“Just Mercy” is a courtroom procedural drama adapted from the 2015 New York Times Bestseller of the same name. Written by Bryan Stevenson the original book was a memoir that told the story of his experience as an attorney focused on working to appeal death row convictions. Beginning in 1989, Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) is a new Harvard grad but instead of launching his career at a cushy law firm he chooses a different path. Heading south to Alabama, Stevenson establishes the Equal Justice Initiative and hangs out a shingle as a lawyer open to working on death row cases pro bono.
Tag: <span>justice system</span>
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is located about a 15-minute walk away from the Legacy Museum. It’s really pretty from the outside with beautifully landscaped plant beds and a brown wood fence surrounding the Memorial. I’d read about lynchings before in books about Ida B. Wells and At the Hands of Persons Unknown. But it was something different to walk through the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and crane your neck to look at all of these blocks knowing that each one of them represented the loss of at least one person’s life. It’s important to note that this isn’t a memorial to lynching but rather a memorial to those who lost their lives to lynching. So the focus is on those who lost their lives rather than those who participated in lynchings.
Phillip Dray details the history of mob violence and lynchings in At the Hands of Persons Unknown. Dray lays out how lynchings were used as a form of political terrorism aimed at subjugating Black people and enforcing white supremacy.