EJI’s Bryan Stevenson: It is “Unevolved”…to Celebrate Slavery
From a N.Y. Times Magazine interview.
Historic Marker in Montgomery. A statue/bust of Dr. King is to be unveiled on Monday at the church he led on Dexter Avenue.
The New York Times Magazine talked with Stevenson about Alabama celebrating both Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee on the same day this Monday.
“You live in Montgomery, Ala., where both Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’s birthday are state holidays and Martin Luther King Day is celebrated along with Robert E. Lee Day. How do you reconcile all that? It is unevolved to want to celebrate the architects and defenders of slavery. In Germany, there are no Adolf Hitler statues. They don’t want to embrace something so horrific. That’s not true in America. The landscape has become complicit in the way in which we have tolerated racial bias, so that has to change. There are things about which we can all feel proud. We can all honor, for example, the white people who were abolitionists in the 18th and the 19th centuries. And we can name some streets and schools and buildings after them, and all of us can celebrate those folks. That’s what we have to get to if we’re really serious about progressing past this history”.
Full interview is HERE (pay wall)
Civil War Battle re-enactment in Alabama.
