Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I was finally a college graduate, and I knew that I’d soon accomplish another dream—going to law school. I worked odd jobs to save money and grew closer to my aunt’s two daughters. Every day I’d get home from work, dusty and sweaty from manual labor, and sit at the dinner table to hear my teenage cousins talk about their days at school and trials with friends. Sometimes I’d help with homework. On Fridays during Lent, I helped with the fish fries at the local Catholic church. That feeling I had in college—that I had survived decades of chaos and heartbreak and finally come out on the other side—deepened. The incredible optimism I felt about my own life contrasted starkly with the pessimism of so many of my neighbors. Years of decline in the blue-collar economy manifested themselves in the material prospects of Middletown’s residents. The Great Recession, and the not-great recovery that followed, had hastened Middletown’s downward trajectory. But there was something almost spiritual about the cynicism of the community at large, something that went much deeper than a short-term recession. As a culture, we had no heroes. Certainly not any politician—Barack Obama was then the most admired man in America (and likely still is), but even when the country was enraptured by his rise, most Middletonians viewed him suspiciously. George W. Bush had few fans in 2008. Many loved Bill Clinton, but many more saw him as the symbol of American moral decay, and Ronald Reagan was long dead. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. I doubt my neighbors could even name a high-ranking military officer. The space program, long a source of pride, had gone the way of the dodo, and with it the celebrity astronauts. Nothing united us with the core fabric of American society. We felt trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream—a steady wage. To understand the significance of this cultural detachment, you must appreciate that much of my family’s, my neighborhood’s, and my community’s identity derives from our love of country. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about Breathitt County’s mayor, its health care services, or its famous residents. But I do know this: “Bloody Breathitt” allegedly earned its name because the county filled its World War I draft quota entirely with volunteers—the only county in the entire United States to do so. Nearly a century later, and that’s the factoid about Breathitt that I remember best: It’s the truth that everyone around me ensured I knew. I once interviewed Mamaw for a class project about World War II. After seventy years filled with marriage, children, grandchildren, death, poverty, and triumph, the thing about which Mamaw was unquestionably the proudest and most excited was that she and her family did their part during World War II.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was an absurd system and yet very, very subtle, I’ve come to believe. It singled out men who would give themselves.’ ‘They didn’t make objections to people’s—private lives?’ I carefully queried, reaching across with the teapot. ‘Thank you, my dear. No, no, no. On the gay thing’ (he unselfconsciously brought it out, seizing a lot of sugar again) ‘they were completely untroubled—even to the extent of having a slight preference for it, in my opinion. Quite unlike all this modern nonsense about how we’re security risks and what-have-you. They had the wit to see that we were prone to immense idealism and dedication.’ Charles sipped his tea excitedly. ‘And of course in a Muslim country it was a positive advantage …’ We laughed at this, though the implications were not quite clear. ‘I’m sure you weren’t such innocents as you make out,’ I said. ‘You must have been trained, after all.’ ‘We read a book about the sort of crops and stuff, and did a bit of Arabic.’ Charles shrugged. ‘And then they sent us up to the Radcliffe Infirmary to watch the operations. The idea was that if you saw a lot of blood and severed limbs and so on it would prepare you in some mysterious way for the tropics. They’d bring in chaps who’d been run over, or undergrads who’d tried to do themselves in, and we all had a jolly good look. Fascinating, in a way, but of no obvious benefit for a career in the Political Service.’ Charles was in knowingly good form. ‘So you simply followed your instincts much of the time?’ ‘Mm—up to a point. There was a tendency to treat Africa as if it were some great big public school—especially in Khartoum. But when you were out in the provinces, and on tour for weeks on end, you really felt you were somewhere else . If you’d had the wrong sort of character you could have gone to the bad, in that vast emptiness, or abused your power. I expect you know about the Bog Barons in the south—truly eccentric fellows who had absolute command, quite out of touch with the rest of the world.’ ‘It sounds like something out of Conrad.’ ‘So it is often said.’ ‘I must say, I see you as more of a Firbankian figure—or at least that’s how you seem to see yourself.’ ‘I don’t know about that …’ Charles rumbled. ‘It’s this idea that rather appeals to me, of seeing adults as children. His adults don’t have any dignity as adults, they’re all like over-indulged children following their own caprices and inclinations …’ ‘Well, I don’t know!’ Charles gave a brusque laugh of disagreement. ‘Don’t you feel that, though? I’m always being struck by it, especially with very grand and humourless people who can’t afford to see that they’re behaving just like prefects.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Other states with very large death-row populations, like California and Pennsylvania, have declared moratoriums on executions. Support for the death penalty is waning even as people are still being executed. The fifty-year trend of annual increases in the jail and prison population in the United States that began in the 1970s has ended. In the last five years, we have seen declines in the number of people jailed or imprisoned in America, although our nation still has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In the last ten years, twenty states have banned life imprisonment without parole sentences for children, and nearly one thousand people who were condemned to die in prison for crimes they were accused of committing when they were children have been released. It is the great joy of my career these days that I frequently travel and have someone come up to me and say, “Hey man, I’m one of your guys! I was a juvenile lifer who was supposed to