Founding of the Equal Justice Initiative

The Founding of the Equal Justice Initiative was an effort to build a lasting source of free legal representation for people condemned to die in Alabama at a moment when executions were accelerating and the new organization had almost no institutional support. Begun by Bryan Stevenson and Eva Ansley, the project moved from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery, where a rented, yellow, two-story house became both a legal office and a makeshift home for the work.

Purpose and First Setbacks

In February 1989, Stevenson and Ansley opened a nonprofit law center in Tuscaloosa to provide free, quality legal services to men and women on Alabama’s death row. The need was clear; the means of meeting it were not. In the first months, the center’s first director resigned, and the University of Alabama School of Law withdrew its support and promised office space. The founders also discovered how difficult it was to recruit lawyers to Alabama for full-time death-penalty work paying less than $25,000 a year.

The center’s financial plan depended in part on state legislative funding, which was needed to secure federal matching dollars. The legislature denied the request. After disheartening meetings with the board, Stevenson and Ansley concluded that they had no dependable support within the state and would have to raise the money themselves. The project’s eventual name, the Equal Justice Initiative, came after this decision to regroup and begin again in the state capital. Its formation was therefore not a smooth institutional launch but a choice to keep the work alive after its expected sources of space, funding, and staffing had fallen away.

A New Office in Montgomery

In the summer of 1989, Stevenson and Ansley signed a lease on a small building near downtown Montgomery. The rented office was a two-story Greek Revival house built in 1882, near the historic district known as Old Alabama Town. Painted yellow and fronted by a welcoming porch, it offered a striking contrast to the courtrooms, institutional waiting rooms, and prison walls that shaped the lives of clients and their families.

The house was imperfectly equipped for legal work. It was cold in winter, squirrels repeatedly got into the attic, and its electrical supply could not run the copier and a coffeepot at the same time without blowing a fuse. Yet it became both a place to work and, through the long hours spent there, a kind of home. These practical details mark the scale of the undertaking: the founders were trying to create a functioning legal center in a building that could barely support its basic office equipment.

Ansley took responsibility for administration, including the complex reporting and accounting attached to federal funds. Her work helped small amounts of money reach the project, while the founders hired a receptionist and tried to make the office financially viable. Stevenson had already gained fundraising experience at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. He believed that the new office might raise enough to meet the minimum federal matching requirements, but the effort needed time that the unfolding execution calendar would not allow them.

The Work’s Urgency

Before the center opened, Stevenson had begun traveling each month from Atlanta to visit Alabama’s death row and meet a small group of new clients, including Walter McMillian. At the close of these visits, the prisoners repeatedly asked him to help Michael Lindsey, whose execution was scheduled for May 1989. Later, they pressed him to assist Horace Dunkins, scheduled for execution in July. Stevenson explained that he and Ansley were struggling to establish the office and lacked the time and resources to take on every urgent case. The prisoners said they understood, but their anguish at being unable to secure help while other men faced execution remained plain.

The urgency was intensified by a sharp change in Alabama’s execution activity. From the adoption of the state’s new death-penalty statute in 1975 through the end of 1988, Alabama had carried out only three executions. In 1989, changes in the United States Supreme Court’s treatment of death-penalty appeals, together with political shifts, led the attorney general’s office to pursue executions vigorously. By the end of that year, Alabama’s number of executions had doubled. The center was thus being built not in a period of steady preparation, but amid a rising demand for immediate legal intervention.

Early Practice and Institutional Significance

The later work around McMillian’s case illustrates the kind of legal barriers the center confronted. When the defense sought access to police records and files while his conviction was on direct appeal, the state was not required to provide them. Stevenson and his colleague Michael responded by filing an Alabama Rule 32 petition, which returned the case to a trial court and created an opportunity to present new evidence and seek discovery. The petition raised claims including ineffective counsel, nondisclosure of evidence, innocence, and police and prosecutorial misconduct. Here, legal procedure could serve as a route toward evidence, but obtaining that route required sustained advocacy.

The case also exposed the struggle over whose account would count as credible. When Stevenson challenged prosecutor Tom Chapman over the indictment of alibi witness Darnell Houston for perjury, Chapman said that community members who believed McMillian innocent had uninformed opinions and no facts. Stevenson argued that charging Houston for contradicting the state’s case risked intimidating others from coming forward. The conflict made concrete the gap between local testimony and the official prosecution narrative—a gap the new center’s work sought to test through investigation and legal challenge.

The founding’s significance lies in the combination of purpose and constraint. The center promised representation to people facing the state’s most final punishment, but its first months brought lost office space, failed public funding, scarce lawyers, and a workload growing faster than its resources. The yellow house in Montgomery was a modest base for a demanding legal effort, not a solution to those pressures. Its creation established a place from which Stevenson and Ansley could continue the work, even as the cases arriving at its door made clear that legal assistance could not always be organized on the timetable the people most urgently needed.