2021-2022 Community Reading announcement

The 2021-2022 Community Reading is Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson.

Lafayette invites students, faculty, staff, alumni, and others in the community to engage in a common reading during the academic year. Throughout the year, there will be an interdisciplinary series of events that will explore the themes of the book more fully and engage the community in an intellectual dialogue with the text.

Please purchase a copy and start enjoying!  Copies can be purchased online or through the Lafayette College Bookstore in late May. 

Stay tuned for upcoming 2021-2022 Community Reading events and programs!

(From https://justmercy.eji.org/):  An unforgettable true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to end mass incarceration in America — from one of the most inspiring lawyers of our time.

Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned.

Just Mercy tells the story of EJI, from the early days with a small staff facing the nation’s highest death sentencing and execution rates, through a successful campaign to challenge the cruel practice of sentencing children to die in prison, to revolutionary projects designed to confront Americans with our history of racial injustice.

One of EJI’s first clients was Walter McMillian, a young Black man who was sentenced to die for the murder of a young white woman that he didn’t commit. The case exemplifies how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching — a system that treats the rich and guilty better than the poor and innocent.