die in prison, but now I’m here with you.” We then usually embrace. The encounter changes my day and lifts my spirits in ways that are hard to measure. Many of the young people you’ll read about in this book have since been released. Some even work on my staff now. But there have been worrisome developments, too. In 2020, after several heartbreaking killings of unarmed Black people by police attracted international attention, there seemed to be a new appreciation of the racial bias that undermines the administration of justice in the United States. In the midst of a global pandemic, police violence sparked protests and an unprecedented focus on confronting racial injustice that compromises our nation’s legal system. Today, however, a bitter backlash has emerged and many states have retreated from efforts to overcome the problems created by racial bias. Some states have passed laws to restrict educators from teaching about our history of racial bigotry and discrimination. Books about Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have been banned by school boards. Programs and initiatives designed to improve racial and gender diversity have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The politics of fear and anger has re-emerged, and narratives that fuel bigotry, violence, and hate seem to gain ever more prominence on social media and in the public sphere. I’m proud that we have now opened three cultural sites in Montgomery, Alabama, to foster truth-telling about our history of racial injustice. Each week, thousands of people come to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which memorializes victims of lynching in America, and many visitors are visibly moved by what they discover. At our Legacy Museum, which explores the evolution of unjust racial bigotry from slavery until today, visitors seem to understand things that they did not learn in school.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The first time I met Ms. Parks, I sat on Ms. Durr’s front porch in Old Cloverdale, a residential neighborhood in Montgomery, and I listened to the three women talk for two hours. Finally, after watching me listen for all that time, Ms. Parks turned to me and sweetly asked, “Now, Bryan, tell me who you are and what you’re doing.” I looked at Ms. Carr to see if I had permission to speak, and she smiled and nodded at me. I then gave Ms. Parks my rap. “Yes, ma’am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We’re trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don’t get the legal help they need. We’re trying to help people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We’re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system. We’re trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We’re trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors—” I realized that I had gone on way too long, and I stopped abruptly. Ms. Parks, Ms. Carr, and Ms. Durr were all looking at me. Ms. Parks leaned back, smiling. “Ooooh, honey, all that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.” We all laughed. I looked down, a little embarrassed. Then Ms. Carr leaned forward and put her finger in my face and talked to me just like my grandmother used to talk to me. She said, “That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.” All three women nodded in silent agreement and for just a little while they made me feel like a young prince. — I looked at the clock. It was 6:30 P.M . Mr. Dill was dead by now. I was very tired, and it was time to stop all this foolishness about quitting. It was time to be brave. I turned to my computer, and there was an email inviting me to speak to students in a poor school district about remaining hopeful. The teacher told me that she had heard me speak and wanted me to be a role model for the students and inspire them to do great things.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone. We can easily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a permanent American underclass, one where family dysfunction, childhood trauma, cultural segregation, and hopelessness coexist with some basic measure of subsistence. Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass. Yet to return to the issue that motivated me to write this book, doing better requires that we acknowledge the role of culture. As the liberal senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” I agree, and my view that there will never be a purely government-based solution to the problems I write about has remained largely unchanged since Hillbilly Elegy came out. That said, I’m hardly a policy skeptic, and I think there is much more our governments could do to address these problems. Better policy requires better politics, however, and like many people, I find new reasons each day to wonder whether our politics are remotely up to the challenge. To the degree I’ve commented on politics in the past five years, I’ve usually argued that my own party has to abandon the dogmas of the 1990s and actually offer something of substance to working- and middle-class Americans. And despite all of my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me: from his disdain for the “elites” and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan to his recognition that the Republican Party had done too little for its increasingly working- and middle-class base. For so many years, I and a few of my intellectual fellow travelers in the Republican Party were telling politicians to make precisely those sorts of arguments. Yet the populist rhetoric of the campaign hasn’t informed the party’s approach to governing. Unless that changes, I suspect Republicans will pay a heavy political price. Despite a relatively vibrant economy, many of the regional economies in the industrial Midwest continue to struggle, wage growth lags behind productivity growth, and many metrics of broader social problems—opioid overdoses, rising mortality—are going up. The rancor of the 2016 campaign continues to infect our discourse. In short, there are many reasons to worry about the future, though I remain hopeful about it. Part of that stems from the fact that my own life remains remarkably blessed. Understandably, many people wonder what so many of the characters of Hillbilly Elegy are doing. I recently led an effort (along with my partner Steve Case) to bring more investment capital to neglected areas of the country, an effort we hope will spur serious job growth in places like my hometown.