Bryan Stevenson, the author of this year’s Go Big Read book, filled Varsity Hall in Union South Monday night during a talk on mass incarceration and race.
“Just Mercy” follows Stevenson’s career and his work as the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that defends the poor and wrongly convicted, according to the book.
The university gave out more than 5,000 copies of the book to students at convocation and more than 170 courses on campus are using the book.
“Bryan’s work has demonstrated that justice has not always been blind in this country,” Chancellor Rebecca Blank said in her introduction of Stevenson Monday. “Out of his experience, he has created a movement for equal treatment in the criminal justice system for poor and rich, for black and white and for children as well as adults.”
The talk focused on systemic disparities in the criminal justice system through anecdotes from his career and actions he said he believes to be necessary to “change the world.”
“One of the great challenges we have in this country is that we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent,” Stevenson said.
The large audience had a diverse background, including Sanele Sibanda, a visiting scholar from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
“I love the idea of a campus having a big read,” Sibanda said. “I started reading the book about a week ago and it’s quite fascinating.”
In the same idea of combatting adversity, Dean of Students Lori Berquam said the university will use its Diversity Framework to continue pushing toward equality.
“We have to, as a community and as a campus, come together to all of us be a part of it,” Berquam said. “It’s not one person’s job or one person’s responsibility or in one job description, it’s all of our responsibility to create both a place here on campus where everybody feels they belong.”
The next Go Big Read event, “A New Politics of Human Rights: Crossing Disciplines, Regions and Issues,” will be held at the Pyle Center Nov. 5-7.
