Always Looking Forward

A story of leadership, lineage, and the transformational power of education

In his historically grounded memoir, Always Looking Forward, James Edward Bowers adds an essential voice to the story of how Black South Carolinians used education as a vehicle for freedom and opportunity. Highlighting the contributions to this endeavor from his ancestors, many of whom had found a way to learn to read and write under the oppressive conditions of enslavement, Bowers offers objective lessons in the power of education.

Showing how their determination shaped his own career, Bowers reflects on his great-grandfather, who founded a school for the children of formerly enslaved people, his grandfather, who taught at two historically Black colleges, and his mother, who was fired as a public school teacher for protesting the inequality of Black education after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Bowers tells his story of rising up from a childhood spent in segregated Orangeburg, South Carolina, to attending Fisk University, to enrolling at a newly desegregated USC and Harvard Law School, to then becoming the first full-time African American faculty member at the University of South Carolina School of Law, forging a path to leadership in government, corporate service, and higher education.