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  It was a serious injury that left Walter in very poor condition for several weeks. He didn’t have a lot of care available, so he came to live with me in Montgomery for several months until he recovered. He eventually regained his mobility, although the injury put an end to his ability to cut trees and perform difficult landscape work. I marveled at how he seemed to take it in stride. “I’ll figure out something else to do when I get back on my feet,” he told me. After a few months, he went back to Monroe County and started collecting car parts for resale. He owned the plot of land where he’d put his trailer and had become convinced, on the advice of some friends, that he could generate income with a junk business—collecting discarded vehicles and car parts and reselling them. The work was less physically demanding than logging and allowed him to be outdoors. Before long his property was littered with busted vehicles and scrap metal. In 1998, Walter and I were asked to go to Chicago to attend a national conference where exonerated former death row prisoners were planning to gather. By the late 1990s, the evolution of DNA evidence had helped expose dozens of wrongful convictions. In many states, the number of exonerations exceeded the number of executions. The problem was so significant in Illinois that in 2003, Governor George Ryan, a Republican, citing the unreliability of capital punishment, commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death row. Concerns about innocence and the death penalty were intensifying, and support for the death penalty in opinion polls began to drop. Abolitionists were becoming hopeful that more profound death penalty reform or possibly a moratorium might be achievable. Our time in Chicago with other exonerated former death row prisoners was energizing for Walter, who seemed more motivated than ever to talk about his experience. Around the same time, I started teaching at the New York University School of Law. I would travel to New York to teach my classes and then fly back to Montgomery to run EJI. I asked Walter to come to New York each year to talk with students, and it was always a powerful moment when he walked into the classroom. He was a survivor of a criminal justice system that had proven, in his case, just how brutally unfair and cruel it could be. His personality, presence, and witness said something extraordinary about the humanity of people directly impacted by systemic abuse. His firsthand perspective on the plight of people wrongfully convicted was deeply meaningful to students, who often seemed overwhelmed by Walter’s testimony. He usually spoke very briefly and would give short answers to the questions posed to him. But he had an enormous effect on the students who met him. He would laugh and joke and tell them he wasn’t angry or bitter, just grateful to be free.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We emphasized the incongruity of not allowing children to smoke, drink, vote, drive without restrictions, give blood, buy guns, and a range of other behaviors because of their well-recognized lack of maturity and judgment while simultaneously treating some of the most at- risk, neglected, and impaired children exactly the same as full-grown adults in the criminal justice system. Initially, we had little success with these arguments. Joe Sullivan’s judge ruled that our claims were “meritless.” In other states, we were met with similar skepticism and resistance. Eventually we exhausted options provided by the state of Florida in Joe Sullivan’s case and filed an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 2009, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case. It felt like a miracle. Review in the Supreme Court is rare enough, but the possibility that the Court might create constitutional relief for children sentenced to die in prison made this opportunity even more thrilling. It was a chance to change the rules across the country. The Court granted review in Joe’s case and in another Florida case that involved a sixteen-year-old teen convicted of a non-homicide and sentenced to life with no parole. Terrance Graham was from Jacksonville, Florida, and had been on probation when he was accused of trying to rob a store. As a result of his new arrest, the judge revoked Terrance’s probation and sentenced him to die in prison. Because both Joe’s case and the Graham case involved non-homicides, it was likely that if we won a favorable ruling from the Court, it would only apply to life- without-parole sentences imposed on juveniles convicted of non-homicides, but that was an exciting possibility. The cases generated a lot of national media attention. When we filed our brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, national organizations joined us and filed amicus briefs urging the Court to rule in our favor. We received support from the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, former judges, former prosecutors, social workers, civil rights groups, human rights groups, even some victims’ rights groups. Former juvenile offenders who had later become well-known public figures filed supporting documents, including very conservative politicians like former U.S. senator Alan Simpson from Wyoming. Simpson had spent eighteen years in the Senate, including ten as the Republican whip, the second-ranking senator in his party. He had also been a former juvenile felon. He had been adjudicated as a juvenile delinquent when he was seventeen, for multiple convictions for arson, theft, aggravated assault, gun violence, and, finally, assaulting a police officer. He later confessed: “I was a monster.” His life didn’t begin to change until he found himself imprisoned in “a sea of puke and urine” following another arrest.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The next day he called again, to my relief. “Mr. Stevenson, I’m sorry, but you have to represent me. I don’t need you to tell me that you can stop this execution; I don’t need you to say you can get a stay. But I have twenty-nine days left, and I don’t think I can make it if there is no hope at all. Just say you’ll do something and let me have some hope.” It was impossible for me to say no, so I said yes. “I’m not sure there is anything that we can do to block this, given where things are,” I told him somberly. “But we’ll try.” “If you could do something, anything…well, I’d be very grateful.” — Herbert Richardson was a Vietnam War veteran whose nightmarish experiences in brutal conditions left him traumatized and scarred. He enlisted in the Army in 1964 at the age of eighteen, at a time when America was heavily involved in combat. He was assigned to the 11th Aviation Group, 1st Cavalry Division, and was sent to Camp Radcliff in An Khe, Vietnam. The camp was near Pleiku, an area known for extremely heavy fighting in the mid-1960s. Herbert endured perilous missions in which he saw friends get killed or seriously injured. On one mission, his entire platoon was killed in an ambush, and he was severely injured. He regained consciousness coated in the blood of his fellow soldiers; he was disoriented and unable to move. It didn’t take long before he experienced a complete mental breakdown. He attempted suicide after suffering severe headaches. Despite multiple referrals from commanding officers for psychiatric evaluation, he remained in combat for seven months before his “crying outbursts” and “uncommunicative withdrawal” resulted in an honorable discharge in December 1966. Not surprisingly, his trauma followed him home to Brooklyn, New York, where he had nightmares, suffered disabling headaches, and sometimes ran out of his house screaming “Incoming!” He married and had children, but his post-traumatic stress disorder continued to undermine his ability to manage his behavior. He ended up in a veterans hospital in New York City, where he had a slow, difficult recovery from severe head pain associated with his war injuries. Herbert became one of thousands of combat veterans who end up in jail or prison after completing their military service. One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Joe Sullivan was entitled to relief. Scores of people, including Antonio Nuñez and Ian Manuel, were entitled to reduced sentences that would give them a “meaningful opportunity for release.” Two years later, in June 2012, we won a constitutional ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences imposed on children convicted of homicides. The Supreme Court had agreed to review Evan Miller’s case and the case of our client from Arkansas, Kuntrell Jackson. I argued both cases in March of that year and waited anxiously until we won a favorable ruling. The Court’s decision meant that no child accused of any crime could ever again be automatically sentenced to die in prison. Over two thousand condemned people sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for crimes when they were children were now potentially eligible for relief and reduced sentences. Some states changed their statutes to create more hopeful sentences for child offenders. Prosecutors in many places resisted retroactive application of the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama, but everyone now had new hope, including Ashley Jones and Trina Garnett. We continued our work on issues involving children by pursuing more cases. I believe there should be a total ban on housing children under the age of eighteen with adults in jails or prisons. We filed cases seeking to stop the practice. I am also convinced that very young children should never be tried in adult court. They’re vulnerable to all sorts of problems that increase the risk of a wrongful conviction. No child of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen can defend him- or herself in the adult criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions and illegal trials involving young children are very common. A few years earlier, we won the release of Phillip Shaw, who was fourteen when he was improperly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in Missouri. His jury was illegally selected, excluding African Americans. I argued two cases at the Mississippi Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the convictions and sentences of young children were illegal. Demarious Banyard was a thirteen-year-old who had been bullied into participating in a robbery that resulted in a fatal shooting in Jackson, Mississippi. He was given a mandatory death-in-prison sentence after his jury was illegally told that he had to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and the State introduced impermissible evidence. He was resentenced to a finite term of years and now has hope for release. Dante Evans was a fourteen-year-old child living in a FEMA trailer with his abusive father in Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  These words were spoken by his best man, who is also a child of divorce. His toast conveys the yearning, uncertainty, and youthful self-confidence of his generation: To many here today it feels strange to find that one of us is getting married. It’s strange because we are a generation of cynical children when it comes to marriage. We came of age during a time when divorce became an acceptable alternative. Ultimately this is good. But the effect on us is one of caution, of skepticism. Who needs marriage? It’s an outdated institution. Why be burdened? But while we were uttering these cynicisms, we were privately nurturing the hope that we could rediscover and experience the romantic and very profound magic that we had heard existed in a far-off time—to see marriage through innocent eyes. But we didn’t realize it’s not about innocence. It’s about realism, about seeing what’s really there and not deluding ourselves with false expectations. Ironically, the wonderful thing about growing up in the Age of Divorce is that we have learned so much. It’s been very painful but we learned. So we look for signals. When one of our friends tells us he’s getting married, we look for signals to assess his chances. Well, I got a signal this morning. As the bride stepped out of the door, I caught my breath. I felt a lump in my throat and I leaned against the car for support. I was stunned. She was so beautiful. But it wasn’t just physical beauty. As Elizabeth walked behind Michael, he turned slowly and took her hand. I felt that calm electricity that happens when it’s right—the thing, whatever it is, that doesn’t happen unless it’s basically right. And I paused to appreciate the knowledge that our cynical generation has gained. And I choked back a tear. We’re okay, Michael and Elizabeth. Speak the truth to each other and be happy. Appendix: Research Sample Divorced Sample ORIGINAL SAMPLE AND DEMOGRAPHICS The study began in 1971 with 131 children and adolescents from 60 families in which the parents had recently separated and filed for divorce in Marin County, California. These families were selected out of a much larger group of people who were referred to us by their family law attorneys on the basis of the parents’ willingness to participate and using the criteria that all of the children had to be developmentally on track, never having been referred for emotional or developmental problems. Each child, 59 of the mothers, and 47 of the fathers were studied intensively for a six-week period near the time of the marital separation, which was defined as the time when the parents physically separated and remained permanently apart. Parents and children were recontacted and reexamined at eighteen months postseparation, at five years, and at ten years.