Because he was right down there on the ground with us, his was an important voice among the handful of adult voices we listened to carefully. The age difference underscores a deeper point about those years that is often missed: Much of the southern civil rights movement was powered by a convergence of young people with older people who were willing to share their experiences and permit use of networks they had built over years of activism.
Forman shaped our organization from the deep well of his own experiences. He spent most of his early childhood on a farm with his grandmother in Holly Springs, Miss. He'd been a reporter for the Chicago Defender, covering Little Rock. In 1960 he went to Monroe, N.C., in support of the controversial NAACP leader there, Robert Williams, who argued for self-defense, to the dismay of the organization's national headquarters.
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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One of his most significant lessons for SNCC and the broader movement itself was Forman's constant injunction to "Write! You've got to Write!"
Forman was a trained historian who understood the importance of a written record. Of all the organizations involved in the southern movement during the early 1960s, SNCC left the clearest written trail. SNCC's research department was the movement's best. It meant that we SNCC field secretaries entered rural counties with concrete information about who and what we were up against. Ultimately this research department would lay the foundation to a challenge to the Mississippi Democratic Party that would change the national Democratic Party forever.
He had left a teaching job to work with SNCC, and that first day entering SNCC's Atlanta office was pretty discouraging: "One room. Greasy walls. A faint light from a dusty plastic skylight overhead. The mustiness. The smell. The mail all over the floor," he wrote later. The phone rang and it was Newsweek "wanting information I did not have."
There would have been no SNCC without James Forman.
Forman was a radical intellectual but oriented toward action more than words and political babble, not that he was ever shy about his political thoughts. But in the South of those days, more often than not, Forman kind of commandeered you and sent you into action. And without discussing it, he somehow made it clear that he believed you had the ability to do the job. This is a rare quality, a gift that is still missing from so many inter-generational relationships, be they between political activists or others.
In the end, this is the great debt to Forman owed by those of us who worked with him. Whatever we did in SNCC, we would have been lost were it not for Forman's strong steady hand helping to guide our efforts.
I already miss his special strength.
