Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama, has spent his career advocating for change in the American judicial system.

In 2014, he published the memoir “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” which describes how he came to be a lawyer who represents the poor, the wrongly convicted and people sentenced to death row. Stevenson said he never imagined the impact that book would have.

“It was a real surprise when the book was published that I started hearing from so many people who said they were learning things about the [judicial] system, that they were now inspired to do the kind of work that I do,” he told GBH’s The Culture Show.

More broadly, he said public understanding about our country’s legal system has grown over the past decade, and more people are calling for reforms.

“I think for the first 10-15 years of my career, it didn’t feel like there were a lot of people with us,” Stevenson said. “That’s changed radically over the last decade.”

He pointed out that rates of incarceration have dropped in many states, as have executions.

But, he said, many concerns raised in his memoir remain today.

The 10th anniversary release of “Just Mercy” includes a new prologue discussing Kenneth Smith, who was subjected to a failed execution attempt in 2022 before being put to death using a controversial method in 2024. With this new prologue, Stevenson wished to underscore that the issues addressed in his book remain strikingly important years after publishing.

“We are still capable of a tremendous amount of injustice, a tremendous amount of cruelty, and a lot of problems are still pervasive in our system,” said the author. “So, the work continues, and the work obviously is critically needed, as critically needed today as it was a decade ago.”

With the recent rapid-fire changes the Trump administration has made to the judicial system on all levels, Stevenson wishes for a commitment to “the rule of law.”

“I don’t think we’ve had a stress test over our commitment to the rule of law since the 1950s and ’60s, when you had elected officials who were openly saying, 'we will not comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education,’” noted Stevenson. “It was a stress moment, and we ultimately prevailed in making people understand that you can’t ... participate in this democracy if you’re unwilling to follow the law.”

“I grew up in a community where Black children couldn’t attend the public schools. It took lawyers coming into our community to open up those schools,” he said. “People are openly talking about violating the law, stepping back from the law. We saw mob violence that has seemingly been minimized by the current administration, and I think that’s a real threat.”

Even in the face of mounting threats to marginalized people in America, Stevenson remains steadfast in his commitment to fighting injustice.

“I live in Montgomery, Alabama. I stand on the shoulders of people who did so much more with so much less, and so, for me, that has made hopefulness ... a necessity,” he said. “I think that hopelessness is the enemy of justice. ... It will allow democracy to collapse. It will allow the rule of law to be abandoned. We have to be hopeful because hope is our superpower.”

To hear more from Bryan Stevenson, listen to the full interview above. Listen to   The Culture Show  daily at 2 p.m. on 89.7.