High Tide of Black Resistance and Other Political & Literary Writings
(Nine stories and essays from a noted African-American act...)
Nine stories and essays from a noted African-American activist capture the mood of the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the author of The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Simultaneous.
The Making of Black Revolutionaries: Illustrated Edition
(This eloquent and provocative autobiography, originally p...)
This eloquent and provocative autobiography, originally published in 1972, records a day by day, sometimes hour by hour, compassionate account of the events that took place in the streets, meetings, churches, jails, and in peoples hearts and minds in the 1960s civil rights movement.
James Forman was an American writer, journalist, political philosopher, human rights activist, and revolutionary socialist from Chicago.
Background
James Forman was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on October 4, 1928. He spent his early life on a farm of his grandmother, "Mama Jane", in Marshall County, Mississippi. He recalls being "hungry all the time. " His family had no outhouse and no electricity.
Education
Upon graduating from Englewood High School in Chicago, he attended junior college for a semester. He enrolled at the University of Southern California; however, his studies were interrupted when a false arrest charge kept him from taking his final examinations. In the fall of 1957 he began graduate studies at Boston University in African affairs, yet could not reconcile himself to studying Africa when children in Little Rock, Arkansas, were trying to integrate a school.
In 1977 he enrolled as a graduate student at Cornell University. He received a Masters of Professional Studies (M. P. S. ) in African and Afro-American history in 1980. He also received a Ph. D. in 1985 from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities in cooperation with the Institute of Policy Studies.
Career
After the college he joined the U. S. Air Force as a personnel classification specialist.
He left Boston and went to the South as a reporter for the Chicago Defender. During this period he also wrote a novel about the ideal interracial civil rights group whose philosophy of non-violence would produce massive social change.
Forman returned to Chicago to teach, and became involved with the Emergency Relief Committee, a group affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and dedicated to providing food and clothing to black sharecroppers evicted from their homes for registering to vote in Fayette County, Tennessee. In 1960 he formally joined the civil rights movement by going to Monroe, North Carolina, to assist Robert F. Williams, head of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In his confrontation with local white people, Williams had been censured by the NAACP for his call of armed self-defense.
Though still teaching in Chicago, Forman maintained his ties with the southern student activists and from them heard about a newly formed group called SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), which was structured much like the organization his novel suggested. After some debate, Forman left teaching and went to SNCC's national headquarters in Atlanta. Within a week he was appointed executive secretary, in 1961.
Forman's greatest contribution to SNCC in eight years of involvement was his ability to provide the administrative skills and political sophistication the organization needed. He hired an efficient staff, brought professionalism to the research and fund-raising activities as well as discipline and direction to SNCC's various factions. He realized the need for specialized skills and made office-work, research, and fund-raising all part of SNCC's revolutionary activities.
As executive secretary of SNCC, Forman was involved in every major civil rights controversy in the nation. Forman also noted that most civil rights groups were not effective or enduring because they were "leader-centered" rather than being "group or people-centered. " Some of those other civil rights leaders saw Forman as something of a hothead.
As director of the International Affairs Commission of SNCC, Forman and ten other staff members went to Africa in 1964 as guests of the government of Guinea. This trip began to alter his views, and he developed a global analysis of racism. His understanding was shaped by reading the works of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkhrumah, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X. In 1967 he delivered a paper in Zambia entitled: "The Invisible Struggle Against Racism, Colonialism and Apartheid. "
His internationalist orientation lead him to accept an appointment in the Black Panther Party (BPP) as minister of foreign affairs and director of political education in 1968. (Early in 1967 SNCC and the BPP had coordinated a number of ventures and activities. ) This alliance soon ended, and Forman even left SNCC in 1969 when he was essentially deposed by H. Rap Brown, then chairman of the committee.
Before Forman left, he delivered one of the most provocative challenges to come out of the 1960. In a speech given in April of 1969 at the Black Economic Development Conference, Forman called for "a revolutionary black vanguard" to seize the government and redirect its resources.
In some ways, "The Black Manifesto" was Forman's greatest moment. He had linked contemporary wealth with historic exploitation; thus, he presented the ultimate challenge to American society. In the early 1970 Forman spent most of his time writing his mammoth work on black revolutionaries.
In 1983 Forman served a one-year term as legislative assistant to the president of the Metropolitan Washington Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO). He was chairman of the Unemployed and Poverty Council (UPAC), a civil and human rights group in Washington, D. C. As one of the major leaders of the civil rights era, James Forman continued to represent a dimension of black activism which sought to develop a revolutionary organization in America.
(Nine stories and essays from a noted African-American act...)
Religion
In his now famous "Black Manifesto" he demanded that "white Christian Churches and Jewish Synagogues, which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism, " pay half-a-billion dollars to blacks for reparations for slavery and racial exploitation.
In his autobiography The Making Of Black Revolutionaries Forman devoted an entire chapter to explaining his disbelief in God. He believed that the "belief in God hurts my people. "
Politics
He coordinated the famous "Freedom Rides" and advocated the use of white civil rights workers in white communities. He started the Albany Movement, which paved the way for Martin Luther King's campaign there. He criticized the 1963 March on Washington as a "sell-out" by black leaders to the Kennedy administration and the liberal-labor vote. In 1964 Forman and Fannie Lou Hamer opposed the compromise worked out by the Democratic Party and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention.
In addition, he questioned the capitalistic orientation of mainstream black leaders and castigated them for not understanding the correlations among capitalism, racism, and imperialism.
Views
He wanted the money for reparations for slavery and racial exploitation to create new black institutions. Specifically, he demanded a Southern Land Bank, four major publishing and printing enterprises, four television networks, a Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund Training Center, and a new black university. Interesting enough, some funds did come in; however, most were given to the traditional black churches and organizations.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
As James Farmer noted in his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, "Forman was volatile and uncompromising, an angry young man. His head had been clubbed many times on the front lines in Dixie. He was impatient with Urban League and NAACP types; he was nervous and perhaps a trifle battle-fatigued. "
The New York Times called him "a civil rights pioneer who brought a fiercely revolutionary vision and masterly organizational skills to virtually every major civil rights battleground in the 1960s. "
Connections
Forman's marriages to Mary Forman and Mildred Thompson ended in divorce. He was married to Mildred Thompson Forman (now Mildred Page) from 1959 to 1965, during the most active period of SNCC. Mildred Forman moved to Atlanta with James and worked at the Atlanta SNCC office as well as working as coordinator for tours of The Freedom Singers. Forman and Romilly had two sons: Chaka Forman and James Forman Jr.