[Marxism] James Forman dies

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

>From the Post. Naturally hey don't mention his days in the League of 
>Revolutionary Black Workers, and only in passing his book on 
>self-determination.

Whatever your views on his particular brand of revolution, his passing marks 
the death of a revolutionary who made important contributions.

Andrew Pollack

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1621-2005Jan11?language=printer
Civil Rights Leader James Forman Dies

By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 11, 2005; 6:37 PM


James Forman, 76, who as executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent 
Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s dispatched cadres of organizers, 
demonstrators and Freedom Riders into the most dangerous redoubts of the Deep 
South, died Jan. 10 of colon cancer at Washington House, a local hospice.

At the height of the civil rights movement, Mr. Forman hammered out a role for 
SNCC among the so-called Big Five, the established civil rights organizations 
that included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 
the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Congress of Racial Equality and 
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. SNCC in those years was the 
edgier, more aggressive organization, pushing the South specifically and the 
nation generally toward change.

On numerous occasions, Mr. Forman himself was harassed, jailed and beaten 
during forays to register voters and organize protests in communities willing 
to use any means necessary, including terror, intimidation and murder, to 
resist the dismantling of the region's rigid system of apartheid.

"Accumulating experiences with Southern 'law and order' were turning me into a 
full-fledged revolutionary," Mr. Forman wrote, recalling his experiences of 
1962-63. Although he moved increasingly leftward during his years at SNCC, he 
was edged out of the organization in the late 1960s when Stokely Carmichael, H. 
Rap Brown and other, younger members considered him insufficiently militant.

When Mr. Forman joined SNCC in 1961, it was a loose federation of student 
organizations housed in a grubby, windowless room in Atlanta, across the street 
from the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on Auburn 
Avenue. He moved to Atlanta at the urging of Ella Jo Baker, who had been the 
SCLC's first executive director. She believed the students, most from black 
colleges in the South, some of them veterans of sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., 
and elsewhere, needed a separate organization to channel their energy and 
dedication.

As an Air Force veteran who was about a decade older than most of those 
involved with SNCC, he had the drive and experience, and the administrative 
abilities, to give focus to the organization, universally pronounced "Snick." 
Appointed executive secretary within a week of his arrival, he set about paying 
old bills, radically expanding the staff and planning logistics for 
direct-action efforts and voter-registration drives in Mississippi, Alabama, 
Georgia and elsewhere.

For the next four years, working in southern towns that are now touchstones of 
the civil rights movement, he was responsible for making sure that SNCC 
organizers were fed, housed and transported from one place of engagement to 
another, getting them out of jail and raising money for the organization's 
continued existence.

"He imbued the organization with a camaraderie and collegiality that I've never 
seen in any organization before or since," said Julian Bond, chairman of the 
NAACP and SNCC's communications director during Mr. Forman's tenure.

"Jim performed an organizational miracle in holding together a loose band of 
nonviolent revolutionaries who simply wanted to act together to eliminate 
racial discrimination and terror," said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), 
who was a member of SNCC. "As a result, SNCC had an equal place at the table 
with all the major civil rights organizations of the 1960s. Americans may not 
known Jim's name as a household word, but if they look around them at the 
racial change in our country, they will know Jim by his work."

James Forman was born in Chicago on Oct. 4, 1928, and spent his early years 
living with his grandmother on a farm in Marshall County, Miss. When he was 6, 
his parents took him back to Chicago, although he often spent his summers in 
Mississippi. Until he was a teenager, he used the surname of his stepfather, 
John Rufus, a gas station manager, unaware that his real father was a Chicago 
cabdriver named Jackson Forman. He met his father when the elder Forman drove 
his cab into the gas station.

He graduated with honors from Chicago's Englewood High School in 1947 and 
served with the Air Force in Okinawa during the Korean War. After his discharge 
in 1952, he enrolled at the University of Southern California.

Early in his second semester, in 1953, he was studying for an examination at 
the library and stepped outside late at night to take a break, a copy of the 
psychiatrist Karl Menninger's book "Love and Hate" under his arm. Two Los 
Angeles police officers drove up and accused him of a robbery in the area. 
Despite his protestations, they hauled him to the police station downtown, 
threw him into a cell and beat him.

He was released after three days, but the weight of frustration and outrage 
would not lift; he suffered a mental and emotional breakdown. After a brief 
period as a patient in the Veteran's Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles, 
he went back to Chicago.

In 1954, he enrolled at Chicago's Roosevelt University. He graduated in three 
years, planning to be a writer or journalist. While doing graduate work at 
Boston University, he was distracted by events in Little Rock, Ark., where, in 
the fall of 1957, court-ordered school integration was being resisted. In 1958, 
he wrangled press credentials from the Chicago Defender and took the train to 
Little Rock. He filed a few stories, worked on a social-protest novel and 
looked for opportunities to organize mass protests in the South.

After working briefly as a substitute elementary school teacher back in 
Chicago, he found that opportunity in Fayette County, Tenn., a few miles from 
his childhood home. Seven-hundred families of sharecroppers had been evicted 
from their homes for registering to vote. Joining a program sponsored by CORE, 
he helped publicize the farmers' plight in Chicago, distributed food and 
registered voters.

