Public Education

We are haunted by our history of racial injustice in America because we don't talk about it. Ending mass incarceration and achieving equality, justice, and fairness for all Americans starts with learning and sharing the truth about our past.

/ We educate people on the history of racial violence.

We educate people on the history of racial violence.

/ We distribute our reports and A History of Racial Injustice calendar at community events nationwide.

We distribute our reports and A History of Racial Injustice calendar at community events nationwide.

/ EJI awards scholarships to high school students through our Racial Justice Essay Contest.

EJI awards scholarships to high school students through our Racial Justice Essay Contest.

For more than 30 years, EJI lawyers have been winning relief for clients by telling their stories. We’ve overturned wrongful convictions and unfair sentences by exposing official misconduct and racial bias. We’ve had tremendous success in courtrooms across the country. But America needs a deeper and broader narrative shift to move from mass incarceration into an era of truth and justice: we need to honestly confront our history.

To help people learn, share, talk, and teach about America’s history of racial injustice and its legacy, we built a powerful tool kit that includes groundbreaking reports and interactive websites, lesson plans, and powerful films like Just Mercy and the HBO documentary True Justice that underscore the urgency of reform.

We’re also harnessing the power of place to change a physical landscape littered with thousands of Confederate monuments but next to none about slavery or lynching. We’re working with communities to install historical markers and collect soil from lynching sites, and more than a million people have come to our Legacy Sites in Montgomery to learn, remember, and commit to truth telling about our history.

Our Work

EJI’s public education projects include bestselling books, documentary and feature films, videos, websites, reports, lesson plans, and community programs.

Community Remembrance Project

EJI partners with communities to recognize the victims of racial terror lynching through community soil collections, historical marker dedications, and community research and education programs led by local coalitions.

Just Mercy

A powerful true story about EJI, the people we represent, and the importance of confronting injustice, Just Mercy is a bestselling book by Bryan Stevenson that has been adapted into a feature film.

True Justice

An HBO documentary film, True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality follows EJI’s struggle to create greater fairness in the criminal justice system and shows how racial injustice emerged, evolved, and continues to threaten the country.

A History of Racial Injustice Calendar

To highlight overlooked and marginalized people and events in American history, we created a wall calendar and companion website that features events on this day in history.

EJI Reports

Our reports explore racial discrimination and abuse of power in the death penalty, abusive sentencing of young children in adult prisons, and our history of racial injustice from enslavement to racial terror lynching and segregation.

Public Education