Summary
Introduction: Higher Ground
The memoir opens with the author, Bryan Stevenson, recounting his first visit to a death-row prisoner in 1983, when Stevenson was a twenty-three-year-old Harvard Law School student. As part of a legal internship, Stevenson drives to a rural Georgia town where state death row prisoners are kept. Stevenson is worried his youth and ignorance of capital punishment or the appeals process will disappoint the prisoner.
Stevenson comments on how he’d studied philosophy in college and then decided to study law while simultaneously pursuing a graduate degree in public policy. He soon grew disenchanted and doubtful about law school. The courses he took were disconnected from the race and poverty issues that had motivated him to study law. But he later found the school offered a one-month course on race and poverty litigation, which brought him to conduct social justice work with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC), whose mission was to defend condemned people on death row in Georgia.
He meets Stephen Bright, the SPDC director, on his flight to Georgia. They talk the entire flight and Bright tells Stevenson that capital punishment means people without capital—i.e. money—get punished. Stevenson admires Bright’s dedication and charisma. At SPDC, Stevenson also respects the time and energy the attorneys put into their work. After years of prohibition and delay, executions had started taking place again in the Deep South, and most SPDC lawyers had come in response to the crisis of death-row prisoners being denied their right to legal counsel and advice. The worry was that prisoners would be put to death without having their cases reviewed by trained lawyers. Stevenson isn’t at SPDC long before Bright asks him to travel to meet the condemned man and convey the message that he will not be killed in the next year.
On the drive to the rural prison, Stevenson rehearses how to phrase the message. When he arrives, the guards are brusque as they point him to the visitation room, an empty metal cage. The man comes in wearing chains and bright prison whites. He is a neatly groomed, young African American man. He looks familiar to Stevenson. They shake hands and the man introduces himself as Henry. Stevenson apologizes and says the SPDC doesn’t have a lawyer for Henry’s case, but they are working on it, and he won’t have an execution date in the next year.
Though Stevenson worries his message isn’t comforting, Henry is delighted to hear it. There is intense relief in his eyes as he explains to Stevenson that he is glad to hear it because he will now invite his wife and kids to visit. He hadn’t wanted to traumatize them if he had an execution date. But now that he doesn’t, he can invite them. They both relax and discuss their families and law school and prison and what is important in life.
Stevenson doesn’t realize the time passing until a guard bangs on the door; they had been talking for three hours. The guard roughly re-applies the cuffs. Stevenson apologizes to Henry for going over visitation time, but Henry says it is fine, and asks him to come back. Before Henry is dragged away, he plants his feet and sings a hymn Stevenson recognizes from the church where he grew up. Stevenson considers the song a precious gift, and hadn’t expected it; in that moment, Henry deepens Stevenson’s understanding of human potential, redemption, and hopefulness. Upon returning to law school, Stevenson plunges into the history of race, poverty, and power, dedicating himself to understanding why the U.S. judicial system interprets the law in a way that judges some people more unfairly than others.
Stevenson digresses to explain that he grew up in a poor rural area in Delmarva Peninsula, Delaware, a region where Confederate flags hung as symbols of white supremacy and slavery. African Americans lived in racially segregated ghettos, some living in tiny shacks without plumbing. Stevenson’s parents and relatives worked hard and with determination but never seemed to prosper. His grandmother was the daughter of enslaved people, and this legacy influenced the way she raised her children and grandchildren. She told him that he couldn’t understand things from a distance; he had to get close. Closeness to condemned people on death row is what inspired him to advocate for unfairly judged people.
Stevenson states that the book is about how quickly we condemn people in America and the dramatic increase in the number of incarcerated people in the country—known as mass incarceration. It is also about excessive sentences, sinister treatment within prisons, and how injustice is created by allowing fear, anger, and distance to guide the way vulnerable people are treated.
In 1983, America was imprisoning more people than any other country. In 2014, the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. One in every fifteen people born in the U.S. in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison, while one in every three black males born in the twenty-first century is expected to be incarcerated. Stevenson notes that the statistics reflect who is being convicted, not necessarily who is committing crimes.
Thousands of people await execution on death row. A quarter-million children under twelve have been sent to adult jails, and the U.S. is the only country that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole. Nonviolent offenses, such as drug offenses, also result in imprisonment as opposed to rehabilitation and education. Some states strip people with criminal convictions of their right to vote. Death row prisoners have been exonerated after being executed, as hundreds have been proven innocent through DNA testing. Prisons also cost nearly $80 billion every year to run, leeching funds from public services such as education, health, and welfare. There are also private prisons that make profits from crime and incarceration; this drive for profit is at odds with efforts to reduce incarceration and promote rehabilitation.
After law school, Bryan returned to the Deep South to represent the poor, incarcerated and condemned. In the last thirty years, Stevenson has gotten close to people wrongly convicted and sent to death row, such as Walter McMillian, whose case taught Stevenson that there is light within the darkness of the U.S. judicial system. Through all the people he has met and represented, Stevenson has learned that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” The opposite of poverty is not wealth, but justice. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. Stevenson says we are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. We all need mercy, justice, and some measure of unmerited grace.
