Bryan Stevenson

At a moment when it seems most urgent, Stevenson has emerged as one of the nation’s most effective crusaders against inequity in the criminal justice system. Stevenson founded the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative in 1989. It was his argument that persuaded the Supreme Court to end life-without-parole sentences for children in 2012, and EJI has freed 115 wrongly condemned prisoners from death row. Last year EJI documented thousands of past lynchings that occurred across the South; the group’s next move, with funding from Google, will be to create civil rights memorial sites across the country.