I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

Welcome to another episode of Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today we have a good friend of the family, somebody.

I literally feel like I have known since before I was born.

His family is closely connected to mine.

He is a hero of mine.

His father truly is a hero of us all,

but none other than James Foreman Jr. you feeling today I'm good man good to be with you

Yeah man we start each one of our shows in a very unique way in that okay our we like our guest to walk us through the arc of their careers and you've had a story career in the law and in legal academia.

Walk us through each of your career stops from your clerkships after law school to the work you do now at Yale.

Absolutely. So I was clerking after graduation. I was working at the Supreme Court for Justice O'Connor and I was trying to figure out what kind of lawyer I wanted to be.

This is the early 90s and if you can believe it at that time we didn't even have the term mass incarceration it hadn't been created yet

But what you already knew at that stage was that you, we had one in three young black men under criminal justice

supervision. The United States had passed Russia and South Africa, become the world's largest

jailer. And I felt at that moment, you know, thinking about our parents struggle and thinking

about how I was going to play a role. To me it felt like the criminal justice system or the criminal

legal system, it was the place, it was the place, it was the

place, it was the civil rights challenge, I felt like a large generation. So I

decided to become a public defender because it felt to me like... Not make money either but go ahead no not make any money but it was like if you wanted to fight mass incarceration if you wanted to fight too many people being locked up too many many black people in particular, it seemed like going in to court every day representing people trying to get them out, trying to get them free was a way to do it. So that's what I did. And during that time, I was representing young people,

juveniles, and I was really frustrated with the lack of educational opportunities that my clients were getting.

And so I took a year off from the Public Defender's Office to start an alternative school, which we named after Maya Angelou. So the

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