We can’t change until we change the narrative

Bryan Stevenson divides his time between heading the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., and teaching law at New York University, but he still recalls his Sussex County roots.

Stevenson, whose book “Just Mercy” debuted on The New York Times best-seller list, recently spoke at Eagle’s Nest Church near Milton about his work representing prisoners on death row.

“I think we can change things,” Stevenson said. “I think we can make a healthier Sussex County.”

My Dec. 30 column centered on what Stevenson called the importance of proximity. A brief visit with a prisoner on death row had changed his life.

But there are other factors that Stevenson said people needed to embrace if we are to heal our nation.

One is “changing the narrative.”

He talked about how in the 1980s criminologists created a narrative about how “some children aren’t children … these are super predators.”

States lowered the age at which they could charge a child as an adult. States passed mandatory sentencing laws to deal with these “super predators.”

Later, Stevenson said, the criminologists realized their theories were mistaken, their projections wrong. But by then it was too late.

“This narrative condemned a generation of children,” Stevenson said.

The result: In Pennsylvania, he said, there are children as young as 10 serving time in adult prisons.

Nationwide, an estimated 10,000 children are doing time in adult prisons.

One 9-year-old Stevenson represented had shot his mother’s boyfriend after he clocked her, dropping her to the kitchen floor like a sack of potatoes. The little boy thought she was dead.

In prison, Stevenson said, he couldn’t get the boy to talk. After a long silence, the boy finally began crying, sobbing about how he had been hurt and sexually assaulted by adult prisoners.

The little boy had become a victim not only of his fellow prisoners, but also of adult criminologists and their flawed theories. And the society that allowed those super predator laws to pass. In other words, all of us.

Changing the narrative, though, is very difficult, Stevenson said. “In a society that’s been corrupted by the politics of fear and anger, it’s hard for anybody to say, ‘We were wrong.’”

“And the arrogance behind our unwillingness to acknowledge our mistakes creates all kinds of problems,” he said.

“We have continuing challenges with race and racial equality in this country because we haven’t been willing to say, ‘We’re wrong.’”

Those challenges remain, 150 years after the Civil War.

“Sussex County, in particular, had a large slave population,” Stevenson said, “and the legacy of slavery continues to haunt this county.”

Delaware, as most people know, was a border state. It remained in the union, but was fiercely pro-slavery.

The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t end slavery in Delaware - it applied only to slaves living in the Confederacy - and neither did the war.

“When the Civil War ended … there was still slavery in Delaware … We were still persuaded we were owed the institution of slavery … We didn’t give it up willingly; we gave it up begrudgingly.”

Delaware treasures its status as the first state to ratify the Constitution, but we weren’t so quick to ratify the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. That didn’t come for another 35 years, in 1901.

Slavery, according to Stevenson, didn’t end so much as it evolved. Newly freed slaves weren’t truly free. Jim Crow laws restricted their civil liberties.

Threats of violence - and actual violence, if necessary - backed them up.

“Between Reconstruction and World War II, we had decades of terrorism in many parts of this country, including this county,” he said.

During this era 4,000 people of color in America were lynched, he said, “sometimes by entire communities. This was terrorism.”

“Old people come up to me sometimes,” Stevenson said, “and they say, ‘Mr. Stevenson, we get so mad when we hear somebody on TV talking about how we’re dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation’s history, after 9/11. You make them stop saying that. We grew up with terrorism.’”

Think about that. The “good old days” many recall so fondly, others recall with dread.

The 13th Amendment ended slavery, but it didn’t end the ideology - the narrative - on which American slavery depended, that blacks were less than fully human.

That narrative lingers, as do the communities where African-Americans were forced to live.

“We’re making progress, but we’re not going to get there until we commit to a process of truth and reconciliation,” Stevenson said.

Getting there sounds like a tall order. I don’t see the politics of fear and anger ending anytime soon. But Stevenson, at least, shines a light forward.