The third Monday of January is a U.S. federal holiday honoring the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., but two Southern states — Alabama and Mississippi — also use the day to celebrate Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces during the Civil War.

Public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson lives in Alabama and is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to combat injustice in the U.S. legal system. The new movie, , is an adaptation of his 2014 memoir of the same name. He says that the fact that his state honors Lee at all — let alone on the same day as King — is a sign that America has not acknowledged the evils of its past.

“In the American South, where I live, the landscape is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy,” Stevenson says. “We actually celebrate the architects and defenders of enslavement. For me, that has to change if we’re going to get to the kind of healthy place I think we need to get to.”

Stevenson has traveled the world, observing how other cultures address the injustices of the past. He notes that Johannesburg, South Africa, has a museum and monuments that “talk about the wrongfulness of apartheid.” In Berlin, he says, “You can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones placed next to the homes of Jewish families that were abducted during the Holocaust.”

“But in this country,” he says, “we don’t have institutions that are dedicated and focused to making sure a new generation of Americans appreciates the wrongfulness of what we did when we allowed lynching to prevail and persist, what we did when we created racial apartheid through segregation.”

In 2018, Stevenson and his organization opened the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., both dedicated to the legacy of slavery, lynching, segregation and mass incarceration in the U.S. For Stevenson, the museum and the monument are an effort to address the past — and to change the future.

“I just felt like we had to introduce a narrative about American history that wasn’t [being] clearly articulated,” he says. “We need to create institutions in this country that motivate more people to say ‘Never again’ to racial bias and bigotry.”

Interview highlights

On the “great evil” of slavery in America

The great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude. It wasn’t forced labor. It was this idea, this narrative, that black people aren’t as good as white people, that black people aren’t fully human. [That] black people aren’t evolved. [That] they can’t do this, they can’t do that. And that narrative created an ideology of white supremacy. And for me, that was the true evil of American slavery.

After the Civil War, there were 100 years of terrorism and violence. Black people were pulled out of their homes, beaten, drowned, burned, tortured and lynched. And the law did nothing. Communities did nothing. The nation did nothing.

We passed the 13th Amendment that prohibits involuntary servitude, enforced labor, but it doesn’t say anything about ending this narrative of racial difference, and because of that, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865. I think it evolved. And this wasn’t a narrative we had actually articulated.

After the Civil War, there were 100 years of terrorism and violence. Black people were pulled out of their homes, beaten, drowned, burned, tortured and lynched. And the law did nothing. Communities did nothing. The nation did nothing. And then when we got to the civil rights movement, we had this heroic moment. But that narrative of racial difference, this presumption of dangerousness and guilt continued past that era — and we’re still burdened with it today.

On the Legacy Museum

It’s located in a building that is the former site where a slave warehouse existed. And we want people to know that they’re standing on ground where enslaved people were put in pens and held. It’s a block from the auction space where enslaved people were taken to the square and sold. And it’s a first-person experience. We actually went through hundreds of slave narratives and took these accounts, which are heartbreaking and devastating, and you come in and you see the visuals that you would see if you were enslaved going into a dark dungeon-like space. We have these pens that are slave pens and they look empty. But when you walk up to them, it triggers a motion sensor and a hologram will appear and you’ll see and hear an enslaved person who will give an account of how they were pulled away from their siblings, their parents, their children, how they were sold. And getting people closer to the anguish and the suffering is part of what we’re trying to do.