"Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument. "
My spouse and I, along with several of our parish community, went to see the movie Just Mercy, the fictionalized story of the work of civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson.
It was brilliantly scripted , acted, and set. I hope that the Oscar Awards do not snub this excellent biopic.
However, it is not a movie for the faint-of-heart. There are some scenes that are so well-acted that I had a visceral reaction to what I saw & heard in the story. There is one prison scene that is so disturbing that I'll not forget the bile that rose in my stomach as it came across the screen.
The South that young, Harvard-educated lawyer , Bryan Stevenson meets when he moves to small-town Alabama is not our South at its finest. It is a south that, within the course of my own four decades on Earth, still practiced horrendous racially-based injustice within the police departments, courts and media. To be born Black in this version of Alabama is to live life looking over one's shoulder. I am familiar with the racial tensions of the 1960's but was shocked to discover that such injustices remained within the Alabama law-enforcement and court system well into my growing-up years.
The story follows Stevenson's case with a client who was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to die in Alabama's electric chair. The wrongly convicted, a Black man of working-class background, was framed and wrongly convicted for murdering a white teenaged girl in Monroeville, Alabama.
Monroeville, Alabama, home of author Harper Lee, is a town in my part of the South. As a matter of fact, the little Episcopal church there is a part of my Diocese . I know some{ white} people who live in that town. Furthermore, some of the story takes place in Mobile and Baldwin Counties in Alabama--- two places that are familiar to people in Pensacola.
This movie is sad, scary, rage-inducing yet at the same time hope-full. In spite of odds stacked against him, a young lawyer from Delaware has dedicated his life to righting injustices within the criminal justice system. The work, of Equal Justice Initiative, started and maintained by Stevenson, has so far assisted many prisoners who were wrongly convicted and placed on Death Row, advocated for poor people, and challenged biases in the criminal justice system that are designed to work against poor and Black people.
I am glad that I saw this important movie with people in my life whom I love.
Bryan Stevenson inspires me to continue with doing justice work here in Pensacola.
Amen...
Sarah
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