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.

[4][7] Forman speculated in an interview that FBI pressure on civil rights groups at the time contributed to the strain on his parents' relationship:[4] "There was also the period when...the FBI was putting incredible pressure on civil rights groups through the counter-intelligence program -- or the COINTELPRO program.

[4] The school was almost all white, prompting Romilly to move with her sons to Atlanta so they could grow up in a black community, which she considered important for their racial identities.

[4] Forman expressed the importance of this move in an interview, saying: "In a city that has so many African-American people, I would go to school, and the jocks were black.

[4] In his interview for the job, Forman was asked how his differing political viewpoints would affect his work as a law clerk.

[8] There he teaches Constitutional Law and seminars entitled Race, Class and Punishment, and Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice.

[12] 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.

[13] 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.

[13] The school was designed to reach troubled children and provide them high-quality education, counseling services, and employment opportunities.

"[14] In 1997, Forman took a leave of absence from public defense work to pursue opening the Maya Angelou School.

[14] In the fall, with some grant money and teachers hired on, the Maya Angelou Public Charter High School opened with twenty students selected from the court system,[14] all of them either on probation or committed to the Department of Youth and Rehabilitation Services.

[16] In addition, Forman writes in Locking Up Our Own about ongoing struggles with local police targeting students of the school for searches and arrests.

[15] The changes enacted by the Maya Angelou School inside the prison were described by a court monitor as contributing to an "extraordinary" turnaround.

[18] Forman was part of the 1999 documentary Innocent Until Proven Guilty, which focused on his work as a public defender and with the See Forever Foundation.

[19] Forman has contributed writing about topics such as police brutality, mass incarceration, and the criminal justice system to The Atlantic and The New York Times.

We need the federal government to do for black communities what it did for Europe after World War II -- to rebuild, to reinvest, to revitalize.