Mcmillan. With all of those things going on, it became a case that was too irresistible to walk away from. The final thing, and this is one of the reasons i was interested in doing a book project is case took place in alabama which is where harper lee grew up and wrote to kill a mockingbird. Everyones read it. Its a beautiful story. The people in monroeville love the story. Theres boo radley street, scout street, atticus bench, all through the community. Yet, when i started saying, look we have an innocent black man wrongly convicted of a crime people had no interest in that. It was a bit surreal to be in this space where they were celebrating this story and watching such an incredibly vicious prosecutors and take place. One of the challenges is that we had narratives in American Literature that we celebrate for the wrong reasons. We give out these awards, the Atticus Finch award, a very famous model that the Legal Profession has embraced but the truth of it is that tom robinson died in prison. Oh, boy. He did not get justice. I certainly want more for the clients we represent than what atticus was able to get. Changing that has been the real challenge. So we spent six years trying to get mr. Mcmillan off of death row. It is one of the few cases where we got bomb threats at our office and we had people following us creating all kinds of hazards in this space where people celebrate the story of to kill a mockingbird. What an irony. I want you to share it because the lies that were told. What you showed and just the fight all the way through what is interesting is that these wrongful convictions, as you know, we now have 147 people proven innocent. For every 10 people who have been executed, we have proved one person innocent. Which is a shocking rate of error. Prosecutorial misconduct are some of the key components and it was certainly what we had here. It was a young white woman murdered in downtown monroeville. And mr. Mcmillan was not someone you would suspect of committing a crime. He was actually a 45yearold africanamerican hard worker. Trouble before. His mistake was he was having an interracial affair with the young white woman related to one of the Police Officers. In alabama, until 2002 are our state constitution still prohibited interracial marriage. It was not enforceable after loving versus virginia but we could not get people to take it out of the constitution so these attitudes were very real. After seven months they were getting pressured and you see this pressure into these spaces where they do really unjust things. Gun sales increasing, talking about impeaching the sheriff. They begin to put this case together and got a man to testify against him, coerced the man to testify. For some bizarre reason, they actually tape recorded the sessions where they were coercing him to testify falsely and even more bizarre they did not destroy the tape. [laughter] there was a funny story. My car, back in those days, i had a tape player. I had a rental car and a tape player. It had an auto reverse. A lot of people here wont know what we are talking about because theyve never seen a tape player. We had gone to the court house to pick up the tapes with these interviews. I put the first came in, and he did not say anything that was helpful to us for this witness and i was getting discouraged. It was quiet and then i heard it clipped. Auto reverse turns it over to the other side of the tape and thats where we have the earlier interviews where the witness was saying you want me to frame an , innocent man for murder and i dont feel right about that. [laughter] the Police Officer said if you dont give us what you want, we will put you on death row, too and it went on for an hour. We found these tapes and got the witnesses to recant and it was incredibly exciting to finally see this case moving towards justice. There were Police Officers who had gone to mr. Mcmillans house, bought a fish sandwich, and made notes in their logs indicating they bought a fish sandwich and none of that was turned over. He was convicted in a trial that lasted a day and a half adding a jury verdict of life overridden by the elected judge. Jury override is such a terrible thing. They have that in alabama. We are the state that has the most use of it now. 100something people have gotten a death sentence as a result of an override. Whats ironic and chilling is that judge robert e lee key probably saved mr. Mcmillans life. If he had allowed the jury verdict to stand, we would have never been able to get to his case. We were only working on Death Penalty cases. The heartbreaking thing is that for every Walter Mcmillan on death row, there is 10 serving life without parole. For every 10 there is 100 serving a lesser sentence. Because he had a death sentence we pick up the case and ultimately one. Theres the great irony that chances are youll get more help if you have a death case. All of the people languishing under these long sentences, half of the 6000 people in prison in louisiana have practically life without parole sentences. Half of them. Most of them never get a visit a postcard, or anything. The languishing, it is massive exile of huge segments of our population. When you think of it that it is 2. 