The World's 50 Greatest Leaders

Rank
16
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Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson, who founded and runs the Equal Justice Initiative, in front of the former courthouse where the 1910 lynching of Allen Brooks, a black man, began in Dallas.
**EMBARGO: No electronic distribution, Web posting or street sales before 1:01 a.m. ET Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015. No exceptions for any reasons. EMBARGO set by source.** Bryan Stevenson, who founded and runs the Equal Justice Initiative, in front of the former courthouse where the 1910 lynching of Allen Brooks, a black man, began in Dallas, Feb. 8, 2015. On Tuesday, the organization is releasing a report on lynching in the U.S., compiling an inventory of 3,959 victims of ?racial terror lynchings? in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950. (Brandon Thibodeaux/The New York Times)Brandon Thibodeaux — Redux
  • Title
    Founder
  • Affiliation
    Equal Justice Initiative
  • Age
    56

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.