Montgomery, Alabama

Montgomery, Alabama, serves in the book as a working center for the Equal Justice Initiative’s legal advocacy, reentry support, and public engagement with racial history. Its significance emerges through the people who arrive there after years of incarceration, the programs organized from its offices, and the institutions opened there to make a history of racial violence visible.

Legal and Community Work

The Equal Justice Initiative is based in Montgomery, where Bryan Stevenson continued to lead the organization and its work representing people on death row, children prosecuted as adults, and incarcerated people who had been wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. The office was also a site of educational and community programs: the organization brought hundreds of high school students there for supplemental education and discussions about rights and justice, while working with poor children and families in Black Belt counties across the South.

The organization’s race and poverty initiative connected those local activities to a broader effort to change how racial history and contemporary inequality were discussed. Its work included a racial history calendar for 2013 and 2014, as well as reports and other materials on slavery, lynching, and the history of racial injustice. Montgomery thus appears not only as an administrative base but as a place from which legal advocacy was joined to education and public interpretation of history.

Release and Reentry

For Anthony Ray Hinton, Montgomery became the destination after his long imprisonment. In 2015, after a unanimous Supreme Court ruling compelled prosecutors to reexamine the evidence against him, new tests confirmed his innocence. He was the 152nd person exonerated after wrongful conviction and a death sentence, and went on to work as a community educator at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery.

Joe Sullivan’s arrival followed a different path out of prison. After his release in December 2017, staff brought him to Montgomery, where he entered the organization’s residential program. He remained there for eighteen months before moving to Joseph House, a home for formerly incarcerated people with significant disabilities. The city is therefore part of the account of what release required beyond the prison gate: support, a place to live, and the chance to begin a life outside confinement.

Public Memory and Continuing Advocacy

In April 2018, Montgomery became the site of the opening of the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial was described as the country’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to victims of racial-terror lynching. Together, the museum and memorial extended the organization’s work beyond individual cases, placing the history of racial terror and its continuing consequences in public view.

Montgomery also anchors the account’s closing emphasis on continuing legal work. In February 2019, the Equal Justice Initiative won a landmark Supreme Court ruling barring the execution of condemned people who become incompetent as a result of dementia or neurological disease. The organization continued to represent people facing execution, children tried as adults, and people subjected to wrongful convictions or unfair sentences. In this way, the city gathers several strands of the book’s account: defense and reentry, education and historical remembrance, and advocacy that remains unfinished.