James Forman, who marshaled the energy of young civil rights workers and, with his considerable organizing skill, helped turn the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into one of the civil rights movement's most powerful institutions, died Monday night at a hospice in Washington, D.C., after a long struggle with cancer. He was 76.
Forman, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in the early 1990s and was hospitalized during the Christmas holidays, served as the committee's executive director from 1961 to 1967.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday January 13, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 31 words Type of Material: Correction
James Forman -- An obituary of civil rights leader James Forman in Wednesday's California section said he was executive director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His title was executive secretary.
The committee, which grew out of lunch counter sit-ins organized by students in Nashville and Greensboro, N.C., played a primary role in many of the era's watershed events, including the Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer and the 1963 March on Washington. It nurtured some of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders, including Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), an early committee chairman, and Stokely Carmichael.
Over the years, SNCC and other leading civil rights organizations -- including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- took opposing views on strategies in the fight for integration.
Forman felt his tactics, which were more confrontational than King's and many of the movement's other key leaders, were the best way to press for integration.
Forman's role within the committee was not as public as that of Lewis or Carmichael. But he was, historian Taylor Branch said in an interview with The Times on Tuesday, the "backbone ... the brawn and muscle." He was the one who raised funds and recruited volunteers for demanding, often perilous assignments.
"He'd say, 'Go organize South Louisville -- here is the contact,' " said Branch, the author of two books on the civil rights movement. "He made people believe they could do that."
Forman was a decade older than many of the college students who were members of SNCC, and he commanded their respect in part because of his experiences. He had served in the Air Force and worked in rural Tennessee helping black farmers who had been evicted from their land because they had tried to register to vote.
Forman was also physically imposing. He had a large build and wore overalls over a white shirt, the uniform of the working man in the South, though he was a Northerner by birth.
Among the volunteers the committee attracted under Forman's leadership were Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, who were killed in June 1964 while registering voters in Philadelphia, Miss. Last week, Edgar Ray Killen was charged with three counts of murder in the 40-year-old case.
Julian Bond, the former Georgia legislator and current chairman of the National Assn. for Advancement of Colored People, recalled dropping by the committee's office one day in the early 1960s to find Forman sweeping the floor.
"I thought he was the janitor," Bond, who was then a college student, recalled in a phone interview with The Times on Tuesday. "He immediately began to ask me what I could do -- or thought I could do. Before I knew it, I had become the publicity director of the organization, editor of the newsletter and the person who wrote the press releases. Because Forman made me do it. He had a compelling personality."
Lewis, whose tenure as committee chairman overlapped with Forman's years as executive secretary, called his former colleague "a pillar of the modern civil rights movement" and credited Forman with turning the group into a multidimensional organization with an effective infrastructure.
"We were not just a protest group," Lewis said. "We had a structure. We bought a building. We had our own printing press.... We had a research department that had the capacity to engage in rapid response. All this happened under his leadership."
Beyond his role with the committee, Forman gained wide public attention in 1969 by presenting the "Black Manifesto," a call for $500 million in reparations from white churches and synagogues as compensation for years of oppression suffered by African Americans. On one Sunday in May, Forman interrupted a communion service at the Riverside Church in New York City to press his demands. And, though the actual response nationally was tepid, it did fuel a debate that has resurfaced time and again over the years.
Forman was born in Chicago on Oct. 4, 1928. Before his first birthday, his parents took him to Mississippi to live with his grandmother, a subsistence farmer.
He would later recall the threat of being lynched in Mississippi because he had failed to say "Yes, ma'am" to a white woman in a store.
He eventually returned to Chicago, where he graduated from high school, earning the Chicago Tribune's student honors award. After attending college for a year, he joined the Air Force and served in the Korean War.
