Foreword to reissue of James Forman's autobiography, 1997

1 James Forman by Julian Bond

James Forman is one of the under-appreciated figures of the modern civil rights movement. His autobiography - The Making of Black Revolutionaries - is a classic.

In a determined voice, Forman describes his life and activism. He doesn't mince words. Nor is he cautious in his descriptions of those he believes to be enemies of black progress, whether black or white.

Revolutionaries is also precious because it represents one of very few autobiographies by a youthful activist. A small library's worth of book now records and analyzes the modern civil rights movement, and many adult figures of the activist movement have written their accounts. Among Forman's contemporaries, Cleveland Sellers (The River of No Return), Mary King (Freedom Song), Anne Moody (Coming of Age in Mississippi) Sheyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson (Selma, Lord Selma) , Julius Lester (Lovesong) and Charles Koen (The Cairo Story) are among the few who have written their own narratives of who they were, what they did, what they thought about it then and how they looked back upon it when marches and demonstrations had been stilled and some victories had been won.

James Forman had enormous influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) , the civil rights movement, and on me personally.

He molded SNCC's near anarchic personality into a functioning , if still chaotic, organizational structure, and insured that most of its parts functioned smoothy most of the time.

He brought the trained historian's eye and values to our

2 work, thereby accounting for the large repository of field and other reports, giving SNCC the best detailed records (for its short life) among its contemporary and often competing organizations.

"Write it down" was his constant injuction; because he insisted, the SNCC files contain often lyrical descriptions of exactly how an organizer goes about his or her work. Here one may learn how to insinuate yourself into a community, how to learn who the real "leaders" are and aren't, and how to help those who aspire to leadership to develop to their fullest. The SNCC Field Secretary's reports, written at Forman's insistence and withheld at great peril, offer a day-to-day account of community organizing that cannot be found anywhere else. SNCC, of course, because of Forman's leadership and personality, was unlike any other organization.

His scholarly bent also guided Forman's selection of SNCC staff; the organization had the best research arm of any civil rights organization before or since. SNCC Field Secretaries entered the rural, small town South armed with evidence of who controlled and owned what, and who, in turn, owned them.

"Power sttucture" was no abstract phase for SNCC's band of brothers and sisters, but a real list with real persons' names and addresses, descriptions of assets and interlocking directorships, demonstrating how large interests, ranging from Memphis and New York banks to the Queen of England, might own at least partial control of a plantation in Mississippi's Delta. Knowledge of who owned what was crucial to SNCC's strategies. From it we knew that Southern peonage was no accident, but rather the deliberate result of economic policies determined thousands of miles away from the cotton field.

SNCC's data on income and wealth distribution were exact, as well. The series entitled "The Economic Condition of Mississippi (or Alabama or Georgia) Negroes" showed in stark columns just how profitable the system of white supremacy was for some, how devastating for others.

3 James Forman was slightly older than most SNCC people, and that age advantage gave him a solemnity and seriousness well suited to the task he undertook. Undoubtedly his military experience - recounted in frightful detail in these pages - made a great difference too, for most of us were just old enough to worry about the draft when the movement caught us up and made several of us happily ineligible for military service.

Imposing governance on the self-styled revolutionaries was a difficult task, but Foreman proved equal to it.

He became SNCC's Executive Secretary because the field staff wanted firm assurance that they would receive their meager pay on time, and equally as important, that a steady hand was ever present in the Atlanta headquarters to insure the jailings, beating and death they expected to occur would not pass by unnoticed.

Forman was a master propagandist. He insisted SNCC develop a publicity apparatus - called Communications - and that it produce materials of the highest quality and unassailable objectivity. In time, we owned a large web-fed offset press, had four staff photographers and a professional-level darkness, and printed a newspaper, The Student Voice.

From him, I learned to write brief, punchy press releases, and how to report on movement activity to skeptical journalists in a believable way. But I also learned that journalists could be enemies as well as friends, and that the information they received had to be what we wanted them to know, not what they wanted to learn.

My favorite Forman memory is of the many youthful whites who trickled into the office, usually convinced their unique determination and commitment was just what the movement needed, demanding to be put to work leading demonstrations in deepest Mississippi or organizing some other dangerous action elsewhere. Forman's usual response was to give them a broom and instructions to report back when the office floors were swept. Some left before they finished; those who completed the task were given a

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second look. He also often swept the floor and cleaned restrooms himself, believing he ought never ask anyone to do a task he would not do himself.

"Forman provided a necessary ingredient in the development of an organizational structure for the southern student movement. ...without a leader like Forman," SNCC historian Clayborne Carson writes, "who was prepared to assume responsibility for fund-raising and directing the activities of a full-time staff, it is unlikely that SNCC could have become a durable organization."

Carson is right - without Forman, there would have been no SNCC, at least not the one that developed in the early 1960s. Without that SNCC, it is doubtful that the movement would have succeeded as well as it did, doubtful that the drive for citizenship rights would have energized and engaged as many people or claimed victory as quickly as it did.

Speculation is easy. In these pages, James Forman spells out the truth, his truth about his life and the times he helped create.

The Making of Black Revolutionaries is an invaluable look into the mind and heart of one of the modern movement's makers; no serious student of the period should be without it.

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(Julian Bond is a Lecturer in History at the University of Virginia and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Government at American University.)