Bryan Stevenson

He has dedicated his life to defending the unfairly incarcerated and condemned. But his vision for racial justice has always been about more than winning in court.

- SARAH LEWIS

Throughout his career, Bryan Stevenson's rigorous focus on criminal justice reform and human rights has been aimed at putting himself out of a job. "Sometimes somebody will write something really kind and nice, and a young person will say, 'I want to do what you do, and I'm really honored by it,' he told me recently. "But I want to create a world where nobody has to represent people on death row because we abolish the death row. I've always wanted to believe that we're close to getting to a point where we can eliminate this problem." Humanitarian, visionary, patriot, civil rights leader, and American saint: These are just a few of the terms one hears when asking about Bryan Stevenson, 64. He is known not just for winning cases at the Supreme Court through his work with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the organization he founded in 1989 to end mass incarceration in the United States and achieve criminal justice reform, but for pioneering a new cultural landscape to address racial and economic injustice. Through a unique merging of law, information gathering, and art, he has fundamentally transformed our understanding of opportunity, equity, and justice in America.

Stevenson's work has also expanded the scope of the philanthropic universe. When he began, fundraising for criminal justice reform was not the movement it has since become. For evidence of how radically it has changed, one need only look to the landmark work of Agnes Gund. In 2017 Gund created the Art for Justice Fund, which supports artists and advocates working to end mass incarceration and the inequality embedded in the criminal justice system, using the $165 million proceeds from the sale of her Roy Lichtenstein painting Masterpiece. Her motivation for this inspired act? Reading Stevenson's best-selling memoir, Just Mercy, alongside Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, and watching Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th.