James Forman, Jr.

James Forman Jr. (born James Robert Lumumba Forman; June 22, 1967) is an American legal scholar currently on leave from serving as the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and a co-founder of the Maya Angelou School in Washington, D.C.

In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Early life Forman is the son of James Forman Sr. and Constancia Romilly, who met through their activism and involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Forman Sr. was the group's executive secretary handling internal operations from 1961 to 1966 and active during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In the early 1970s, when Forman was seven years old, his parents, who had never been married, separated. Forman speculated in an interview that FBI pressure on civil rights groups at the time contributed to the strain on his parents' relationship: He went on to attend Brown University, from which he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1988. He received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1992. He instead chose to become a public defender, saying in an interview, "I imagined myself doing the civil rights work of my generation." He wrote about some of his experiences with clients in Locking Up Our Own.

Teaching

In 2003, Forman began teaching law at Georgetown University.

The Maya Angelou School

In 1997, Forman cofounded with David Domenici as part of the See Forever Foundation, a comprehensive educational program for teens, which later became the Maya Angelou Public Charter School. Domenici, a Stanford Law graduate and former corporate attorney first pitched his idea for the school to Forman in a D.C. coffee shop in 1995, and they began planning in earnest soon after.

In 1997, Forman took a leave of absence from public defense work to pursue opening the Maya Angelou School. The students had poor academic records and had often experienced trauma or struggled with mental health. In addition, Forman writes in Locking Up Our Own about ongoing struggles with local police targeting students of the school for searches and arrests.

The school's name was chosen in a contest from an essay written by Sherti Hendrix, a member of the class of 1999, the school's first graduating class.