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Some version of Gail’s story often rears its head where I grew up. You watch as teenagers find themselves in dire straits, sometimes of their own making and sometimes not. The statistics are stacked high against them, and many succumb: to crime or an early death at worst, domestic strife and welfare dependency at best. But others make it. There’s Jane Rex. There’s Lindsay, who blossomed in the midst of Mamaw’s death; Aunt Wee, who put her life on track after ditching an abusive husband. Each benefited from the same types of experiences in one way or another. They had a family member they could count on. And they saw—from a family friend, an uncle, or a work mentor—what was available and what was possible. Not long after I began thinking about what might help the American working class get ahead, a team of economists, including Raj Chetty, published a groundbreaking study on opportunity in America. Unsurprisingly, they found that a poor kid’s chances of rising through the ranks of America’s meritocracy were lower than most of us wanted. By their metrics, a lot of European countries seemed better than America at the American Dream. More important, they discovered that opportunity was not spread evenly over the whole country. In places like Utah, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts, the American Dream was doing just fine—as good or better than any other place in the world. It was in the South, the Rust Belt, and Appalachia where poor kids really struggled. Their findings surprised a lot of people, but not me. And not anyone who’d spent any time in these areas. In a paper analyzing the data, Chetty and his coauthors noted two important factors that explained the uneven geographic distribution of opportunity: the prevalence of single parents and income segregation. Growing up around a lot of single moms and dads and living in a place where most of your neighbors are poor really narrows the realm of possibilities. It means that unless you have a Mamaw and Papaw to make sure you stay the course, you might never make it out. It means that you don’t have people to show you by example what happens when you work hard and get an education. It means, essentially, that everything that made it possible for me, Lindsay, Gail, Jane Rex, and Aunt Wee to find some measure of happiness is missing. So I wasn’t surprised that Mormon Utah—with its strong church, integrated communities, and intact families—wiped the floor with Rust Belt Ohio. There are, I think, policy lessons to draw from my life—ways we might put our thumb on that all-important scale. We can adjust how our social services systems treat families like mine. Remember that when I was twelve I watched Mom get hauled away in a police cruiser. I’d seen her get arrested before, but I knew that this time was different. We were in the system now, with social worker visits and mandated family counseling.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In a church basement, Walter’s sister found flyers advertising the fish fry held at Walter’s house; they confirmed that the event had taken place on the same day as the Morrison murder. A white storeowner who had no relationship to Walter or his family had kept a copy of that flyer for some reason, and he confirmed that he had received it before the Morrison murder. We even tracked down Clay Kast, the white mechanic who had modified Walter’s truck and converted it to a low-rider. He confirmed that the work had been done over six months after Ronda Morrison was murdered. This proved that McMillian’s truck had had no modifications or special features and therefore could not have been the truck described by Myers and Hooks at the trial. I was feeling very good about the progress we were making when I got a call that would become the most significant break in the case. The voice said, “Mr. Stevenson, this is Ralph Myers.” Our secretary had told me there was a “Mr. Miles” on the phone, so I was a little shocked to hear Ralph Myers on the other end of the line. Before I could compose myself, he spoke again. “I think you need to come and see me. I have something I need to tell you,” he said dramatically. Myers was imprisoned at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama, and Michael and I made plans to meet him there in three days. Michael and I had started running a few miles at night after work to help us wind down from the increasingly long work days. Montgomery has a beautiful park that houses the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which brings nationally acclaimed playwrights and actors to Alabama to perform Shakespeare and modern theatrical productions. The theater is set among hundreds of acres of beautifully maintained parkland with lakes and ponds. There are several trails for running. That evening we spent most of our run speculating about what Myers would tell us. “Why would Myers call us now?” Michael asked. “Can you imagine just going into a courtroom and straight-up making up a story that puts an innocent man on death row? I’m not sure we can trust anything he says.” “Well, you may be right, but he had a lot of help in putting together that testimony. Remember, they also put Myers on death row to coerce some of those statements. Who knows? He may be in touch with the State now, and this is some kind of setup where they are trying to mislead us.” I hadn’t seriously considered that possibility until our run that night. I thought again about how sleazy Myers had been during the trial. “We have to be careful to not reveal information to Myers—just get information he has. But we have to talk to him because if he recants his trial testimony, the State has nothing on Walter.