Each month people gather at our church (“virtually,” these days) for a “dinner and documentary.” Over soup, salad, and homemade cookies, we’ve learned about what’s threatening bee colonies and how to help care for them; about food waste and food distribution in the U.S.; about the surprising benefits of music therapy; and about what’s happening to immigrants and refugees. Documentaries, a film genre that has become a major avenue of public education, allow us to reflect together on challenging public issues and to learn where and how we can participate in efforts to improve the systems we inhabit and care for our neighbors—a term that includes not only humans who suffer the effects of poverty, war, and racism, but also the trees, insect life, and soil, all of which have suffered harm from human greed. Along with the sobering and sometimes alarming information these films deliver, we have learned how many organizations, including small bands of faithful folks from local churches, have quietly, steadily, humbly worked toward solutions, one case or species or ordinance at a time.
Occasionally we see a film that’s not strictly a documentary; Just Mercy was one of these—the story of attorney Bryan Stevenson’s efforts to provide legal representation for the poor and those wrongly imprisoned or condemned. Based on Stevenson’s book of the same title, the 2019 film focuses on the case of Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to death in Alabama for a crime he didn’t commit. The story of a black man with no criminal record wrongly convicted for the murder of a white woman by a mostly white jury on the flimsy testimony of a white man is not, unfortunately, unfamiliar. Systemic racism has infected the legal system in this country since its courts were established. Most of us read To Kill a Mockingbird in school and remember that story of wrongful conviction refracted through the eyes of the white girl-child whose intelligent naivete shines a harsh and clarifying light on the virulent hypocrisy that convicts an innocent man. Just Mercy reminds us how many still languish in prison without trial or conviction, or are convicted without sufficient evidence because they can’t afford adequate representation.
Stevenson, an African American raised and educated in the North, was no stranger to racism and injustice: schools and public facilities were still effectively segregated when he was a child in the sixties, and some services maintained separate entrances for whites (through the front door) and people of color (through the back). But Stevenson’s outrage grew in the same soil as his faith. The AME church where he sang in the choir fostered in him an ethic that “valued redemption over revenge.” For him, the work of redemption took shape in the Equal Justice Initiative, which he and a small group of colleagues founded in Alabama in 1989. Now a much larger organization with a staff of over 150 people, EJI works to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the U.S., to get prisoners off death row, end the death penalty, and offer legal protection to the most vulnerable.
The film gives us a long look at a few of those “most vulnerable.” Not only Walter McMillian, whose case was one of Stevenson’s first hard-won successes—a reopened case and overturned verdict accomplished in the very midst of entrenched public and professional resistance—but also McMillian’s family and community and their white allies who lived with fear the way one lives with sultry weather. At any point and without warning, they could find themselves under arrest or targeted by hostile people with guns. Consenting to be a witness in a trial like McMillan’s meant exposing oneself to real and present danger.
Though the film focuses on the single-minded work Stevenson did to get justice for a black man on death row, it wasn’t single-handed. Patient, painstaking research in legal archives, frustrating phone calls, and providing steady emotional support for those in personal crisis required the same kind of conviction and courage from EJI staff and their families as Stevenson manifested. They weathered threats, insults, abuse of power and twisted applications of the law. They trusted in the power of evidence as well as, in Stevenson’s case, the power of a God who is for the vulnerable and outcast.
Just Mercy speaks to our time on more than one level. It puts very human faces on the problem of systemic racism, now so much in the public mind and eye as people rise up all over the country to remind us that “black lives matter.” It reminds us also how much depends upon a strict and strenuous understanding of evidence. It is hard to watch the film (or read the more nuanced memoir on which it is based) without reflecting on how the noise of mass media has eroded our collective commitment to evidence that can be tested, to testimony that meets high standards of credibility and common sense, and to “justice for all,” a phrase often waved like a flag by the very people who seek to withhold justice from some.
For people of faith, Just Mercy offers a challenge to make a practical, public, costly, and courageous response to the question put to ancient Israel and to us all by the prophet Micah: “…and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8, KJV) The walk of the humble may lead us into prisons during visiting hours, or into a witness stand, or into crowded, hot offices where human needs are met and human rights served by inconspicuous people doing the inglorious work of sorting, filing, scanning, and writing reports. Bryan Stevenson made it clear in his memorable TED talk of 2015 that the work to which he has given his life and considerable talent involves us all. It is we, not just the heroic or the highly trained among us, who are called to do justice and love mercy, in what we support and speak up for and insist upon. When we sing and when we go into the streets with signs. When we vote and when we visit the vulnerable, knowing our own moral vulnerability and acknowledging the privilege that may, unjustly, be ours.
“the just man justices,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, and
…Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.[1]
Too many of those faces are behind bars. Perhaps, for some of us, watching Just Mercy will be the first step toward deeper involvement in calling our public servants and systems—and ourselves—to account.
Marilyn McEntyre has taught courses in literature and spirituality at Westmont College, Princeton Seminary, and New College Berkeley. She has published many books of poetry and prose, including Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.
[1] Gerard Manly Hopkins,“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” lines 9,11-14, poetryfoundation.org https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire