We’re just days from May, when we will have a new social action offering organization. May’s elected organization is the Equal Justice Initiative.

Founded in 1989, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a private, non-profit organization that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. They challenge the death penalty and excessive punishment and provide re-entry assistance to formerly incarcerated people.

EJI works with communities that have been marginalized by poverty and discouraged by unequal treatment. They are committed to changing the narrative about race in America. EJI operates the The Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which opened to the public in April, 2018, in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved Black people were imprisoned, and is located midway between an historic slave market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade.  

EJI also operates The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.

Bryan Stevenson, the Executive Director of EJI, is the author of a powerful book, Just Mercy, which documents Stevenson’s and EJI’s efforts to challenge injustice in the Alabama court system and bring compassion and justice to people sentenced to death. This book has been made into a movie of the same name, starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. The Racial Justice Project and RE program recently showed another film about Brian Stevenson’s work titled True Justice.