James Forman

Activist

• Born: October 4, 1928
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: January 10, 2005
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Forman was instrumental in the transformation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from a loose association of student groups into a cohesive, vigorous protest party that helped lead the 1960’s Civil Rights movement. Like his colleague at SNCC Stokely Carmichael, Forman became more radical as the 1960’s progressed, issuing a manifesto in which he demanded that churches and synagogues pay reparations for slavery.

Early Life

James Forman was born in Chicago in 1928. His mother was Octavia Allen and his stepfather was John Rufus. It was only as a teenager that Forman learned that his biological father was Jackson Forman, whose last name he eventually adopted. James Forman spent much of his childhood living with his grandparents on their farm. He never forgot his first traumatic experience with racism. When Forman was eight years old, he went shopping in town with his uncle. He neglected to say “Yes, ma’am” to a sales clerk, and the men in the store threatened to lynch him.

Forman developed an early interest in books. He eventually returned to live in Chicago, where he sold copies of The Chicago Defender, the historic African American newspaper. Upon graduation from high school in 1947, he joined the military and served in the Air Force. Forman was discharged in 1952 and married Mary Sears. He enrolled in the University of Southern California, but he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1953, which he blamed on being beaten by the police. After recovering his health, he returned to Chicago and enrolled in Roosevelt University, where he became a leader in student politics and was the delegate to the National Student Association Conference in 1956.

After graduating from Roosevelt in 1958, Forman became involved in civil rights work. The Chicago Defender assigned him to report on northerners traveling to the South to teach and to register voters. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) asked him to work with dispossessed farmers in Tennessee. Meanwhile Forman, a man of wide intellectual interests, was studying French and teaching in the Chicago public schools. He married his second wife, Mary Thompson, in 1959.

Life’s Work

From 1961 to 1966, Forman was executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was a loose collection of student groups that Forman helped forge into a cohesive party of sufficient stature to ally with CORE and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was ten years older than most of the students in SNCC, and his more mature outlook and experience garnered respect. Forman ran the SNCC like a business, raising money, systematically paying bills, and installing a system of record-keeping. Other members wanted to be on the front lines; Forman was willing to perform the mundane administrative chores to keep the organization running. He was one of the leading organizers of the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi in 1964 to register voters. However, he also was critical of Martin Luther King, Jr., both for King’s philosophy of nonviolence and for the attention that King received as a civil rights leader.

Stokely Carmichael became chairman of the SNCC in 1966, symbolizing a more radical direction for the organization. Forman moved in a correspondingly more radical direction. For example, he encouraged SNCC leaders to read the works of Mao Zedong. In 1967, Forman became director of international affairs for the SNCC. As such, he looked to connect the struggles of African Americans with international movements against colonialism and oppression in Asia, Latin America, and especially Africa. In the summer of 1967, Forman made a trip to Tanzania and Zambia. As he was traveling, the six-day Arab-Israeli War broke out. Forman wrote two letters (June 7, 1967, and June 8, 1967) to SNCC colleague Stanley Wise in which he sought to understand that conflict in terms of an increasing internationalist perspective by SNCC. He argued that despite Jewish support for civil rights in the United States, SNCC should side with the Arab and Palestinian peoples in opposition to Israel as “an extension of United States foreign policy.” These letters foreshadowed an increasing rift between more radical African American activists and their Jewish allies over Middle East politics and Zionism.

Like Carmichael, Forman found his views diverging from those of the SNCC, and he resigned in 1968. SNCC disintegrated shortly afterward. Forman became associated with the Black Panther Party as its foreign minister. During this time, he was divorced from Mary Thompson and lived with Constancia “Dinky” Romilly. They had two children before separating. In 1969, Forman presented his “Black Manifesto,” calling for a socialist assault on capitalism at the national Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit. On Sunday, May 4, 1969, he marched into Riverside Church in were chosen, interrupting a communion service. He demanded that the Christian churches pay $500 million in reparations for the treatment of African Americans. Forman planned to make similar demands at the Temple Emanu-El but was prevented by the Jewish Defense League.

In the 1970’s, Forman returned to academic pursuits. He received a master’s degree in African and African American studies at Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities. He published his thesis, Self-Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African-American People, in 1984. In this book, Forman proposes creating an autonomous region for African Americans in the United States. His last years were devoted to teaching and writing. Forman died of colon cancer in 2005.

Significance

When Forman joined SNCC, it was a loose confederation of activist student groups. With maturity and intensity, he shaped the groups into a well-run, formidable student organization. In addition to his administrative ability, he was an aggressive protest leader who became more radical as the 1960’s progressed. His memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972), is notable for its revelation of the psychology and goals of a 1960’s leader, as well as Forman’s astute and impressionistic analysis of revolutionary groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers. Although the early Civil Rights movement had been led by African ministers and churches, Forman rejected the role of religious groups in activism. He considered his demand for multimillion-dollar reparations from churches and synagogues as both the next step in the civil rights struggle and a strike against religion and capitalism.

Bibliography

Clayborne, Carson. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. This academic study of the dynamics of the SNCC credits Forman with building an administrative structure that could support the local organizers and Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement.

Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Foreword by Julian Bond. 1972. Rev. ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Forman’s incendiary call for revolution is presented in the context of his personal account of the 1960’s.

Greenberg, Cheryl, ed. A Circle of Trust: Remembering the SNCC. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Reminiscences and oral histories by the founders and members of the SNCC.

Turner, Jeffrey. Sitting In and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960-1970. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Focuses on the role that African American and white students played in the Civil Rights movement.