Yale School of Law Photo
James Forman Jr.
James Forman Jr. wanted to tell a story that put African-Americans at the center, and not just on the sidelines. He found that story in a Washington, D.C. courtroom where all the actors — the judge, his client, and the prosecutor — all looked like him.
It was the 1990s, and Forman was a public defender trying to keep a young man named Brandon, who’d been caught with a gun and a small amount of marijuana, out of the then notoriously inhumane (and now defunct) Oak Hill Youth Correctional Facility.
Forman, who is now a Yale Law School professor and author of the celebrated new book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, told WNHH radio host Kica Matos during the latest episode of “Kica’s Corner” that he saw his work in the public defender’s office as “the civil rights challenge of my generation.”
That makes sense if you know the environment in which Forman was raised. He is a movement baby whose parents met through their work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, as it was most commonly known. His father, James Forman Sr., served as SNCC’s executive secretary.
By the late 1990s, the U.S. had surpassed Russia as the world’s largest jailer. Forman saw the disparities of who that impacted the most in courtrooms just like the one he was in that day with Brandon. He saw keeping Brandon, a poor kid growing up in a tough D.C. neighborhood, out of jail, particularly one that had no functioning school and no viable social services, as civil rights work.
The judge, who’d lived through Jim Crow and segregation, saw things differently. He told Brandon that day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had died for his freedom, not so that Brandon could be carrying an illegal gun. Actions have consequences, the judge said, and he sent Brandon off to Oak Hill.
“The judge had used the same civil rights history that I had used for becoming a public defender, but he had flipped it,” Forman said. “He was using it as a form of argument for why [Brandon] had to be locked up. The judge wasn’t alone.”
Forman’s new book is about how a generation of people who had fought for freedom during the civil rights movement and become the first generation of black elected officials in largely black cities like Washington, D.C. found themselves contributing to the mass incarceration of their own people. He said he wanted to tell the story of how that happened, and hopefully offer some ideas on how to keep it from happening again.
Heroin: The Crack Of The 1960s
When people think of a drug’s impact on the black community, Forman said, they often think about the crack epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s. But in the late 1960s, it was heroin that was having devastating impacts on cities with high concentrations of black people. Crime was through the roof. The murder rate had tripled in the District of Columbia and doubled in other places. Black constituents wanted their black elected officials to do something.
As part of his research for the book, Forman spent summers reading the constituent letters in the archived records of former D.C. City Council members and he said, “what leaps off the pages is the pain and anguish that people were feeling.” They wrote comments like, “I feel like a prisoner in my own home,” Forman said. “I feel like a stranger on my own street.
“I can’t walk to the store. I can’t take my kid to school without passing drug dealers. They’re shooting up the place. What happened to us as a community? What happened to us as a people?”
This first generation of black elected officials who had come into power after the fall of formal Jim Crow wanted to be responsive to black death and victimization in a way that government had not been for centuries prior to this moment in history.
Prior to this time, Forman said, black folks didn’t call the police if they were robbed or assaulted in their own neighborhood because they knew from experience that the then mostly white police forces wouldn’t respond, and if they did respond, they would make the situation much worse.
“It wasn’t a murder if it was a dead black person,” he said of the police then, which was overwhelmingly white even in a predominately black city like Washington, D.C. “It was just another dead black person.”
He said the black officials who had come to power wanted to prove that they would do things differently. “They wanted to protect black lives,” he said.
They also wanted to address the root causes of crime and addiction with better jobs, housing, schools, and drug and mental health treatment, Forman said. What they got was law enforcement.
“They wanted a Marshall Plan for urban America,” he said. “They wanted a massive investment in an infusion of jobs in our community for a lot of reasons, including fighting crime. Although this is a story of black characters front and central, any story that’s about what people of color do in this country also has to be about the constraints and the racism and the things that surround them and limit their abilities. They wanted an all of the above strategy to fighting crime. But they only got one of the above.”
Forman said that’s because African-Americans have never controlled the U.S. Congress or statehouses.
“We controlled cities,” he said. “So we could deploy more police. We could deploy more prosecutors. But we by ourselves did not have enough political power to create a Marshall Plan for urban America. People of color have always needed allies. They’ve always needed the white community to feel their pain, and that was never forthcoming.”
Though the book examines what role African-Americans played in mass incarceration, including the dynamics of class and colorism, and the series of policy steps and possible missteps that contributed to the system, Forman said one can’t view these factors as separate from racism.
“Race is central,” he said. “White supremacy is central. You can’t understand the history of this country, the history of the criminal justice system, the history of mass incarceration without understanding the role of racism. At the same time, it’s not the whole story.”
Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full interview with James Forman Jr. on WNHH radio’s “Kica’s Corner.”