If you stick around for the credits at the end of “Just Mercy,” a legal drama starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx, you’ll spot the name of a Birmingham-Southern graduate.

Evan Milligan ’03 joined Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 2016 as a law fellow. The Montgomery-based non-profit organization provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial – and its origin story is now the subject of an award-winning film.

Based on the memoir of the same name by lawyer, activist, and EJI founder Bryan Stevenson, “Just Mercy” is the true story of Walter McMillian, who, with the help of defense attorney Stevenson, appeals his murder conviction.

Milligan’s name is included in a list underneath a special thank-you message in the movie’s credits.

In 2018, Milligan visited campus to speak to students during a Common Hour event, providing thoughtful insight into what led him to EJI, and inspiration for those who wish to lead a life of service.

Below is an edited transcript of that speech.

Krulak Institute “Lives of Significance” Series: Evan Milligan ’03
September 6, 2018

No matter what happens in the Alabama State Capitol or the White House, no matter how strange the headlines on the evening news may become, there is a magical sequence of events that must take place at the beginning of a summer night in Montgomery.

The train rolling along the Alabama River must announce itself several times.

The crickets, katydids, and cicadas must all increase the volume on their seductive conversation to remind human beings within earshot that we are a much younger species, not far from guests in the world that they and millions of other beings have worked collaboratively to build.

And finally, if it’s summer and early evening in Montgomery, then within every dwelling, some version of “Family Feud” must be played on the television. Whether it’s the vintage Richard Dawson era or the classical Ray Combs period, or the lost era when Louie Anderson hosted, the era doesn’t matter as much, just as long as the show is on.

The week after I met BSC student Alexis Nail, my daughter Ruby and I happened to pay a visit to my mom’s house. It was 6:30 on a weekday evening in Montgomery, so of course we were watching “Family Feud.” Being that my family and I are cutting-edge contemporary folks, we were watching an episode from the most recent season hosted by Steve Harvey. And to my excitement, not only were Alexis Nail – who I was fortunate enough to grab lunch with over the summer – and her family featured on this particular episode, Alexis saved her family twice to ensure they secured a chance to proceed to the Fast Money bonus round and compete for what many grandmothers have referred to as “big money.”

I am supposed to talk about how my time here at BSC helped guide me to a staff position at the Equal Justice Initiative. I should mention Bryan Stevenson, capital punishment, the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, and our work to memorialize African-American victims of lynching. I should mention the research featured in the Legacy Museum and the reports that discuss connections between race and poverty, and the enduring legacy of white supremacy in our state and nation.

I should probably also talk about the most challenging work that we do, that of providing re-entry services to men and women who have served 15, 20, 40 years in prison, and maybe offer an anecdote about what it’s like to fail a client, and then work over time to restore trust.

All those things are important, and it’s true I would not be at EJI absent Birmingham-Southern. I’m 100 percent sure of that, and I’m excited to explain that connection.

But before I get there, I want to briefly linger in that moment with Alexis and her family on Family Feud, my mom, daughter, and I watching them on TV, the cicadas, katydids, and crickets outside flirting, loudly. The train, blowing its horn, rolling along the Alabama River.

Because everything that is beautiful and worth fighting for is there in that moment.

The whispered internal message urging me to do this work is there, and sometimes I think, if we could just tune into the right frequency humming along in that scene, or whatever our internal scenes may be, we could hear the message and understand how we all, beyond tribal lines, A-L-L, all connect to the task of dignifying our communities with justice, equity, basic decency. Especially here in Alabama.

Family Ties

If BSC led me to EJI, then Big Momma, Big Daddy, and Granny led me to Alabama. We were living in Houston, Texas, when a series of medical emergencies took place. Big Daddy had a stroke that limited his mobility and speech. Big Momma began to experience very early stages of Alzheimer’s. Granny was generally rebellious about accepting the fact that diabetes was not something she could charm out of her life.

We moved to Alabama to be closer to them, first moving to the house in College Hill, the neighborhood across the street from BSC, and a few years later, to Montgomery.