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  There were hundreds of people outside the Court as well. A wide assortment of children’s rights advocates, lawyers, and mental health experts were watching closely when we asked the Court to declare life-without-parole sentences imposed on children unconstitutional. During the argument, the Court was feisty, and it was impossible to predict what the justices were going to do. I told the Court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes life imprisonment without parole sentences on children. I explained that condemning children violates international law, which bans these sentences for children. We showed the Court that these sentences are disproportionately imposed on children of color. We argued that the phenomenon of life sentences imposed on children is largely a result of harsh punishments that were created for career adult criminals and were never intended for children—which made the imposition of such a sentence on juveniles like Terrance Graham and Joe Sullivan unusual. I also told the Court that to say to any child of thirteen that he is fit only to die in prison is cruel. I had no way of knowing if the Court had been persuaded. I had promised Joe, whose name and case were constantly being discussed on television, that I would visit him after the argument in the Supreme Court. At first Joe was very excited by all the attention his case was generating, but then the guards and other prisoners started making fun of him and treating him more harshly than usual. They seemed to resent the attention he was getting. I told him that now that the argument was over, things would calm down. For weeks he’d been working on memorizing a poem he said he’d written. When I asked if he had really written it, he acknowledged that another inmate had helped him, but his excitement about the poem was undiminished. He had repeatedly promised that he would recite it for me when I visited him after the argument. When I arrived at the prison, Joe was wheeled into the visitation area without any difficulty. I talked to him about the argument in Washington, but he was much more interested in preparing me to hear his poem. I could tell he was nervous about whether he’d be able to do it. I cut short my report about his case so I could hear his poem. He closed his eyes to concentrate and then began to recite the lines: Roses are red, violets are blue. Soon I’ll come home to live with you. My life will be better, happy I’ll be, You’ll be like my Dad and my family. We’ll have fun with our friends and others will see, I’m a good person…uh…I’m a good person…I’m…a…good…person…uh… He couldn’t remember the last line.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  We had two shanties in the backyard that my grandmother would rent out to migrants and seasonal workers. We had a small peach tree in a tiny patch on one side of the house and on the other side my grandmother had a driveway. I never understood why my grandmother had a driveway. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t know how to drive. Yet she had a driveway. All of our neighbors had driveways, some with fancy, cast-iron gates. None of them had cars, either. There was no future in which most of these families would ever have cars. There was maybe one car for every thousand people, yet almost everyone had a driveway. It was almost like building the driveway was a way of willing the car to happen. The story of Soweto is the story of the driveways. It’s a hopeful place. — Sadly, no matter how fancy you made your house, there was one thing you could never aspire to improve: your toilet. There was no indoor running water, just one communal outdoor tap and one outdoor toilet shared by six or seven houses. Our toilet was in a corrugated-iron outhouse shared among the adjoining houses. Inside, there was a concrete slab with a hole in it and a plastic toilet seat on top; there had been a lid at some point, but it had broken and disappeared long ago. We couldn’t afford toilet paper, so on the wall next to the seat was a wire hanger with old newspaper on it for you to wipe. The newspaper was uncomfortable, but at least I stayed informed while I handled my business. The thing that I couldn’t handle about the outhouse was the flies. It was a long drop to the bottom, and they were always down there, eating on the pile, and I had an irrational, all-consuming fear that they were going to fly up and into my bum. One afternoon, when I was around five years old, my gran left me at home for a few hours to go run errands. I was lying on the floor in the bedroom, reading. I needed to go, but it was pouring down rain. I was dreading going outside to use the toilet, getting drenched running out there, water dripping on me from the leaky ceiling, wet newspaper, the flies attacking me from below. Then I had an idea. Why bother with the outhouse at all? Why not put some newspaper on the floor and do my business like a puppy? That seemed like a fantastic idea. So that’s what I did. I took the newspaper, laid it out on the kitchen floor, pulled down my pants, and squatted and got to it.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Again. Just as virtue prepares man for heaven, so sin debars him therefrom. Now sin, which is opposed to virtue, debars man from heaven, not only because it brings disorder into the soul, by leading it away from its due end, but also because it offends God, to whom, as the director of human actions, man looks for this heavenly reward. Moreover, sin is contrary to divine charity, as we have fully proved. Again, when a man is conscious of sin, he loses hope, which he needs in order to go to heaven. Therefore, as sin abounds in the human race, man needs a remedy for it. But none can provide this remedy, save God alone, who is able not only to move man’s will to good, so as to bring him back to the right order, but also to condone the offence committed against Himself; since an offence is not forgiven, save by the person offended. In order that man’s conscience may be eased of his past sin, he must be certified of God’s forgiveness. But he cannot be certified of this except by God Himself. Therefore it was fitting to the human race, and expedient for the obtainment of heavenly bliss, that God should become man, so that man would both receive from God forgiveness of his sins, and be certified of that forgiveness by God made man. Hence our Lord said (Matth. 9:6): That you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins: and the Apostle says (Heb. 9:14) that the blood of Christ … shall cleanse our conscience from dead works, to serve the living God.