Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1989. He was a young attorney who had been working with the Southern Center for Human Rights on Alabama defense cases, and he stayed in Montgomery to build something permanent. The need was stark: Alabama was -- and as of 2022 remained -- the only state in the country that does not provide state-funded legal assistance to death row prisoners. EJI committed to filling that gap. By 2013 the organization had grown to a staff of 40, including attorneys and support personnel. Stevenson has argued multiple cases before the United States Supreme Court and has prevented more than 125 people from being executed. His defense of Walter McMillian, a man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, became the basis for his memoir Just Mercy and the 2019 film of the same name starring Michael B. Jordan.

After the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons (2005) that executing minors was unconstitutional, Stevenson turned to the next frontier: children sentenced to life without parole. In 2006 EJI launched a litigation campaign challenging these sentences. At the time, nearly 3,000 children aged 17 or younger had been sentenced to die in prison, some as young as 13. Stevenson testified before the Court, and in Graham v. Florida (2010), the justices ruled that mandatory life-without-parole for juveniles in non-homicide cases was unconstitutional. Since that decision, EJI has provided legal representation to nearly 100 people entitled to new sentences. The work is incremental, case by case, but each case is a life.

In 2015, EJI published Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, a study that documented 3,959 lynchings of African Americans across twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. The research added nearly 700 cases to previous records. Updated editions raised the total to 4,084 victims in the South and 300 in other states. The report classified these killings as racial terrorism -- systematic violence designed to suppress the African American community during the decades when Southern legislatures disenfranchised Black voters and maintained political exclusion through intimidation. Stevenson and his staff argued that this history had to be acknowledged publicly, with memorials and monuments that create space for what they called 'the restorative power of truthtelling.'

On April 26, 2018, EJI opened two sites in Montgomery that changed the landscape of American memory. The Legacy Museum, housed in a building where enslaved people were once warehoused, traces the line from slavery through sharecropping, Jim Crow, convict leasing, and lynching to mass incarceration. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice displays 800 steel monuments -- one for each county where lynchings occurred -- hanging from above, inscribed with the names of over 4,400 victims. Duplicate columns lie on the ground, waiting for individual counties to claim them and erect their own local memorials. In 2024, EJI opened the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park on 17 acres along the Alabama River: its centerpiece is the National Monument to Freedom, a wall 43 feet tall and 155 feet long inscribed with 122,000 surnames adopted by formerly enslaved African Americans as recorded in the 1870 census, the first to list Black Americans entirely as free people.