In 1962 in Nashville, at a conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this big guy touched me on the shoulder.
"You're Charlie, and you're down there in Mississippi?"
James Forman marches arm-in-arm with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during a Selma, Ala., civil rights demonstration in 1965.
(AP)
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It stopped short of being suspicious or belligerent, but it was definitely a sort of "And just what are your intentions?" question.
He was James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC -- which organized voter registration campaigns in the toughest areas of the South during the civil rights movement -- and he wanted to know who I was because I was northern, in Mississippi working with SNCC and had had absolutely no contact with SNCC headquarters, ever.
I said, "Yes, I'm Charlie." I was all of 20 years old, and I had dropped out of Howard University that spring to come South.
He nodded and walked away. I think I must have represented a kind of frustration to him showing up in Mississippi, laying claim to the organization the way I did. How could you have an organization if people could do that? Whatever he had in mind, Forman never brought it up to me.
And it is not the substance or lack of substance of that first encounter in Nashville that I am thinking of as I recall that day. Instead it is an image of how big he was. The frail Jim Forman, weakened by colon cancer, those of us in Washington saw in recent years hid just how big and vibrant Jim Forman was. He was a tough guy. First impression: maybe a longshoreman or Teamster. A good size to have if you were going to tackle white supremacy in the blackbelt South the way Forman did.
James Forman, who died Monday at 76, leaves a lot behind, most of it unrecognized and unappreciated. I am writing as one of those shaped by Forman. It is worth making the argument right here, and Forman would appreciate it, that the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s is largely misunderstood. His own invisibility as one of the great forces in that movement is one example of just how deeply it was misunderstood.
There he is in my mind's eye, pressing his ideas on Martin Luther King Jr. or the NAACP's Roy Wilkins: You don't have to be so cautious with the president. Let's get people out on the street.
There he is, arguing with us -- the young and inexperienced -- about disciplined organizing, challenging us to think about more than a cup of coffee at a lunch counter or even voting rights.
One of my favorite photographs from those days, 1963, I think, is of Jim gazing into the distance from behind the bars of a jail in Americus, Ga. I look at it often, even now, wondering just what he is thinking, what he is seeing. Does he really feel the price we are paying is worth what we are gaining? I wonder.
As an unruly lot of kids, most of us in our early twenties, more than a few of us still in our teens, James Forman -- "Jim" to some of us, but more often and oddly as just "Forman," as Julian Bond noted -- organized us. He was older; at 33, older than King, when he became executive secretary of SNCC and began molding, as Bond puts it, "SNCC's near-anarchic personality into a functioning, if still chaotic, organizational structure."
You have to constantly think about what it is you are really fighting for, Jim taught us. And it was Jim who began to connect us to Africa, the southern African liberation movements, in particular. He had done graduate work in African studies at Boston University. The slogan "One Man One Vote," which we used in our voter registration campaigns across the South, was borrowed from the independence movement in what is now Zambia.
His age gave him a kind of gravitas that, without question, was needed among a group like ours, ready and willing, as fellow SNCC member Joyce Ladner once cracked, "to argue with a lamppost."
