Lee Winkelman Says

April 29 2020 – Just Mercy (2019) Screener

Sometimes you are the mood for a Hollywood movie. I have been watching many excellent but sprawling movies from the past and from other countries, and sometimes I want a movie with more narrative drive. Just Mercy is a biopic – usually one of my least favorite kinds of movies – with narrative drive. It tells the linear story of how lawyer Bryan Stevenson manages to free an innocent man from death row in Alabama. Though you know exactly where this story is going the whole time, even if you haven’t read Stephenson’s book, the film is really well done, especially when compared to something like Remember The Titans. Michael B. Jordan gives a restrained performance as Stevenson. The supportive performances are excellent too, particularly Jamie Fox as the man on death row and Tim Blake Nelson as the key witness. The soundtrack too is restrained, not telling us what to feel at every moment. And best of all, the movie manages to balance the uplift you feel when an innocent man is released while also not letting a racist inhuman justice system off the hook.

I had the privilege of meeting the real Bryan Stephenson this past November on a trip I took with my synagogue IKAR to Montgomery Alabama. As a community organizer, I have read and thought a lot about racism in the United States. I didn’t anticipate how profoundly I would be affected by the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Legacy Museum tells the story of racism in this country, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. The Memorial commemorates the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched in the twelve southern states.

I have read The New Jim Crow and seen the documentary 13th. I knew the basic story of racism in America. But knowing it intellectually was different then seeing it all laid out so devastatingly in the museum in pictures and the words of those who lived through it. I knew about lynching, of course, but I always thought of it as something done by a few bad racist people. I didn’t realize what lynching really was until I saw the story the Museum tells and the names carved in stone in the Memorial. I didn’t realize that lynching was systematic terrorism, designed to maintain the political status quo of Jim Crow. I always thought that most people stood idly by while lynching occurred. I didn’t realize that lynchings were advertised in the newspaper, that tens of thousands of people came out to watch and celebrate, that white people took photos next to the lynched black bodies hanging from a tree or bridge, and that people bought postcards of the lynching to remember that festive day.

I was emotionally overwhelmed by my visit to the museum and memorial that Bryan Stephenson’s organization started. I mourned the loss of life, the loss of freedom and the loss of dignity by so many people for so long. I was outraged at the devaluing of African American lives to benefit the white majority. I despaired to see how racism has morphed and evolved over the last 400 years to maintain the power and privilege of whites in America even in the face of big victories won by the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement and in the face of the efforts by so many of us today to dismantle mass incarceration. These were hard lessons for my head and my heart.

I also took some solace in a clearer understanding of the problem. We can’t cure the disease of racism unless we have an accurate diagnosis of the illness. I feel like I understand the illness better now.

Meeting Bryan Stephenson and hearing him talk was inspiring too. Stephenson is not content to rest on his victories. He is always looking at what else must be done to achieve justice. He told us that even if he kept winning cases and saving people from death row that his legal victories would not stop racism and oppression from increasing in America. Stephenson said he realized that if Thurgood Marshall brought Brown vs. Board of Education to the Supreme Court today, he would lose the case. Stephenson said we need to hold up a new narrative about race our country that challenges the dominant narrative of white privilege and African-American inferiority that still holds reign in the United States. So Stephenson and his organization Equal Justice started their narrative work, resulting in the museum, the memorial, and the book and movie Just Mercy.

When our world returns to normal and travel is again possible, I highly recommend a trip to Montgomery, Alabama. It will the most profound, the most moving, and the most memorable trip you have ever taken.