There, during summer months, I learned to sit still and appreciate the fine art of game-show watching with Big Momma, Big Daddy, and Granny. At seven or eight years old, in a den with three elders in their 60s and 70s with varying disabilities, I began to notice which game shows provided the largest amount of accessible joy to the largest number of us in the room.

Some shows featured bright colors and exciting sounds, but the action happened too quickly for all four of us to follow. Some shows were broadcast at times that competed with “Days of Our Lives” and other stories, and were thus culled from our assessment pool. Some had hosts like Alex Trebek, who seemed friendly enough, but to be honest, presented questions and contestants that we often found too unfamiliar to engage with in a deeply emotional way.

In the pantheon of great game shows, there were those that mastered the alchemy necessary to become a fixture in our household: a quick-witted though not snarky host; bright colors, large text, loud bells, and buzzers; contestants who seemed like someone Big Daddy would wave at from the porch; and a game we could play along with at home, no matter where we placed along the spectrum of development and ability.

“Family Feud” featured all those characteristics, and most of all, the contestants were families, so every episode offered a buffet of original and distinctive nonverbal cues, quirks, fashion choices, celebration dances, inside jokes, nicknames, accents, and answer choices based on curated pools of information.

All these characteristics had been originally cultivated over generations, not in a laboratory or some marketing research office, but out in the world. A world made up of teams that most don’t necessarily choose to join, but instead are born into, as, similar to the cicadas, one person responds to another person’s song.

We enjoyed Family Feud during those early years, after moving to Montgomery. Big Daddy in his chair. Big Momma on the couch. Granny in her chair. Me on the floor.

Over time, however, my elders began to grow sicker and less independent, just as I continued growing in the opposite direction. Old enough to begin making choices about how I wanted to spend my time, I began to grow resentful of the family team I had been born into. I became more aware of the trade-offs related to our decision to live together with our elders, providing care through the day.

As we moved around from one house to another, in search of the right amount of space for what was gradually becoming an in-home clinic, I wondered, why did I have to spend even small portions of my time cleaning up the remnants of Kleenex Big Momma crumbled up during a crying spell? Or carrying bags of saline solution from the garage to Granny’s dialysis machine? Why couldn’t Big Daddy get his words out when he knew what he wanted to say?

My body and mind grew more responsive to the songs outside our home, and I became more aware of the unique limitations within it. It felt as if age, disease, and isolation as a family were suffocating our personalities. We weren’t like the families on the “Feud.” We didn’t seem to laugh and high-five each other, or take vacations to Florida and California, or anywhere, actually. I developed a brooding internal voice that mused on the futility of life, especially harder, more challenging lives.

Fortunately, my parents displayed character much more mature than mine. My mother came home from working a full day at a junior college, managed to love me despite my adolescent withdrawal, and then sat with Big Momma and wiped her tears, helped fill in Big Daddy’s words to let him know that she understood his questions and knew exactly what he wanted. My dad worked in fast food or building maintenance, and still came home and helped dress Granny’s wounds or laughed at devilish things Big Momma would say.

My parents found energy to attend or organize community events that responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic or the “war on drugs.” I watched my mom spend hours on the phone or in person with people crying, laughing, praying, providing motivational speeches, and offering advice to strangers who became friends during the course of one interaction with her.

This was a puzzling sort of reality to interpret against the backdrop of the commercial breaks in between television programs. There was certainly no movie or show at that time that reflected our reality. To make sense of what we were experiencing, I found guidance in books about African kingdoms, abolitionists, and civil rights leaders that my parents demanded that I read.

Those entry points led to questions with Big Daddy about his participation in the bus boycott, volunteering along with his peers to provide carpool taxi service to the boycotting domestic workers who made that campaign a successful one.

Unable to answer questions in detail, Big Daddy could nod or call out names and adjectives here and there, and through that I was able to learn enough to feel ashamed for having reduced him to a person defined by what he could not do, rather than by what he had done, what he felt, and what he still continued to feel and do despite all odds against him.

