James Forman

James Rufus Forman was born on the fourth of October 1928 at Chicago, Illinois, the son of John Rufus Forman — a worker at the Pullman Sleeping Car Company — and Octavia Allen Forman. He was raised across his early childhood by his maternal grandparents on a small farm at Marshall County, Mississippi. He returned to Chicago at six and was educated at the city's segregated public schools and at Englewood High School. He served in the United States Air Force from 1947 to 1951 and completed the bachelor's degree at Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1957.

He worked as a Chicago Defender stringer reporter and from 1958 as a Chicago public-school teacher. His decisive 1960 journalistic assignment to the Tennessee voter-registration campaign at Fayette and Haywood Counties — where over one thousand Black sharecroppers had been evicted from their land for attempting to register to vote — produced his commitment to full-time movement work.

He joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staff in 1961 — at thirty-two, ten years older than the average SNCC field-secretary. The SNCC executive committee elected him executive secretary in September 1961, the position he held for the following five years. SNCC under his executive secretaryship grew from the founding workshop fellowship to a federation of two hundred field organisers across the segregated South. He conducted across that period the principal operational organising of the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, the 1965 Selma campaign, and the operational infrastructure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

He left the SNCC executive secretaryship in 1966 to become its international affairs director. His decisive late-life intervention was the Black Manifesto of the twenty-sixth of April 1969 — delivered at the National Black Economic Development Conference at Detroit and presented from the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York the following month. The Manifesto demanded five hundred million dollars in reparations from the white American Christian churches and Jewish synagogues for their historical complicity in slavery. The document is generally regarded as the founding text of the modern American reparations movement.

His memoir The Making of Black Revolutionaries of 1972 — six hundred pages of detailed first-person documentation of the southern movement of the 1961-1966 period — remains the principal primary-source memoir of SNCC.

He died of colon cancer at Washington on the tenth of January 2005, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the executive secretary of SNCC.