To: The Wellesley College Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Wellesley Welcomes Bryan Stevenson on April 28, 2022
Date: November 29, 2021
I am pleased to announce that Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., and author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Just Mercy, will speak about race and criminal justice with the Wellesley community on April 28, 2022. This event, which will take place in Alumnae Hall Auditorium and be broadcast at wellesley.edu/live starting at 5 p.m. EDT, will serve as both the Betsy Wood Knapp ’64 Lecture in the Social Sciences and the Wilson Lecture, two of the College’s premier academic lectures.
Under Stevenson’s leadership, the Equal Justice Initiative has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Stevenson, a 1995 MacArthur Fellow, has argued and won multiple cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he and his organization have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.
In addition to his legal aid work, Stevenson has initiated major anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts in the United States and led the creation of two highly acclaimed cultural sites in Montgomery: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.
Stevenson is an exemplar of moral courage who has devoted his life to making a difference in the world through public service and by working to lessen the profound inequality of our moment. His organization’s efforts to challenge the death penalty and excessive carceral punishment, provide legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or otherwise abused, and provide reentry assistance to formerly incarcerated people are a powerful example of how a group of committed people can combat structural racism and inequality to change the world for the better. Stevenson’s leadership and innovative thinking have been central in the effort to establish first-of-their-kind monuments that honor the victims of our nation’s worst racial violence, and shine a light on the all-too-often suppressed history of racial terrorism in the United States.
Stevenson has won numerous awards, including the ABA Medal, the American Bar Association’s highest honor; the National Medal of Liberty from the ACLU; and the Olof Palme Prize for international human rights. He has been named public interest lawyer of the year by the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, and was named to the 2015 Time 100 list recognizing the world’s most influential people.
The in-person event is open to Wellesley College students, faculty, and staff only, who will need a ticket to attend. We will share ticket information closer to the event date next spring.
The Knapp Lecture in the Social Sciences is one of the many activities and programs sponsored by the Knapp Social Science Center, established through the generosity of Betsy Wood Knapp ’64. The Knapp Center was developed to integrate the social sciences and serve as a constellation of activity in the social sciences at Wellesley. Its instruction and events connect the intellectual work of social science to its role in the real world. It creates opportunities for students and faculty to conduct social science and interdisciplinary research—both quantitative and qualitative—and to work across department and program lines on issues of common interest.
The Wilson Lecture series, endowed by Carolyn A. Wilson, a journalist and war correspondent and a member of Wellesley’s class of 1910, ensures that generations of Wellesley students are familiar with the most important public figures shaping the events of their time. In 1962, Katherine Anne Porter, best known for her novel Ship of Fools, delivered the inaugural lecture. Over the years, the Wilson Lecture has been given by some of our most innovative and influential thinkers, such as Elie Wiesel, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Paul Farmer, William Julius Wilson, and Al Gore, among others.
We are delighted to host Bryan Stevenson for a lecture on such a profoundly important issue.
