I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

So, welcome to another episode of the Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today, I have a pleasure of interviewing somebody I've never met before but I admire from afar

admire his work admire all the work that he's done and admire the best-selling

movie and book Just Mercy but I have none other than Brian

Stevenson how are you feeling today? I'm great it's good to be with you. Yeah so we start

my show is unique in that we ask each guest the first the same question each time they're on the show or the first

time they're on the show and that is walk us through the arc of your career and you know you're an

icon and the work you've done has among other things inspired a movie a best-selling book etc

But talk to us about the history of your organization that equal justice initiative and what the equal justice initiative has been up to and why the work that you're doing is more important now as ever.

Yeah, well, thank you for that question. I mean, I think the arc of my career and EJ I are kind of intertwined.

I'm a product of Brown versus Board of Education.

I grew up in a community where black kids could not go to the public schools and lawyers came into our community to make them open up those public schools to kids like me.

There were no high schools for black kids when my dad was a teenager, so most of the adults and the racially segregated community

where I lived didn't have high school degrees and that limited their economic opportunities

and their opportunities for a lot of things.

And these lawyers were able to do something

that our democracy could not, because the county was 80% white.

If you had a vote on whether to let kids like me

into the school, we would have lost that vote, but these lawyers had the power to enforce the rule of law, which meant that I got to go to the school. I went to high school, I went to college, and I went to law school because I wanted to access the same power those lawyers had access to help me to help other people and when I finished

Harvard Law School in the 1980s it was clear to me the community of people that were most at risk in this country was this growing population of people being sent to jails and prisons. Our prison population went from 300,000 in the early 70s to 2.2 million today and I wanted to respond to this crisis that was impacting black and brown communities communities like the one I grew up were all of the young men of color in particular but lots of people were being swallowed up by this punitive parcel system.

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