In this 250th anniversary year of the United States, pianist Lara Downes is traveling the country collecting conversations with scholars, searching for our history through songs. Her latest stop is a visit with Bryan Stevenson — public interest lawyer, author of the memoir Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.
Before I taped my conversation with Bryan Stevenson in Montgomery, Ala., I spent several days visiting the Legacy Sites he built there, on the banks of the Alabama River. The museum, memorial and sculpture park are dedicated to fostering what he calls "a new era of truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair, truth and redemption." The Sites illuminate the history of racial injustice, from the brutality of the Middle Passage to present-day mass incarceration, a long history in which the year 1776 falls around the midpoint.
As we looked back on these 250 years, the stories Stevenson and I found ourselves focusing on were ones of survival and resilience, small acts of kindness and monumental feats of courage, testaments to the pursuit of happiness that carries us in the direction of equality and justice. Together we explored the song "Deep River," an old African American spiritual rich in metaphors and meaning, expressing the constant faith that we can cross over to a better place if we pull together.
This conversation is about learning from the past to imagine and create a brighter future. As Stevenson told me, "Grace and mercy flow like that deep river — and you can't hold back a river."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Downes: In 2016, I was digging into the idea of telling American history through music. I had just made an album that included the song "Deep River," and I sent it to you. And now I'm thinking about this place that you've built, on this river, and all the stories this river carries.
Bryan Stevenson: "Deep River" captures a lot of the complexity, the changing currents, power and beauty of rivers in this country. We created Freedom Monument Sculpture Park here on the Alabama River, which during the 19th century trafficked thousands of enslaved Black people. That legacy, that pain and suffering, is a part of the American story. But the other part of the American story was how millions of enslaved people found a way to love in the midst of agony — to hold up one another and find a way to survive, and then to thrive, build and create. Langston Hughes wrote the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," and we have that powerful poem at our site on the banks of the river. I do think there's something powerful about water as a medium for storytelling and a medium for music.
River metaphors run so deep in Black history: the river as the root, the river as a gathering place, as a place of baptism and as a route of escape, right? "Deep River" talks about "crossing over," and that metaphor, whether you're crossing over into another life or crossing over into freedom, exists so much in the reality of these old songs and spirituals.
I often argue that justice has to have a soundtrack. Freedom and liberation need a soundtrack. During the civil rights era, people sang "We Shall Overcome" not just to make noise — it steadied you, it oriented you, it empowered you to do things that were difficult. You needed a song in your heart and you needed to give voice to it, because sometimes you were singing to other people, but you're also singing to yourself. And that's the power that music allows us to tap into. When people sang, they were revealing the beauty of their humanity, their dignity, and courage, their passion and their heart. That's what jazz and blues and the compositions of all of those amazing African American artists did, who were taking the classical tradition and applying their own lived experience to that tradition. There's a lot to learn and understand in the music of this country that gives insight to the people and the struggle that goes with the story of America.
I love to think about that time, in the late 19th, early 20th century, when composers like Harry Burleigh came along and wanted to ensure that there was dignity for this music — that this music got introduced into the mainstream of American culture, so it didn't get left behind as a relic of slavery or something that we would be allowed to forget.
I think the burden we have inherited in America is this false narrative that was created to justify so many of the harms that took place as we were emerging. One of our great challenges is changing these narratives. We had a Constitution that talked about equality and justice for all, but we didn't apply those concepts to Native people. We instead made up a narrative that Native people are different, and that racial difference meant they didn't get the benefit of our commitment to equality.
The great evil of slavery in America wasn't the bondage, the involuntary servitude, the violence and abuse. All of those things were horrific. But I think the greatest evil of slavery was the narrative that was created to justify enslavement — that Black people aren't as good as white people, less capable, less human, less evolved, less worthy. And that narrative gave rise to this ideology of racial hierarchy. And the challenge to that narrative was the brilliance of these early African American composers who were creating these works of such beauty and complexity.
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It made it impossible to embrace this narrative that Black people were less creative, less evolved. That's what music did — it challenged that narrative in a very powerful way. I love the stories about Rachmaninoff and Leonard Bernstein and all of these great early 20th century musicians and composers who all raced to hear Art Tatum play in the jazz clubs of New York. They thought he was in a completely different category of skill.
We're celebrating the 250th anniversary of this nation, and we're doing it during a very difficult time in this country. I'm contemplating what comes next and how we can all play into it. How do you see it?
There are things that we can and should celebrate, and there are things that we can and should mourn, should acknowledge. I'm very hopeful about our capacity to have the next milestone be something that gets us closer to the kind of freedom, equality and justice we talk so much about. When we began challenging segregation in the 1950s, we were in Montgomery, Ala. Within a decade, this city changed the world. From 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and 50,000 people chose to stay off the buses, to 1965, a decade later, when Dr. King marched into Montgomery, followed by 25,000 people who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma. And then, a few months later, the Voting Rights Act is passed. Within a decade, this country was changed radically.
We still have work to do, but I take great encouragement from the pace at which things are picking up. And people will say, "Oh, but look at what's going on now in 2026." There's always going to be a counternarrative if your narrative is freedom, if your narrative is justice and equality. If your narrative is the beloved community, someone's going to be threatened by that and there's going to be a counternarrative, and even people with power will be a part of that. That's just history.
When we talk about justice and equality, there's a force behind it. It's like that river: You can't hold back a river when it gets going, when it starts to move in the direction that the world and those who believe in good need it to move. And so I'm not discouraged about how much longer we're going to have to do this work. We're going to have to do it. But I think our day is coming.
Tom Huizenga and Vincent Acovino produced the audio version of this story. Tom Huizenga produced the digital version.
(Playlist image courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History)
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