Atlanta police arresting James Forman Sr. in Atlanta in 1963.
James Forman Jr. Tuesday at WNHH FM.
James Forman Jr. doesn’t need convincing that protests can change America. He just needs to look at a wall in his home.
There hangs a photo (pictured above) of Atlanta police arresting his father, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader James Forman Sr., in 1963 for protesting Jim Crow segregation laws. Thanks to civil rights protests, legal challenges, electoral campaigns, and efforts to change institutions from within, laws did change. And society moved forward.
So Forman means it when he calls on people who oppose the current federal assault on law and racial justice efforts to protest, pursue lawsuits challenging federal policies, and vote in upcoming elections.
Forman — a 57-year-old Yale Law professor who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America — issued that call during a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
The idea that “protest works” is a fact, not just a “hope,” beginning with the Boston Tea Party and extending through the Civil Rights Movement, Forman argued.
“What my dad would always tell me over and over again is: Look, the protests are never popular when they’re happening. SNCC wasn’t popular. King wasn’t popular. Martin Luther King was unpopular at the time that he died; he had a two-thirds unfavorable rating during the March on Washington, the most famous, iconic march in civil rights history. The Freedom Rides, where Black people and white people went together and rode on buses into segregated communities where they weren’t allowed to be together on a bus — those had a 20 percent favorable rating at the time that they happened. These are now all iconic parts of civil rights history.”
Forman is working to energize potential protesters through a network called Descendants of SNCC. One hundred twenty fellow younger-generation relatives of SNCC activists have so far signed up since the group’s September launch to take action in their parents’ and grandparents’ and aunts’ and uncles’ spirit.
Meanwhile, he has enlisted his students to help reform the legal profession from within — by widening the net of who becomes a lawyer.
They founded the Access to Law School project four years ago, mentoring New Haveners interested in becoming first-generation lawyers. The program guides students through the application process, LSATs, and other required steps.
About 60 of the 80 people who signed up for the program so far have either begun their studies or are in the process of applying, Forman said. One of them, WNHH FM “LoveBabz LoveTalk” host and Inner-City News Editor Babz Rawls-Ivy, is beginning studies this fall at Western New England University School Of Law. The program’s first three law graduates received their diplomas from Yale, Villanova, and University of Connecticut.
The goal of the program is to enable people from New Haven neighborhoods to offer their neighbors the kind of representation people from more privileged places receive.
“If you’re in Fair Haven, if you’re in Dixwell, if you’re in Dwight, if you’re in the Hill, you need lawyers to not just be a billboard when you’re on 91, or not just be downtown,” Forman argued. “You need somebody in your community that you can go to when there’s an issue that you paid rent, but the landlord is not making sure that the hot water is running; when your kid has special needs in school, but the school system is not giving them any additional services; when you have lead paint that you feel like has been unabated, and it seems like nobody is doing anything about that. If we only have people with backgrounds of power and privilege who become lawyers, which has traditionally been the path, then law is going to be about reinforcing power and privilege.”
Forman is on research leave from his teaching post this fall. He plans to explore how the cohort’s participants have fared so far. He also plans to study the results at similar “pipeline” programs at other schools — including how they’re all responding to the Trump administration’s efforts to stop racial diversity-oriented university programs. Forman emphasized that the Access to Law School program at Yale has never focused on race. Rather it focused on people of all races in New Haven who want to become lawyers.
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with author and law professor James Forman Jr., including an update on efforts to tackle mass incarceration, on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”