3 million people, we are the biggest incarcerate herr in the world, one in every 100 adults. Do i have this right . Since weve made drugs a felony ive heard that one in every three young black men aged 1929 are in the prison system . Prison, parole thats right. Thats more than apartheid in south africa. Yeah. The really scary statistic that im especially terrified of now is that the bureau of justice now reports that one of three black male babies are expected to go to jail or prison. One in six latino boys is expected to go to jail. That wasnt true in the 20th century, 19th century. It became true. Weve got tremendous, tremendous work to do to turn this thing around. Getting people to just be honest and responsible in the prosecutors offices and Law Enforcement positions is part of how we do that. We have some bigger challenges as well. Yes, we do. Just to have a little perspective, a white woman of privilege growing up in baton rouge, louisiana, during the days of jim crow. It gives me compassion and in working with people because it took so long for me to wake up. When you are in a culture, it gives you eyes and ears. Honey, thats the way we do things. Its better for the races to be separated. They like to go and be with their people and we like being with rp old. I go to Sacred Heart Church in baton rouge, and black people had to sit over on the right. This is symbolic of the oneness in the body of christ am a black kids had to make their first communion separate or my kids and i never questioned it. In fact we had an , africanamerican couple that worked at the house. Ellen worked in the house with mama. Jesse worked in the yard. Daddy and mama were kind. Daddy helped them get property get a house, helped jesse get a job at the refinery, and then they moved on, but never questioned the system. I did not question the system. In fact my whole approach to the gospel one of my seven words , was jesusfollower. Theres a way to follow jesus and there is a way to follow jesus. There are a lot of ways. [laughter] pope francis follows jesus, but its different than what others have followed jesus or the , bishops or whatever. The Institutional Church that happens. For me, bryan, it really was an awakening around the gospel that i did not even really realized i had grown up in privilege. When i had joined the nuns, we still had africanamerican people helping the sisters. Lillie may was the cook. We had a guy working in the yard. I never questioned it. But it was when we began to discuss the Civil Rights Movement and what was happening in liberation theology in latin america about being on the side of poor people, i had always resisted that justice stuff for nuns because i thought we should just be spiritual. If people have god, they have everything. My Spiritual Life was parallel with what is going on on earth because after all, all you want to do is one day be in heaven with god, right . I did not even really know poor people. When i woke up to what the gospel is really about going and , being with people, when i moved into the same top t. Thomas house in the project, it was like going to a different country. I found out when i did research there were more complaints to the Justice Department about Police Brutality in new orleans, louisiana than any other city. If you are living in the suburbs, that could be calcutta. You are so removed from the experience. Public school kids coming into the Adult Learning center. They dropped out as juniors in high school, cannot rita thirdgrade reader. Nobody had health care. People were dying. Young men did not know they had high Blood Pressure and destroying their kidneys. Then they are on dialysis the rest of their life. They are so angry and so depressed. Their kidneys are shot and theyre going to be on dialysis. What happens when you dont have health care . When i first went there, we had a great sister who had started hope house. She said helen, you dont have , to have this plan in your back pocket about how you will eliminate poverty. Sit in the feet of the people and hear their stories and just be a neighbor and let them teach you. Africanamerican people then became my teachers. One thing i realized, its not that i was so virtuous. Its just i had been so cushioned unprotected then you can have agency in the world. If you do not know what gets you have, you think you are stupid. You think, i cannot learn that. I am not smart. I think it is so interesting because i do think we have done this horrible thing in america i not by not questioning the wrongs we have done and the consequences of those wrongs. Bigtime. This is a country that has not been selfcritical and so reflective of its mistakes. We do not like to admit mistakes at the National Level or political level. Because of that, we have created a world where we can be living in close proximity to tremendous poverty and racism and bigotry and still be comfortable. We have been taught that we are not responsible for the problems we see around us. One of the great challenges for me right now, this is one of my burdens and i will be honest about it, is how we correct that. How we change this narrative. Our new project at eji is about erasing poverty. We are focused on reeducating this poverty on the history of racial inequality. So important. It has to start with that history, because in so many ways, we are still suffering from the legacy of slavery. I talk about my grandmother a lot because she was the daughter of people who were enslaved. For parents were born in virginia in the 1800s. Her experiences of slaverys shaped the way she was raised. It is not a distant thing for me. And when i think about slavery i think about the fact that we had an institution in this country that was very different than other societies. Other societies had slaves. America became a country that became a slave society. We did more than just enslave people. We created a mythology about the differences between white people and people of color. We created a religion that try to reconcile slavery in this country by saying that these people are not fully human, they are different. All of these deficits. We are going to help them by enslaving them. We made ourselves feel good about the fact that we owned all the slaves. That myth, that ideology was not addressed by the 13 amendment. It was not addressed by the emancipation proclamation. Slavery did not and in this country, it evolved. It turned into something else. We still have forced labor and that mythology. Than we got to decades of terrorism, this. Between period between reconstruction and world war ii. It was lynching and violence that sent my grandmother and her friends to the north. It was that fear that was constant and persistent. We never talked about it. We did not talk about the trauma that we created by flinching people lynching people. We were so focused on dealing with these little issues. Where you couldnt eat, where he could sleep, where he could drink, all of that. But we never took time to talk about the big issue, which is the historical art of inequality and injustice. That concerns me because we have never developed a habit of being truthful about what we did wrong during slavery, what we did wrong in the era of terrorism. You cannot segregate people. Who cannot subject people to humiliation by excluding them from things. Excluding them from education day in and day out. The way that segregation injured people. And just move on. Those injuries will continue. When my great fears now is the the way we are talking about the Civil Rights Movement. I will be honest, i am worried about the way we are celebrating. