“You have to be persuasive when you’re trying to change the world,” human rights attorney Bryan Stevenson said at an event to promote the movie Just Mercy, which opened nationwide this weekend.
The movie is based on Stevenson’s bestselling memoir of the same name. It stars Michael B. Jordan who plays Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian, a black man awaiting execution on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. McMillian spent six years in prison before Stevenson won his release.
Since the McMillian case in 1993, Stevenson and his nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), have secured the release or reduced sentences for over 140 condemned prisoners. One of those men, Anthony Ray Hinton, spent 30 years in solitary confinement on death row before Stevenson won his release in 2015. Hinton was one of the longest-serving condemned prisoners who was proven innocent.
As a movie, Just Mercy is an example of great storytelling (it has a 99% positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). But great storytelling isn’t just a requirement in moviemaking; storytelling is essential to changing hearts and minds.
“Narrative is hugely important in effective communication,” Stevenson told me when I interviewed him for my public-speaking book, Talk Like TED.
In his now famous TED Talk about his work in the criminal justice system, Stevenson held the audience spellbound for 18 minutes and received the longest standing ovation in the history of the TED conference. In my analysis of the talk, I noted that Stevenson spent 65% of his time telling stories that framed the argument—personal stories from his life.
“You have to get folks to trust you,” Stevenson said in our conversation.
“If you start with something too esoteric and disconnected from the lives of everyday people, it’s harder for people to engage…Almost everything we’re trying to do turns on effective communication. You need data, facts, and analysis to challenge people, but you also need narrative to get people comfortable enough to care about the community that you are advocating for.”
A 2019 HBO documentary sheds light on where Stevenson honed his instinct for storytelling as tool to connect people to other people’s experiences.
When he was growing up, Stevenson’s grandmother asked him to put on his best clothes. They’d be taking a trip to Bowling Green, Virginia. They walked down a dirt road to a shack in the middle of a field.
“When we go inside, you’re going to hear something,” Stevenson’s grandmother said.
“I was standing in there and I couldn’t hear anything. And then I noticed that my grandmother was crying. I had never seen her cry before,” Stevenson recalls.
The shack was the slave cabin where her father was born.
Stevenson’s grandmother was bringing the story of enslavement to life. Stevenson never forgot the lesson. “Because my grandmother was the daughter of enslaved people, she understood the power of narrative. Her father would talk to her every day about what he had went through as an enslaved person. She had these various strategies and tactics for getting me to understand things.”
Stevenson uses similar narrative strategies that he learned from his grandmother to transcend time and connect people today with the stories of the past. In one gripping and emotional scene from the documentary, Stevenson leads a group of adults and school children on a visit to sites where African Americans were lynched between 1880 and 1940.
The members of the group are given jars and asked to collect soil from the sites as a way to “bear witness” to the past. They are provided narratives—stories— that accompany each site. The jars are brought back and displayed on shelves with the names of those who were killed, the dates and locations of the lynchings.
According to Stevenson, each jar tells a story. “There’s a story about our history. There’s sweat in that soil, the sweat of enslaved people. There are the tears of people who suffered when they were being brutalized and lynched. There’s the blood of these victims. But there’s also hope in that soil.”
Stevenson extends the narrative metaphor to EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is divided into four ‘eras;’ slavery lynching, segregation and mass incarceration. “We call this is a narrative museum,” Stevenson says. “We present a story about the history of racial inequality in America.”
Storytelling is a strategic tool with the power to inspire change and spark movements. Leaders like Stevenson who make a deep change in a society’s attitudes and behaviors must be persuasive. And persuasive leaders are skilled in the art of narrative.