMillian was proven innocent in his case after 28 years on death row.

Having turned EJI into a justice powerhouse, Stevenson has switched his energies to what might well become the most significant aspect of his legacy. He is now emerging as a leading exponent of America’s racial fault-line in which he has begun to join the dots between slavery, racial segregation, terror lynchings of African Americans, capital punishment and the scourge of modern mass incarceration.

He has taken his hands-on experience of southern brutality – what he calls his “proximity to injustice” – and extracted from it a philosophy of the open wound that runs through American society and politics. To do that he has drawn from his roots as the great-grandson of slaves in Virginia and his experiences growing up as a black child in a small, segregated town in rural Delaware.

From regular attendance at his family’s local black church he imbibed the preacher’s art of engaging an audience. You can see it in action in his Ted talk which has been viewed more than 6m times and which earned him one of the longest standing ovations in Ted’s history.

Stevenson’s mission to join the dots began when he started thinking about the nature of public memorialising in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama where he set up base in the 1980s. He counted 59 Confederate markers glorifying the slave-owning south, while there was nothing to memorialise the suffering that the slave trade induced.

In 2013, after a long tussle with local authorities, he managed to have three markers to the domestic slave trade erected in downtown Montgomery. From there it was but a short hop to thinking about the racial composition of death row. Why were Walter McMillian and Anthony Ray Hinton both black? Why are 42% of death row inmates today African American, when black people form just 13% of the US population?

The culmination of these meditations is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Stevenson’s most breathtaking and audacious achievement yet. Through it he holds up a mirror to America of a central element of its character, one that until now has been almost entirely obscured – its tragic history of lynchings of more than 4,000 African Americans.

The memorial, cast in bronze, sits on top of the hill that rises above Montgomery. Physically, and symbolically, it looks down on the Alabama State Capitol where so many of the political decisions that upheld white supremacy were taken – and still are taken.

Standing in the centre of the memorial the power of Stevenson’s unfolding vision is almost overwhelming. From Montgomery’s slave warehouse and the thousands of men and women who died hanging from a tree, to Walter McMillian who came so close to a latter-day judicial lynching, this is America’s unfinished business, its truly strange and bitter fruit.