Confronting Injustice with Bryan Stevenson #pla2014 Opening Session

Today’s opening session of the 2014 PLA Conference featured Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He is a fascinating man on paper and the web, but hearing him speak about how public libraries can work to confront and correct injustice was truly inspiring.

Stevenson shared four suggestions for how public libraries can make our services to the marginalized more effective:

1. Think about proximity. Make sure the library and all it offers is accessible to those who need it most.
2. Don’t just accept the narrative; change it. We all know the status quo because we’re living it, but the status quo can be changed. And that starts with changing the narrative about what’s realistic and what’s needed for services and access.
3. Commit to being hopeful. That doesn’t mean being blindly optimistic; it means we need to be willing to go to places where hopelessness prevails and be a witness and advocate.
4. Commit to doing things that are uncomfortable. Confronting injustice, inequality–it’s uncomfortable. But if anything is to change, if we are going to reach communities who so far see no value in the library, or see the library as a place they are not welcome, we need to commit to doing things for these communities that may feel uncomfortable at first simply because they are new and different.

Stevenson ended his session by sharing a story about a conversation he had with Rosa Parks. Parks had asked him what he does, what his mission is. He listed a litany of things he’s doing and things he wants to accomplish, and Parks responded by saying, “That’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.”

And their mutual friend followed Parks’s statement with, “And that’s why you’re going to need to be brave, brave, brave.”

All things that librarians of every ilk need to hear and act on.