BROADCASTS.com

From 1877 to 1950, nearly 4,000 black people were lynched in the United States.\xa0Bryan Stevenson says\xa0these stories aren't part of\xa0the collective historical memory of most Americans, but they should be. Stevenson is\xa0the founder and director of the Equal Justice Institute,\xa0an Alabama-based non-profit that fights for retrials, death-sentence reversals, and exoneration in the face of racially-charged legal\xa0practices and policies.

The Equal Justice Institute's report about lynching,\xa0recently detailed\xa0in\xa0The New York Times, is one piece of Stevenson's\xa0work focused on "confronting the legacy of racial terror"\u2014a legacy that is directly observable\xa0today in the record numbers of incarcerated\xa0black men and boys. In this episode of\xa0Here's The Thing, Stevenson tells\xa0host Alec Baldwin that he believes the history of slavery and violence\xa0needs to be radically acknowledged and addressed if Americans are to achieve the promise of an equal society.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.