Source: United States Senator for Delaware Christopher Coons
WASHINGTON — Today, U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) spoke at the 70th Annual Prayer Breakfast and introduced keynote speaker Bryan Stevenson, the Milton, Del.-born founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. During his remarks, Senator Coons expressed the importance of faith and prayer during periods of turmoil and emphasized the need to confront both racial inequality of the past and of the present.
“As Bryan has said, our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow that can’t be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation that traumatized people of color and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice,” said Senator Coons. “For all of us, our faith is an important part of what comforts us and sustains us and helps us engage with others in these difficult times, but it is also a charge, a call to see and to address injustice in our nation and world when and where we see it.”
Full audio and video available here. A full transcript is provided below.
Sen. Coons: Good morning. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Mr. President, Madam Vice President, we are so blessed to have you with us and looking forward to your remarks this morning. Leader Schumer and Senator McConnell, thank you. Clergy, colleagues, friends, welcome to this 2022 National Prayer Breakfast. It’s a blessing to be back together in person as we fight our way through this pandemic with both hope and prayer.
Bryan Stevenson has dedicated his life to representing criminal defendants through his Equal Justice Initiative which provides free legal services to the unjustly convicted. Thanks to its work, at least 125 Americans have been spared the death penalty. If you haven’t read Bryan’s book, Just Mercy, or seen the movie based on his work, you’re in for a powerful experience this morning.
Bryan was born in Milton, Delaware, where his parents raised him and his siblings to be deeply rooted in their faith and taught them at an early age, the power of prayer. His father, Howard, instilled in his children the conviction that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. His upbringing in that faith fed his determination to see injustices undone.
When I first met with Bryan a decade ago in Montgomery, our first conversation, yes, was about his years of determined and hard work exonerating the innocent, but also his stunning vision for how our nation could more honestly confront the legacy of slavery, of lynching, and of segregation. We spent hours talking late into the night as he described for me a vision of a national monument to the terror of lynching, a memorial, a nationwide series of markers and a community-based effort at reconciling and repairing the harms of decades of domestic terrorism rooted in racism.
Years later, in 2018, his National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery. I’ve seen firsthand this powerful memorial and its impact on our home state of Delaware, where the history of our most notorious lynching has now been both confronted and memorialized as a result. And last year, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, confronting the history of racial inequality from slavery to modern day mass incarceration.
As Bryan has said, our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow that can’t be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation that traumatized people of color and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice. For all of us, our faith is an important part of what comforts us and sustains us and helps us engage with others in these difficult times, but it is also a charge, a call to see and to address injustice in our nation and world when and where we see it.
For his leadership rooted in faith, confronting our nation’s original sin of slavery, Bryan Stevenson has been recognized far and wide. He has a hopeful message for us about how we can make both mercy and justice real in our nation. Let’s listen for his word. Bryan…
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