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Murray Excellence in Scholarship Lecture at Duquesne Law School on March 21, 2019
Forman, James
Forman, James
Abstract
I thought I would start by talking a little bit about what brought me to write Locking Up Our Own.
Two motivations stand out. The first has to do with African American portrayals in popular media. Whenever I see a film or a
television show that is completely void of African American representation in the narrative-or, just as bad-with one character who
is made to stand in for the entire black community or represent the entire black perspective, it makes me a little angry. If it's a television show, I might just turn it off, because I refuse this distortion of the truth. The truth is a community that is diverse, complex, and full of individuals who disagree with one another.
Of course, Hollywood isn't the only place with this narrative problem. It lives in our politics and has mapped itself onto history. I
knew that in this book, I wanted to tell the story of the last fifty years through the lens of African American communities, citizens, and leaders in their full depth and complexity. I wanted to show the intellectual, cultural, social, and political history that so often
gets written off or written out. In other words, I wanted to tell the truth.
The second motivation came from my work in the criminal legal system. There are a lot of personal stories in this book, but there's one that really captures why I wanted to write it. It's a story from the introduction, and I would like to share some of it with you now.