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: Patience is stated to have a perfect work in relation to charity, in so far as it is an effect of the abundance of charity that a man bears hardships patiently, according to Rom. 8:35, “Who . . . shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation? Or distress?” etc. Whether any one can be perfect in this life?Objection 1: It would seem that none can be perfect in this life. For the Apostle says (1 Cor. 13:10): “When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.” Now in this life that which is in part is not done away; for in this life faith and hope, which are in part, remain. Therefore none can be perfect in this life. Objection 2: Further, “The perfect is that which lacks nothing” (Phys. iii, 6). Now there is no one in this life who lacks nothing; for it is written (James 3:2): “In many things we all offend”; and (Ps. 138:16): “Thy eyes did see my imperfect being.” Therefore none is perfect in this life. Objection 3: Further, the perfection of the Christian life, as stated [3754](A[1]), relates to charity, which comprises the love of God and of our neighbor. Now, neither as to the love of God can one have perfect charity in this life, since according to Gregory (Hom. xiv in Ezech.) “the furnace of love which begins to burn here, will burn more fiercely when we see Him Whom we love”; nor as to the love of our neighbor, since in this life we cannot love all our neighbors actually, even though we love them habitually; and habitual love is imperfect. Therefore it seems that no one can be perfect in this life. On the contrary, The Divine law does not prescribe the impossible. Yet it prescribes perfection according to Mat. 5:48, “Be you . . . perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect.” Therefore seemingly one can be perfect in this life. I answer that, As stated above [3755](A[1]), the perfection of the Christian life consists in charity. Now perfection implies a certain universality because according to Phys. iii, 6, “the perfect is that which lacks nothing.” Hence we may consider a threefold perfection. One is absolute, and answers to a totality not only on the part of the lover, but also on the part of the object loved, so that God be loved as much as He is lovable. Such perfection as this is not possible to any creature, but is competent to God alone, in Whom good is wholly and essentially. Another perfection answers to an absolute totality on the part of the lover, so that the affective faculty always actually tends to God as much as it possibly can; and such perfection as this is not possible so long as we are on the way, but we shall have it in heaven.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  We now come to a final, critical question. What values does this generation hold regarding marriage and divorce? Have they given up on marriage or committed cohabitation? Is it fated to disappear as a human institution? The vote of this generation is clear. Despite their firsthand experience of seeing how marriages can fail, they sincerely want lasting, faithful relationships whether in marriage or a lasting cohabitation. No single adult in this study accepts the notion that marriage is going to wither away. They want stability and a different life for their children. They fully accept divorce as an option but they believe that divorce in a family with children should be an absolute last resort. Those who are happily married feel blessed. They never expected to have a happy family of their own and they’re grateful for their great good fortune. As children of divorce they are all eager to rewrite history, not to repeat it. They want to do things better than their parents. Over the years, many of the children in this study have kept in touch with me. I’ve been invited to their weddings and attended several of them. Others send color photographs, including images of romantic weddings with all the trimmings. In one, a crateful of white doves was released after the vows were spoken. One garlanded bride got married on top of a mountain to the sound of a shepherd’s flute. Some did not invite their parents. Others invited everyone, including former and present wives and husbands of their parents. For all young people, a wedding still symbolizes lifetime commitment. But among children of divorce, the wedding represents a triumph over fear. For those whose weddings I attended, I think my presence may have provided a sense of closure on their past and strengthened their sense of having made it against the odds. I am the tribal elder who was there at the major battles of their lives, who carries their history, including their dreams, hopes, and fears, in my keeping. I end this book with a passionate wedding toast offered at the marriage of a young man named Michael who just turned thirty-two. Like so many others in this study it had taken Michael years to overcome his intense fear of commitment. He said: “Every time I decided to go through with it, I would be overcome by an awful feeling of sadness, just like I felt when I was a little boy.” Finally he managed to conquer his fear and marry Elizabeth, the woman he had lived with and loved for over five years.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Nothing could be assured, but I explained to Walter that we were only just now getting to a court where our claims would be seriously considered. Michael had stayed long past the two years he had committed to us, but he was now scheduled to move to San Diego to start a job as a federal public defender. He agonized about leaving our office, although he was less conflicted about leaving Alabama. I assigned one of our new attorneys, Bernard Harcourt, to replace Michael on Walter’s case. Bernard was a lot like Michael in that he was smart, determined, and extremely hardworking. He had first worked with me when he was a law student at Harvard Law School. He became so engaged in the work that he asked the federal judge he was clerking for after law school if he could cut short his two-year clerkship to join us in Alabama. The judge agreed, and Bernard arrived shortly before Michael left. Raised in New York City by French parents, he had attended the Lycée Français de New York in Manhattan, a high school that was unapologetic about its European perspective on education. After graduating from Princeton, Bernard worked in banking before pursuing his law degree. He had been preparing for a traditional legal career until he came down to work with us one summer and became fascinated by the issues that death penalty cases presented. He and his girlfriend, Mia, moved to Montgomery and were intrigued by life in Alabama. Bernard’s quick immersion in the McMillian case intensified his cultural adventure more than he could have ever imagined. The community’s presence at the hearing got people talking about what we had presented in court, and that encouraged more people to come forward with helpful information. All sorts of