I learned to ask Big Momma questions about Lowndes County where she and Big Daddy grew up, and where their grandparents had been enslaved. After Reconstruction, their parents were farmers who survived a number of challenges including racial terror lynchings that took place in Lowndes County with no prosecution of those involved.

Big Momma was able to articulate more than Big Daddy, but ironically she remembered less. However, she was masterful at communicating emotions with facial expressions. Certain topics evoked a twinkle in her eyes, while some caused her to wince. Having more understanding of what she had seen and felt during early moments of her life helped remind me of the contrast between the nature of her sacrifices and those that I perceived my parents and I were making.

I learned that Granny endured the sort of gossip and upfront commentary that accompanied living as a divorced single mother in 1950s and 1960s Montgomery, and that much later, she survived a mastectomy, and managed to live largely on her own terms in a manner that ensured her daughter’s enduring respect and love so many years later.

There was still a feeling that, despite my multiple video game systems and full refrigerator, Granny and our family had been dealt an unfair hand, and I certainly felt a cosmic injustice watching Granny repeat the word “Momma” over and over when calling for my mom to alleviate her pain in some way. But there was a growing awareness that much of my protesting was in response to my own sense of being inconvenienced, and that entering a deeper relationship with Granny would require abandoning that posture and learning to own the experience of sadness rather than attempting to anger it away.

During their lifetimes, I was not able to turn this corner internally, unfortunately, but there was at least an awareness that this territorial guarding of my own convenience was the corner to be turned.

On the Hilltop

By the time I arrived in my room on the first floor of Cullen Daniel, many things had changed for us. Granny, Big Daddy, and Big Momma had died while I was in middle school, and were now memorialized in the family cemetery in Lowndes County. My parents’ marriage was ending. After having been placed in this emotional gauntlet of sustained service to others, they had both grown more distant from their relationship to themselves and one another.

We were also coming to terms with the revelation that bipolar disorder had helped provide some of the boundless energy my mother seemed to summon when seamlessly moving from working to caretaking to community organizing; and that this same mental illness later contributed a measure of near fatal depression. For me, coming to college was an opportunity to process what we’d all just survived.

I came with heavy questions about the paradoxes of love, service, and empathy. What are boundaries? Where do I end and where does my family begin? How do I divide empathy between my family, my neighbor, and myself? If I start giving, when do I stop?

BSC was a supportive community because, as a Methodist school with a service learning value set, it takes the complexity of service quite seriously. I found that here there was not a rigid doctrine driven attempt to treat those thoughts as easily answerable, “survey says” sorts of questions, but instead an open invitation and encouragement to intimately explore them in the real world.

When I was here, there were conversations about whether or not turning right at the gate was a sane decision. Occasionally, there were even rumors swirling around about efforts among various powerful alumni shadow cabinets to move the entire institution somewhere to Shelby County.

Rumors and individual biases are impossible to eradicate, but I was encouraged by observing administrative leaders and faculty members who spoke routinely about the school’s commitment to the community, and supported on- and off-campus engagement through student initiatives, and service learning partnerships.

Many of the students I grew closest to at BSC seemed driven by values that were even more demanding than the school’s Honor Code. They were seeking an opportunity to probe the ends of their empathy and to figure out where it would lead. Some of them had every opportunity to avoid the inconvenience of poverty and illness yet chose paths of service to people overwhelmed by these conditions. Sometimes we shared moments of reflection during service learning trips to Sand Mountain or San Francisco, and summer jobs at Urban Ministries. I also found space to reflect on the experiences of my African American peers within the Black Student Union, and exchange stories about how we all were managing the cross-cultural experience of being a person of color at this institution. I appreciated being able to listen to people my age wrestling with such large questions without pretense or unjustified prejudgment.

