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Not everyone is in a position to protest in person or donate large sums of money, but one thing we can all do to support the Black Lives Matter movement—which has reignited following the killing of George Floyd—is educate ourselves on the history of racism within the justice system. Luckily, movies like 13th and Just Mercy have made it super to start your journey. These two films—the former of which is streaming on Netflix and the latter of which is free to rent this week—are a powerful crash course in systemic racism. It’s an educational double feature connected not just by their subject matter, but by activist Bryan Stevenson, founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a name you should know if you don’t already.
13th, from director Ava DuVernay, is a 2016 Netflix original documentary that will expertly walk you through how slavery—supposedly abolished by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution—has been carried on in the U.S. through the prison system. There is, astoundingly, a loophole in the text of that amendment: Slavery is illegal now, it says, “except for punishment as a crime.” And so the number of prisoners in the U.S. exploded. As we hear Barack Obama say at the beginning of the film, “the US had 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”
13th features many activists, politicians, and public figures, and that includes Bryan Stevenson, the central figure of the 2019 legal drama, Just Mercy. In Just Mercy—which is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and based on Stevenson’s own 2014 memoir—the activist is portrayed in his early years, by Michael B. Jordan. He’s a young Harvard law school student, and eager to help people accused of crimes who can’t afford representation. He meets Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian (Jamie Foxx), an African-American man wrongly accused of, and sentenced to death for, murdering a white woman. It was the first big case in Stevenson’s long career in criminal justice activism, but certainly not the last. He went on to found the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit that provides lawyers to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes or not given a fair trial. If you watch 13th on Netflix, you will know that’s a lot of people, and you will also know that a disproportionate number of those people are black.
While Just Mercy shows Stevenson as a young, fresh-face lawyer who looks like Michael B. Jordan (no complaints here), 13th will introduce you to the real deal in the present day. Now 60, Stevenson is still fighting to correct the racist justice system and doing his best to educate Americans on its shameful history. “We make them their crimes,” Stevenson says in the documentary, referring to the disproportionate number of black people behind bars, including those who were falsely accused. “That’s how we introduced them. ‘That’s a rapist, that’s a murderer, that’s a robber, that’s a sex offender, that’s a gang leader.’ And through that lens, it becomes so much easier to accept that they’re guilty and that they should go to prison.”
The story of Stevenson’s fight against systemic racism, both past and present, is a crucial chapter of this national conversation, and Netflix and Warner Bros. have made it all too easy for all of us to brush up on the subject. And once you’ve begun educating yourself, be sure to take the crucial next step: Passing on what you’ve learned to others. That’s how change is born.
Where to stream Just Mercy
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