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights act. Last year was the 50th anniversary of the march on washington. We are so happy to celebrate. Yeah. No one is prohibited from celebrating. It is almost as if the Civil Rights Movement was a threeday movement. Dr. King led a march on washington. On the third day, congress signed all these laws. If we think about it like that we are going to be frustrated about people talking about racial bias. The truth is that we never committed ourselves to a process of true reconciliation. And we need to do it. We will not have justice in this country until we tell the truth about what we did to our society, to this country, by tolerating lynching. By tolerating segregation. And now tolerating mass incarceration. The reason we dont care about youngblood was going to jail or prison is that we have not cared about this distinction for decades. We have work that has to be done. We have this project where we are trying to put up markers to reflect where the slave trade florist. Flourished. In montgomery, we have the confederate monuments. We have 59 monuments in montgomery the two largest high schools. If you come there 10 months ago you would not find a single word about slavery. We want to mark these spaces where the slave trade florist flourished. We want to mark the spaces where there was a lynching, and the whole town participated in a lynching. A lot of the people who were lynched were lynched for social transgressions. They went up to the front door of somebodys house rather than the back door. They lacked too loudly outage of. At a joke. If we do not talk about it, we are going to continue to run into these problems. You point to something really big. I am reading a book lies my teacher taught me. It is the way we have written history. And peoples history of the United States usually the one who writes the history are the victors, not the people subjugated. I was just in seattle on the day the city council changed columbus day to Indigenous Peoples day. Do you know how long that has taken . Most people do not know what Christopher Columbus did to people. You know how he cut off childrens hands in haiti when he did not bring them gold . Have no idea. That is right. Lc wr leadership conference, nuns on the bus, nuns with the people calling on pope francis to rescind three papal bowls. It is just beneficial thing. We will not go there. 1 [laughter] but what it said basically is that Indigenous People were considered pagan, so if they did not become christian, it was ok to enslave them and then, it gave the green light, with religious blessing, slavery that some people were meant to be just what you are saying, brian. You have that lessing of religion on people. I happen to know some northern cheyenne people in montana. We have been in the sweat lodge. They can remember their grandparents, how the calvary would come along with the missionaries and teardown sweat lodges because that was pagan. We still have struggled against that. We do not know it. People who have not suffered by when i went to st. Thomas and began to be educated, and there is a great workshop called undoing racism, and i remember ron chisholm saying institutional racism. Never thought of it. You blackball somebody. Put white is always pure, snow even in the language, we have racism. He would say to us, you may walk in a room and somebody does not like what you stand for. They may argue with you because of your ideas. But you are never going to walk in a room where people are going to treat you funny because of the color of your skin. I never thought about those things that come with i had never heard the term White Privilege before. When we commit ourselves to telling the truth about the history of racial inequality in this country you get to hear things you would not otherwise here hear. To create a safe space for people to talk about the things they want to talk about. We have communities where people are suffering from communal posttraumatic stress disorder very much related to the trauma of segregation and racial subordination. I remember when i was a little kid, my mother she was a church musician. She was precious to me. I never saw herby anything other than kind and just. She would give anything to anybody. I remember when it was time to get polio shots, it was the early 1950s and we did not have a doctor in our county but the black kids had to line up in the back of this building in november. We were waiting for the nurses to finish giving polio shots to white kids three by the time they got to us, the nurses were tired. They did not have sugar cubes. They were just grabbing kids and being rough with them. My sister was in front of me. The nurse grabbed my sister. She had a needle and jabbed my sister in the arm. My sister started screaming. I saw her coming at me. I looked at my mom and started screaming. The nurse grabbed me by the arm and was raising that needle. I was terrified. I heard all of this glass breaking. I turned around and my sweet mother, my Church Organist playing mother, had gone over to the wall and picked up this trade glasses and was growing them against wall. She was screaming about how unfair it is. She was so angry we had been out there. That dr. Came running in and said police. I watched these ministers negotiate for my mothers safety. Please give shots to the rest of our children. They had to beg them to give shots to the res