International Lessons

Maybe the most enduring impact I experienced here was made by the international study office who challenged me to take at least one trip overseas and helped me secure funding needed to do so. While studying in South Africa shortly after the military’s invasion of Iraq, I was confronted by students from across the African continent who wanted me to provide answers for American foreign policy. Others simply wanted to expose me to their emotional realities. One former Eritrean soldier turned student explained to me, “Africa is like being inside an oven, and everywhere there is fire. Everywhere is hot. Everywhere.”

There was a discomforting amount of access people seemed willing to offer me to intimate details of their lives and yet without the moments that this access allowed me to experience I would never have been able to confront the connections of global disparity to my own personal experiences of disparity here in the U.S.

A community organizer befriended me and took me to visit her mother in a public hospital, where lines of patients snaked and spilled onto the street. I was reminded of my adolescent reaction to my elders. Nothing felt convenient or fair for so many of the people I met there, whether they were students who had opportunities to leave Zimbabwe or Congo or Chad but instead chose to return and put out fires so to speak or people like my organizer friend who had only finished secondary school in her township and lacked the government anchored social safety net needed to connect her with college education, resources that could have lifted her and her family out of the very poverty she attempted to help women and children in her community escape. Though they faced often unwinnable odds, watching them helped resolve at least a few lingering questions.

My peers in the direct service community there grieved as openly as they loved and grew angry. The scope of loss, though impossible to ignore, was incapable of erasing the power of music and laughter. People utilized a full spectrum of their emotions. Yes, it hurt for them to lose and, yet, these brave people loved anyway, knowing it was very likely they would lose. They played the role of those who had once helped them, or perhaps, the role they wished someone had played for them. The experience of taking the action was inherently valuable and worth the cost. I wondered, if they were willing to make the trade-offs needed to return to places with even less stability and infrastructure than South Africa – which at the time had over 27% unemployment – could I think more seriously about making a similar commitment to my own home?

I returned home, inspired by these examples, and committed myself to investing in black and poor communities in Alabama. While working as a community organizer in Montgomery, two of my BSC friends scolded me for not knowing more about Bryan Stephenson and EJI. Based on their encouragement, I began seeking ways to learn more about the group’s staff and history. In 2008, I joined the staff as a paralegal. I stayed there for three years prior to attending law school, and then returned in 2016 to work with our community engagement projects.

Equal Justice Initiative

Our work at EJI is quite difficult, and, despite the moment of increased media attention we are currently experiencing, the social odds facing us here in Alabama and in this country are still stacked heavily against most of our work and against the efforts of many who would list as human rights the right of access to legal counsel, quality education, food, living wages, medical care, and affordable housing.

We have long been a nation that resists admitting weakness or fault. We often like to pretend that we’ve always been great to our elders, and that if we have not, perhaps it is the fault of our elders for growing older, slower, and less convenient in the first place. Nevertheless, our staff are committed to the argument that the history of African American communities in this country provides a framework to understand the ways that our dominant institutions have often resisted truth and reconciliation efforts at the expense of cultivating cultural space that could increase the amount of equity and the quality of resources available to the largest possible number of Americans.

We would argue that our failure to adequately confront the legacies of chattel slavery and resistance to the civil rights movement inevitably lays the ground for the policies of mass incarceration that continue to disproportionately impact people of color while also marginalizing millions of poor people in the country, many of whom are white. Further, the very inability to talk about white supremacy and, at a grade-school level, assess ways that this ideology has traumatized entire communities – undermining the accessibility of fundamental democratic institutions – leaving us vulnerable to the persistent threat that the material and social outcomes of this ideology will become more pronounced.

While in South Africa, I took a course that required us to read “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire, and this book helped me find a path to a more balanced emotional relationship to service. In it, Freire writes, “In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both…This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.”

This quote is telling in what it reminds us regarding the subjectivity of those who appear to be the most marginalized, disabled, weak, and materially poor. Freire is reminding us what many of our religious traditions have always taught, that guidance for understanding important truths about ourselves is found in listening to the experiences of those who appear least served and that the people emerging from those contexts are best suited to know what is needed to empower themselves and their communities. This reframing of power then helps place in perspective that skilled people who come from outside of these communities are most helpful when working collaboratively, not to supplant the decision-making skills of those being served, but to walk alongside, full aware that the greatest liberation comes when secured by the person who felt most distant from it.

