Civil Rights’ Tower of Strength

by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 12, 2005

(link)
By Charles Cobb Jr.
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page C01

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?"

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."

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.

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.

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photo: James Forman, February, 2004 (Gary Kuwahara -- Csu Dominguez Hills Via AP)