A recent Stanford course took students on a journey from the classroom to the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, where the echoes of slavery, segregation, and racial terror still resonate.

Through immersive experiences and critical discussions, Narrative Strategies for Racial Justice challenged participants to confront America’s enduring legacy of racial injustice and the stories that have shaped its history.

Students and instructors described the course – based on the idea that while the North won the Civil War, the South won the narrative war – as “transformative.”

To probe the narrative of racial inferiority and its effects, the course included 10 hours of class spread across three sessions, supplemented by readings and lectures and a three-day field trip to Montgomery, a city that played a major role in the slave trade. There, faculty and students visited the multitude of sites created by death penalty lawyer Bryan Stevenson and his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative. The site visits included the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, among others.

Stevenson led the course, along with Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks and Jennifer Eberhardt, a professor of organizational behavior and of psychology at Stanford. This course was part of the Stanford Law School’s S-Term offerings, which are aimed at providing a unique, immersive learning experience for students.

The class was interdisciplinary in nature and included 19 law students and 14 affiliates from Stanford SPARQ, a behavioral science research and intervention center on campus. The course was modeled after one Stevenson had taught at New York University. He believes that more courses like this one could raise awareness and lead to concrete and positive changes in racial equality.

Eberhardt added, “I have taught courses at Stanford for over 25 years now and I have never seen students more engaged than they were in this class. They were so engaged, in fact, that our time together seemed to fly by. Every moment was precious. We didn’t want it to end.”

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Matthew Odom

Field trip into an unjust history

The Montgomery trip focused on the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath. Eberhardt shared a vivid account of their visit to the Legacy Museum, which tells the story of slavery in America.

“We moved through a rocky shore with life-size sculptures of kidnapped Africans crying out,” she said. “We visited slave auctions and plantations. We heard the wailing of those imprisoned on new land, branded as inferior beings. We moved through the cries and the pleas for freedom. And when freedom came, we witnessed the lynchings and the terror, the decades of forced segregation followed by mass incarceration. Finally, exhausted, dispirited, our hearts heavy with the weight of history, we arrived in a reflection room where we lifted our heads up to view the images of those who have fought for freedom and whose legacies continue to bring hope and inspiration. It was a journey unlike any I have ever taken.”

Banks noted that the rule of law in America draws its moral and political force from the ideal of impartiality and the idea that justice is indifferent to the identity of the parties before the court. Yet a critical gap exists between the ideal and reality.

“The potency of narratives of racial difference has often undermined the neutrality of legal decision-makers. Purportedly color-blind law has too often operated in a racist fashion, to the detriment of African Americans,” he said.

Mikaela Spruill, a criminal justice postdoctoral fellow, said the course made it clear how a silent cultural narrative that maintains injustice can be used to justify grave human rights violations, such as extralegal lynchings. 

“Grasping those harmful narratives at the root and challenging them with a new narrative of facts and truth can move a nation closer to justice,” said Spruill, for whom the most poignant moment of the trip came on the last day.

“That morning, I walked in solitude from the docks of the Alabama River down Commerce Street, under the blisteringly hot Southern sun, to the fountain where the slave traders sold enslaved Africans against their will,” she said.

Spruill said the emotional weight of that trek and getting a tiny glimpse into the physical toll her ancestors experienced moved her in indescribable ways. “I will carry that experience, that morning walk, with me throughout my life as I continue to conduct justice-oriented research.”

Stevenson pointed to the over-incarceration of the Black population as one of the most pernicious manifestations of narratives rooted in fear and anger. “One of the goals of this course was to help students understand why we have accepted so much racial bias and injustice,” said Stevenson, whose great-grandparents were enslaved.

“Today’s students are going to have to address how we repair the damage done by 246 years of enslavement, a century of post-emancipation terror violence and lynching, and the challenges created by a 20th century dominated by codified racial segregation and hierarchy,” he added.

Law student Dana Sweeney said that while it was powerful to read and discuss this history in the classroom, it was an absolutely profound experience to stand on the same soil where those histories run deepest and realize that justice and equality are still very much a work in progress in today’s society.

“I think that for many white people like me,” Sweeney said, “there is a temptation to think of the Civil Rights Movement and the eras that preceded it as ancient, settled history. But our relationship to this history is neither ancient nor settled. Visiting Montgomery makes that painfully clear, and it calls us to more thoughtfully inhabit the present.”

Banks explained that part of the premise of the course was the importance of proximity. It’s why the students visited Alabama, where enslaved Black people once lived and labored, and why guest lecturers included Black men who had been imprisoned.

“It’s one thing to read about miscarriages of justice, quite another to meet and talk with someone who spent a quarter century in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and whose arrest, prosecution, and trial were tainted by the biases of legal decision-makers who were little concerned about convicting an innocent Black man,” Banks said.

‘World-altering human trafficking’

Sweeney said students studied the “massive, world-altering human trafficking operation that is now remembered as the transatlantic slave trade,” and traced how slavery evolved after emancipation into an era of racial terror lynchings, forced labor under Black Code laws, segregation under Jim Crow, and the more recent explosion of mass incarceration following the success of the Civil Rights Movement.

In Montgomery, he said, they listened to the trains slowly rumbling past on the same tracks that were used to transport enslaved families to the auction block in the city’s downtown.

“We saw the Alabama Capitol building, where Martin Luther King Jr. famously spoke after the Selma to Montgomery March. There is no statue of him there – but there is a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Reading is no substitute for the sense of place we were able to experience by being there together,” Sweeney said.

From classroom to public policy

Eberhardt said the class returned to the Stanford campus “transformed”; she noted that both the class sessions and the field trip helped them to more accurately understand racial injustice in America. “It moved us. It connected us to one another. It inspired a desire to do more to make a difference in the world.”

Stevenson said, “We are in a narrative struggle to overcome racial injustice in America and it’s important to develop the skills, strategies, and tactics to eliminate the bias that continues to haunt our nation. I think coursework on narrative strategies to help professionals, academics, and others working on a range of public policy issues is vital in this era.”

As Banks described it, “Narratives about racial difference have shaped American history and the law, yet students often don’t learn about such influences during the course of their schooling. For such narratives to be dislodged, they must first be identified and confronted.”