More than the Sum

EJI is primarily a law office, and law offices are notorious for having the sorts of top down structures that undermine the self-determination Freire is describing. Of course we struggle to maintain balance between utilizing the skills of those who often emerge from outside communities and recognizing the driving role played by the clients and community members we serve.

This struggle is perhaps most pronounced with the context of re-entry services, when we might lay out a series of options for our clients, provide strong endorsement for what we are sure is the best option, and then accept that our client may not make the same choice.

I don’t mean to suggest that we have discovered a perfect formula in any aspect of our work, but I’ve been consistently inspired by a staff culture that prioritizes listening, learning cultural cues, and paying attention to the long game of relationship development.

Knowing that people really are more than the sum of our worst decisions, and that usually when given time, information, accountability, and support, even when we start at extremely traumatic places, we can mature into people capable of realizing our own freedom and helping other achieve the same.

Doing direct service in this way requires that we recognize that the human beings at the center of our work are not problems to be solved but decision makers to be served and learned from. So, for example, in terms of criminal justice work, an initial step might involve learning why it’s problematic to have a state with one of the highest per capita death sentencing rates in the country, and also no state funded public defender office at the trail or appellate level.

Or to know that our prisons are currently among the most overcrowded, least funded, and most violent in the country, and that many of the people in our state’s prisons failed to graduate our state’s high schools.

Those are all knowable statistics. We should and can know more than this. We should and can know the actual human beings experiencing these conditions. We can know that the people locked in preventable cycles of generational poverty, with minimal social safety net, or locked in death row cells and general population dormitories are more than dominant institutional powers are willing to recognize. They have language, accents, nicknames, emotions, stories, core memories, bodies of knowledge. They have Big Mommas, Big Daddies, and Grannies, mothers and fathers. They were born into allegiances and like any of us will prioritize loyalty to those closest in proximity to them.

We can also know ourselves and that acts of service may ask different tasks from different individuals at different times in our lives. That we can work to serve in a manner that seeks to first learn the cultural icons and points of reference considered to be important to the people we aspire to serve, and as we learn those languages, collaborate with those who are most marginalized to build the learning experience or political efforts capable of realizing increased access to voting, literacy, legal representation, and self-expression. We can know that we can do this organically, here in Alabama, within our own cultural voices. And that if we become serious about these tasks, then we have less room for public policies that arbitrarily assign executions and other punishments to people primarily due to their rate or poverty level.

At EJI, we’re attempting to manifest this advocacy in litigation, direct social services, community engagement work, and public education. We’re attempting to present our ideas in the language of the people we hope to influence at a given moment. At times, that might involve creating films, doing original reporting and research, or collaborating on the design of books and websites. We are working to identify the colors, sounds, and program designs that are best able to engage the public with our content.

Far beyond the boundaries of our one organization, there is a need for a broader movement featuring people from every discipline and skillset to commit to applying restorative justice and humanizing orientation to their work.

I deeply appreciate all the ways the community here at Birmingham-Southern has worked to challenge systemic poverty and hope that students here now will think about where, how, and why you might be connected to this work as well.

While you are here, certainly have fun, love, dance, and do all the things. Please go get a passport and see the world. Find your team if you don’t like the one biology handed to you. Create room for yourself to exist boldly in this world.

Practice listening to the people you would aspire to serve.

Practice listening to the voice within you. Every now and then, at night, when the cicadas and katydids are singing, pause, and lean in to the moment until you feel a question worth asking. Hold onto it, because it’s more important than a thousand rushed answers, and if you sit with it long enough, it will lead you to valuable adventures. Hopefully, no matter how far those adventures might take you, you will remember to be kind to those a little older, who might move a little slower, and when you can, you will find your way back home and, when asked, share a bit of what you’ve seen.