[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 12 (Tuesday, February 8, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E180-E181]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO MR. JAMES FORMAN

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON

                             of mississippi

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, February 8, 2005

  Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, I would like to recognize 
the life and legacy of Mr. James Forman, former executive secretary for 
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In tribute to Mr. 
Forman, I would like to submit the following excerpt from the 
Washington Post Article, Civil Rights Activist James Forman Dies at 76; 
Key Organizer of SNCC, written by Joe Holley on Wednesday, January 12, 
2005.

       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 January 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, 
     beaten and jailed 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 
     segregation.
       ``Accumulating experiences with Southern `law and order' 
     were turning me into a full-fledged revolutionary,'' Mr. 
     Forman wrote, recalling his experiences of 1962 and 1963. 
     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. As an Air Force veteran who was about a decade 
     older than most of those involved with SNCC, he had the drive 
     and experience, as well as 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.
       ``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.''
       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 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 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 falsely 
     arrested, beaten and held for three days by Los Angeles 
     police. The experience prompted a breakdown that briefly put 
     him in a psychiatric hospital. Afterward, he returned to 
     Chicago and enrolled at Roosevelt University.
       He graduated in three years, planning to be a writer or 
     journalist. While doing graduate work at Boston University, 
     he wrangled press credentials from the Chicago Defender and 
     took the train to Little Rock, where, in the fall of 1957, 
     court-ordered school integration was being resisted. From 
     there, he filed a few stories and looked for opportunities to 
     organize mass protests in the South.
       After working briefly as a substitute elementary school 
     teacher 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 the Congress of Racial Equality, he helped 
     publicize the farmers' plight, 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.
       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 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 Martin Luther King 
     Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 
     1961, for example, Mr. Forman objected to King's involvement 
     in the Albany Movement, a boycott, sit-in and voter 
     registration drive SNCC initiated in Georgia.
       ``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.
       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 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 recently 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 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 Carmichael and Ruby Doris 
     Smith Robinson.

[[Page E181]]

       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.
       In the 1970s, Mr. Forman was in graduate school at Cornell 
     University and received a master's degree in African and 
     African American studies in 1980. In 1982, he received a PhD 
     from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities.
       A writer and pamphleteer, Mr. Forman moved to Washington in 
     1981 and started a newspaper called the Washington Times, 
     which lasted 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).
       His 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, 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 no vote in Congress.
       ``It was said that on his deathbed, Frederick Douglass's 
     last words were, `Organize! Organize!' That's what Forman did 
     every day of his life,'' Bond said. ``That's what today's 
     civil rights movement has forgotten how to do.''

  I take great pride in commending Mr. James Forman for his work to 
curb racial segregation and win social justice in this country.

                          ____________________