In the summer of 1961, he was jailed with SNCC-organized Freedom Riders who 
were protesting segregated facilities in Monroe, N.C. After his sentence was 
suspended, he went to work full time for SNCC.

"Forman was pivotal in keeping various factions of SNCC in action rather than 
concentrating on protecting their own turfs," said Lawrence Guyot, a longtime 
SNCC member and chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

One of Mr. Forman's early challenges was to referee an internal dispute between 
SNCC activists who believed in direct action -- sit-ins, demonstrations and 
other forms of confrontation-- and those who believed voter registration was 
the most effective path to political empowerment. Mr. Forman maintained there 
really was no distinction.

"The brutal Southern sheriffs," he wrote a few years later, "didn't care what 
kind of 'outside agitator' you were; you were black and making trouble and that 
was enough for them."

He also wrestled, as did most SNCC members, with the meaning and utility of 
nonviolence. Unlike his friend and SNCC cohort John Lewis, who considered 
nonviolence as a way of life, Mr. Forman considered it a tactic, nothing more. 
There were times, he believed, when self-defense, fighting back, was absolutely 
necessary.

Mr. Forman also was often at odds with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC. 
In 1961, for example, Mr. Forman objected to King's involvement in the Albany 
Movement, a boycott, sit-in and voter registration drive SNCC had initiated in 
Albany, Ga.

"A strong people's movement was in progress, the people were feeling their own 
strength grow," he wrote some years later. "I knew how much harm could be done 
by interjecting the Messiah complex -- people would feel that only a particular 
individual could save them and would not move on their own to fight racism and 
exploitation."

King came to Albany, spoke and left. SNCC's work in the area continued for the 
next couple of years.

Mr. Forman participated in the planning of the Aug. 28, 1963, March on 
Washington, where he helped John Lewis re-write the draft of his remarks 
because march organizers considered them too strident.

In the summer of 1964, Mr. Forman's SNCC brought almost a thousand young 
volunteers, black and white, to register voters, set up "freedom schools," 
establish community centers and build the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic 
Party. Among those volunteers were Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael 
Schwerner, the three young men murdered along a muddy road near Philadelphia, 
Miss., in June 1964. (According to Julian Bond, Mr. Forman was probably not 
aware in the last days of his life that Edgar Ray Killen, a preacher and 
sawmill operator, had been charged with the murders.)

Later that summer, Mr. Forman journeyed to Atlantic City, where he worked to 
persuade Democratic Party officials to recognize the Mississippi Freedom 
Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention. Despite his efforts and 
despite the powerful testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, who told of being fired by 
her boss and beaten unconscious by the police for her work in support of MFDP, 
the upstart party failed in its efforts to supplant the state's party regulars.

"Atlantic City was a powerful lesson, not only for the black people from 
Mississippi but for all of SNCC and many other people as well," Mr. Forman 
wrote. "No longer was there any hope, among those who still had it, that the 
federal government would change the situation in the Deep South."

Despite Mr. Forman's growing militancy, SNCC dumped him and Lewis in 1966, 
replacing them with Stokely Carmichael and Ruby Doris Robinson.

Mr. Forman, who always had been interested in African liberation movements, 
went to Africa in 1967. In 1969, he helped organize the Black Economic 
Development Conference in Detroit, where a "Black Manifesto" was adopted. He 
also founded a nonprofit organization called the Unemployment and Poverty 
Action Committee.

On a Sunday morning in May, 1969, Mr. Forman interrupted services at New York 
City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white 
churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the 
centuries. Although Riverside's preaching minister, the Rev. Ernest T. 
Campbell, termed the demands "exorbitant and fanciful," he was in sympathy with 
the impulse, if not the tactic. Later, the church agreed to donate a fixed 
percentage of its annual income to anti-poverty efforts.

During the 1970s, Mr. Forman was in graduate school at Cornell University. In 
1980, he received a master's degree in African and African-American Studies. In 
1982, he received a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and 
Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies.

A writer and pamphleteer, he moved to Washington in 1981 and started a 
newspaper called, The Washington Times, which lasted only a short while. He 
also founded the Black American News Service. He was the author of "Sammy 
Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation 
Movement" (1969), "The Making of Black Revolutionaries" (1972 and 1997) and 
"Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the 
African American People" (1984).

Mr. Forman's three marriages, to Mary Forman, Mildred Thompson and Constancia 
Ramilly, ended in divorce.

Survivors include two sons, Chaka Esmond Fanon Forman of Venice Beach, Calif., 
and James Robert Lumumba Forman Jr. of the District; and one granddaughter.

In July 2004, despite being weak from his long struggle with cancer, Mr. Forman 
took a train from Washington to Boston during the Democratic National 
Convention. He took part in a "Boston Tea Party," in which members of the D.C. 
delegation tossed bags of tea into Boston Harbor to protest lack of statehood 
and a vote in Congress.

"He was indefatigable," Bond said. "It was said that on his death bed, 
Frederick Douglass's last words were 'Organize! Organize!' That's what Forman 
did every day of his life. That's what today's civil rights movement has 
forgotten how to do."



© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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