Our Racist Past Is Not In the Past

There are fifty-nine monuments to the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama, where the lawyer and civil-rights activist Bryan Stevenson lives and runs the Equal Justice Initiative. His organization is dedicated to tackling racism in our institutions and documenting it in the past. Stevenson would like to erect historical markers on the sites of lynchings, much as Germany has tried to mark Nazi crimes against Jews. Yes, Americans have civil rights, Stevenson tells David Remnick. What we lack is a sense of shame.