EJI race and poverty initiative

The EJI race and poverty initiative was a public-education and research project launched by the Equal Justice Initiative to change how racial history and contemporary racial issues are understood. It joined the organization’s criminal-justice work to a broader effort: showing how present-day disparities and assumptions are rooted in a longer history, and creating ways for students, families, and the wider public to engage with that history.

Origins and Purpose

For years, Bryan Stevenson had wanted to create a project that would place contemporary race issues in historical context. The initiative finally took shape as the organization’s work expanded beyond individual cases. Its premise was that criminal-justice problems could not be fully understood in isolation: many of the country’s most damaging ideas about justice, he argued, were entangled with enduring myths of racial difference.

The project emerged from a legal practice in which the gap between a community’s knowledge and official judgment could be stark. In Walter McMillian’s case, Black residents said the sheriff had arrested the wrong man, and family members and church parishioners could account for McMillian’s presence at home on the day of the murder. Yet the investigation had not established his whereabouts, and community members’ objections were dismissed by the prosecutor as uninformed opinions. At a later hearing, Ralph Myers directly repudiated his trial testimony. These episodes belonged to the case, not to the initiative’s program of activities; they help explain why the organization sought to make the racial and institutional context of criminal cases more visible.

Programs and Public Work

The initiative produced a racial-history calendar for 2013 and 2014 and began working with poor children and families in Black Belt counties across the South. It also brought hundreds of high school students to the organization’s office for supplemental education and discussions about rights and justice. Alongside this direct work, the organization developed reports and other materials intended to deepen national discussion of the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial injustice.

The project therefore worked through several forms of public engagement rather than relying on a single campaign. The calendars made history a recurring part of the year; educational visits brought students into sustained discussion; and reports supplied material for a wider national conversation. The work addressed both young people and families facing poverty and audiences encountering the country’s racial history through the organization’s publications.

Historical Framework

The initiative treated racial history as a necessary context for contemporary law and punishment. Its framework identified slavery as one institution that shaped American approaches to race and justice, followed by the reign of terror that affected people of color after Reconstruction collapsed and continued until World War II. It also identified mass incarceration as a fourth institution in that history. The account connected these eras not as interchangeable experiences, but as parts of a longer development in which racial power continued to shape public life and legal treatment.

The historical material traced how the defeat of Reconstruction in the South was followed by the removal of African Americans’ voting rights and the creation of racially restrictive laws. Laws criminalizing interracial relationships helped sustain racial hierarchy; later, racial-integrity laws were used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. This history showed how regulation of intimate life, political participation, and bodily autonomy could reinforce the same subordination.

The initiative’s wider argument also placed courtroom practices within that history. In 1987, all forty of Alabama’s elected district attorneys were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-Black counties. In jury selection, discretionary peremptory strikes continued to exclude Black prospective jurors even after courts had ruled against racial discrimination; the Supreme Court of the United States’ 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made such strikes more directly challengeable, while leaving prosecutors room to seek other ways to exclude Black jurors. These examples illuminate the institutional terrain the project aimed to contextualize, rather than representing discrete programs carried out by the initiative itself.

Development and Significance

The materials developed through the project received positive feedback, and Stevenson became hopeful that the initiative could push back against the suppression of difficult histories of racial injustice. Its significance lay in making historical understanding part of the organization’s response to present-day injustice: legal advocacy could challenge a conviction or sentence, while education and public materials could address the assumptions and omissions that made unequal treatment seem ordinary.

By working with children and families, educating students, and developing resources for national discussion, the initiative broadened the reach of the Equal Justice Initiative’s work. It presented racial history not as a separate subject from criminal justice, but as context needed to understand how punishment, exclusion, and poverty operate in the present.