Bryan Stevenson Honored with the National Humanities Medal

Prominent death penal­ty attor­ney, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson (pic­tured with President Joe Biden), was award­ed the National Humanities Medal on March 21, 2023 at the White House. The pres­i­dent com­mend­ed Stevenson for his long-term efforts to rep­re­sent the impov­er­ished and exon­er­ate the wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed, in addi­tion to found­ing the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both locat­ed in Montgomery, Alabama.

The National Humanities Medal ​“hon­ors indi­vid­u­als or groups whose work has deep­ened the nation’s under­stand­ing of the human­i­ties and broad­ened [U.S.] cit­i­zens’ engage­ment with his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, lan­guages, phi­los­o­phy, and oth­er human­i­ties sub­jects.” Because of the COVID-19 glob­al pan­dem­ic, the White House delayed hon­or­ing the 23 recip­i­ents of the 2021 National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts.

Since Stevenson’s found­ing of the Equal Justice Initiative, this orga­ni­za­tion has helped to pre­vent the exe­cu­tions of more than 130 indi­vid­u­als — some of whom were helped to win their exon­er­a­tion and free­dom. Working as an advo­cate for minors pros­e­cut­ed as adults, Stevenson argued before the United States Supreme Court, where he helped secure the land­mark rul­ing in Miller v. Alabama, hold­ing that a scheme that man­dates a sen­tence of life in prison with­out parole for juve­nile offend­ers is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Stevenson also played a foun­da­tion­al role in the devel­op­ment of the Legacy Museum, which details the his­to­ry of racial oppres­sion in the United States from slav­ery to mass incar­cer­a­tion, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which com­mem­o­rates the lives of sev­er­al thou­sand lynch­ing vic­tims who were mur­dered in United States between 1877 and 1950.