people were contacting us with wide-ranging claims of corruption and misconduct. Only a few things here and there were useful to us in our efforts to free Walter, but all of it was interesting. Bernard and I continued to track leads and interview people who had insights to share about life in Monroe County. The threats we received made me worry about the hostility that Walter would face if he was ever released. I wondered how safely he could live in the community if everyone was persuaded that he was a dangerous murderer. We began discussing the idea of reaching out to a few people who might help us publicly dramatize the injustice of Mr. McMillian’s wrongful conviction as a way of setting the stage for his possible release. If the public could only know what we knew, it might ease his re-entry into freedom. We wanted people to understand this simple fact: Walter did not commit that murder. His freedom wouldn’t be based on some tricky legal loophole or the exploitation of a technicality.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Vance takes an affectionate but critical look at his people.” —Columbus Monthly “With a sense of the poetic, Vance writes of the beauty of the place of his kin: deep hollers, green rolling hillsides, and people who live by a fierce code of honor. But we learn a different story, too: that of hopelessness, early pregnancies, addiction, and the sense that poverty is a life sentence.” —Evansville Courier & Press “[Hillbilly Elegy ] does an excellent job of shedding a light on the voters in the Rust Belt states that flipped the last election. . . . There is plenty of sadness and anger in its pages, but those emotions are overwhelmed by a murky truth that would do us good to try to understand.” —East Oregonian “[A]n embodiment of certain timeless and universal truths that speak to us all, regardless of our backgrounds. . . . Hillbilly Elegy is a story of inspiration that should be read by everyone because of its message of hope and personal triumph in the face of overwhelming obstacles.” —Fayetteville Observer “This admirably frank book illumines poverty through memoir.” —Lincoln Journal Star “[Vance’s] narrative is attention-grabbing, gritty, and provides down-to-earth insight into why the United States is now so politically divided. . . . Hillbilly Elegy is at times very funny, disturbing, and deeply poignant.” —Missourian “Vance is brutally honest in sharing his story.” —Highland Country Press “Unflinching.” —Lafayette Journal & Courier “Vance is a wonderful memoirist.” —Toronto Star “A serious, fascinating, human—with all the good and bad that word involves—insight into the lives of people from the white working class of Rust Belt America.” —The Australian “In this searching recollection of his childhood in Appalachia and Rust Belt Ohio, Vance . . . trains an unflinching eye on the rural working class. . . . [Hillbilly Elegy is] a requiem for an identity that sees no place for itself in a postindustrial world.” —Slate “A highly personal deep dive into a segment of American society that is painfully trapped in cycles of despair and failure, some of which is the product of self-destructive behavior that only exacerbates the paucity of economic opportunity.” —Bloomberg “Vance’s is a unique voice. He offers a tough but sympathetic glimpse into a pocket of white America that is too easily lampooned in popular culture, and he does it as only someone who’s lived in that world can.” —Vox “In his touching memoir, J.D. Vance examines the socioeconomic conditions that affected his and other Appalachian families in the twentieth century.” —Bustle “A spare and poignant look at impoverished rural Ohio and Kentucky.” —The Paris Review Daily “If you have not read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy , you should, full stop.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Second, early Christian sexual morality was inextricable from incipient notions of free will. In part the Christian interest in models of human agency was generated by the struggle within the movement for the legacy of Paul; gnostic theologies (in various guises) tended to pull out the strands of Paul’s writings that spoke to a providential elect; orthodox theologies, in the early church, tended to suppress the notion of divine election, insofar as it threatened to impair individual autonomy. The internal struggle gave sharpness, and venom, to the debates over human agency, but it must be emphasized that this fierce controversy was no parochial affair. The church’s acute concern with volition places Christian philosophy in the liveliest currents of imperial Greco-Roman philosophy. Against both the high philosophical debates over the nature of voluntary action and the simultaneous diffusion of vulgar astrology, the orthodox Christians offered a radically distinctive notion of individual freedom. Perhaps inevitably, impossibly strong models of freedom found their starkest testing ground in the area of human behavior where motivation is most muddled, subconscious, indeterminate: sex. In the same period when Greco-Roman philosophy and literature became notably more conscious than ever before that our deepest, constitutive moralities, especially sexual, depended so inscrutably on the lottery of fate, Christians preached a liberating message of freedom—from the cosmos, from the sweeping cycles of social reproduction alike. Indeed, the absolutist model of free will was the doctrine of a persecuted minority, capable of rejecting the world and, more importantly, imagining itself and its morality apart from the world. The discussion of early Christian sexuality is, in its way, as selective as the sketch of Greco-Roman sexuality as a whole, and some of the choices might arouse disagreement. The focus is on the development of orthodox, Pauline sexuality, because it is the style of Christian thought that ultimately triumphed. There is legitimate debate about when, and to what extent, it attained dominance even within the diffuse galaxy of little groups who identified with the gospel of Jesus. We have come to appreciate that early Christian sexuality developed not just through friction with the outside world but through the internal strife among Christians, and the victory of Paul’s authority, much less the meaning of his message, was not a foregone conclusion. That strife is perhaps given short shrift in this book, but the limits are both necessary and defensible. We have had to mute the competing noises in favor of the specific harmonies that are later worked into the full arrangement of ecclesiastical sexuality.14