Chapter One: Mockingbird Players
Stevenson is in his late twenties and in his fourth year at SPDC when he meets Walter McMillian, whose case is one of many he is frantically keeping up with. When they meet, Walter is emotional and insists he is innocent. Stevenson reassures him he’ll do what he can. Back at the office, he reads Walter’s trial transcripts. Walter is at least fifteen years older than him, and not well educated. He grew up in a poor black settlement outside Monroeville, Alabama, where he worked the fields with his family. In the 1950s, his mother got him into a “colored school,” but by eight or nine he left school to return to the fields to pick cotton. Monroe County had been developed by white plantation owners for cotton production. After the Civil War and Emancipation, the black population continued to work the fields as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, dependent on white landowners for survival. Later, the burgeoning paper industry in the 1950s largely excluded African Americans and increased their poverty. However, Walter started a pulpwood business in the 1970s, which gave him economic independence—a freedom that sparked suspiciousness in white Alabamians.
Walter had a wife and three children, though he was known for being romantically involved with other women. He grew up understanding that it was forbidden for a black man to be intimate with white women, but became involved with a white Waffle House employee named Karen Kelly. Word traveled, and her husband Joe found out and threatened to take custody of their kids. Walter was subpoenaed to testify at the custody battle. Knowing it would cause problems, he went to the courthouse and was asked hostile questions. News of the interracial affair spread and Walter’s reputation shifted within the local society. No longer seen as a hardworking pulpwood man, he represented something threatening.
In slavery’s aftermath, racial segregation and anti-miscegenation statutes were largely designed to prevent interracial sex and marriage. Many Southern law enforcers sought to punish black men who had been intimate with white women. Despite the federal government’s promise of racial equality to freed former slaves during Reconstruction, white supremacy in Alabama led to racially restrictive laws that forced the subordination of the black population, and sex between white women and black men was forbidden. It was only in 2000 that a statewide ballot eliminated the ban on interracial marriage, with 41 percent voting to keep it.
Walter knew deep in his bones the perils of him dating a white woman. Dozens of people had been lynched in Monroe County and neighboring counties. With news of his relationship to Karen Kelly widespread, the threat of lynching loomed over Walter. Then, a few weeks later, Ronda Morrison, an eighteen-year-old college student, was found shot dead on the floor of the cleaners shop where she worked. Police pursued various leads but found no evidence. People in Monroe began to whisper about the police’s inability to find a suspect. Meanwhile, Water tried to end his relationship with Karen, who had fallen into a bad relationship with Ralph Myers, with whom she began dealing drugs.
When Myers was questioned by police about the murder of another woman, Vickie Pittman, he changed his story several times before implicating not only Karen but her black former boyfriend Walter; Myers also claimed Water had killed Ronda Morrison. Officials were eager to pin the murder on someone, so investigators asked Myers to meet Walter at a store and deliver a note. Investigators observed the encounter, during which Myers failed to recognize Walter, but rather than concluding the men had never met, investigators pursued the case. But there was no evidence against Walter, aside from the fact that he was a black man involved in an interracial affair.
Analysis
The memoir’s opening pages establish a contrast between how Bryan Stevenson was young and inexperienced when he first began representing death row prisoners, only to become a leading social justice advocate. Having studied philosophy only to shift over to law, Stevenson feels disconnected from his law-school peers until he meets the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee director Stephen Bright. Bright’s charisma and dedication make Stevenson feel connected to the SPDC’s social justice work fighting for under-represented condemned people, the majority of whom are poor and black.
Henry is the first death-row prisoner Stevenson meets. His expectations are undermined when Henry is friendly and grateful and personable; the two men talk for hours, forging the genuine connections and closeness that will be vital to Stevenson’s career as a prisoner advocate. Henry’s hopeful spirit is significant because it inspires Stevenson to improve the U.S. judicial system.
Discussing his upbringing and grandmother’s wisdom, Stevenson introduces one of the memoir’s central themes: closeness to condemned people. His grandmother taught him that things can’t be understood from a distance, and so he takes this philosophy into his career and forges close bonds with the vulnerable people he represents.
Stevenson also introduces the theme of mass incarceration, detailing the staggering statistics about the rise in the number of people imprisoned in the United States since he began his legal career in the early 1980s. The dramatic rise includes people imprisoned for life for nonviolent offenses, and children serving adult life sentences. Impoverished people and people of color are over-represented in prisons, a profitable industry from which Stevenson traces a historical line back to slavery.
The first chapter introduces Walter McMillian and his case of wrongful condemnation on death row. Walter’s case is significant because Stevenson will return to it throughout the memoir. Stevenson outlines how Walter ended up on death row due to a long history of racism in the Deep South: Walter, as a black man, was having an interracial affair with a white woman, which stoked racial animus among local white people in Monroe County.
The theme of racial injustice also plays a role in the murder of which Walter is wrongly convicted: Ronda Morrison, a young white women, was murdered, and there are no leads. Local law enforcement and the town are eager to pin the crime on someone, making them more willing to accept Myers’s ludicrous story when he accuses Walter of the crime. Since Walter already had a sullied reputation as an interracial adulterer, investigators were willing to overlook evidence that could have proved his innocence.
