As the executive secretary of SNCC from 1961 to 1966, Forman played a significant role in the Freedom Rides, the Albany movement, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma to Montgomery marches.
After the 1960s, Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing black people around issues of social and economic equality.
When playing with the neighborhood kids he would throw rocks and cans at white pedestrians and threw bricks off of roofs and onto police cars.
He was sent to a continuation school, Washburne High, he got a job as a paper roller at Cuneo Press, and joined a gang known as the "Sixty-first Raiders."
His real father was a cab driver that Forman coincidentally met and introduced himself to while working at his step-father's gas station.
He received ROTC training and the Chicago Tribune Silver and Gold medal for efficiency as a non-commissioned officer; he was a lieutenant upon graduation.
Forman would go on to regret this decision and call the armed forces a "dehumanizing machine which destroys thought and creativity in order to preserve the economic system and the political myths of the United States.
Forman then went to graduate school at Boston University where he began to develop the ideas of a successful social movement.
From 1961 to 1966, Forman, a decade older and more experienced than most of the other members of SNCC, became responsible for providing organizational support to the young, loosely affiliated activists by paying bills, radically expanding the institutional staff and planning the logistics for programs.
[1] SNCC began as an affiliate of another direct action group of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
For example, following W. G. Anderson's invitation to King to join the Albany Movement, Forman criticized the move because he felt much harm could be done by interjecting the Messiah complex.
Forman echoed the concerns of those in SNCC and the broader civil rights movement who saw the potential dangers of relying too heavily upon one dynamic leader.
[11] In an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Forman laid out many of his ideologies concerning SNCC, commenting that it is "the one movement in this country that has within its spheres of activity room for intellectuals.
"[12] Years before the famous Selma marches of 1965, Forman and other SNCC organizers visited the city to assist the voter registration work of Amelia Boynton and J. L. Chestnut.
[14] When Dylan received an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee he said the honor really belonged to "James Forman and SNCC.
When, notwithstanding the national outrage generated by the violence in Mississippi (3 project workers killed; 4 people critically wounded; 80 beaten, 1,000 arrests; 35 shooting incidents, 37 churches bombed or burned; and 30 black businesses or homes burned),[16] the Johnson Administration refused to seat the MFDP delegates at convention in August rather than further imperil the Democratic Party hold on the South, there was consternation and confusion within the movement.
[17] As an opportunity to take stock, to critique and reevaluate the movement, in November 1964 Forman helped organize a retreat in Waveland, Mississippi.
Like Ella Baker, in criticizing King's "messianic" leadership of the SCLC, Executive Secretary, Forman saw himself as championing popularly accountable, grassroots organization.
It was time to recognize that SNCC no longer had a "student base" (with the move to voter registration, the original campus protest groups had largely evaporated) and that the staff, "the people who do the most work," were the organization's real "nucleus".
For Forman this still suggested too loose, too confederal a structure for an organization whose challenge, without the manpower and publicity of white volunteers, was to mount and coordinate a Southwide Freedom Summer[23] and "build a Black Belt political party.
At a mass meeting on the night of the 16th, Forman "whipped the crowd into a frenzy" demanding that the President act to protect demonstrators, and warned, "If we can't sit at the table of democracy, we'll knock the fucking legs off.
In the negotiations, Montgomery officials agreed to stop using the county posse against protesters, and to issue march permits to blacks for the first time.
"[30] But Forman recalls male leaders fighting "her attempts as executive secretary to impose a sense of organizational responsibility and self-discipline," and "trying to justify themselves by the fact that their critic was a woman"[31] In October 1967 Smith-Robinson was to die "of exhaustion" according to one of her co-workers, "destroyed by the movement".
When on the night of June 16, 1966, following protests at the shooting of solo freedom marcher James Meredith, Carmichael walked out of jail (his 27th arrest) and into Broad Street Park in Greenwood, Mississippi, he asked the waiting crowd "What do you want?."
Like Forman, who was now urging the study of Marxism,[34] Carmichael hesitated to accept the implication that whites should be excluded from the movement, but this was the course taken.
Carmichael was expelled ("engaging in a power struggle" that "threatened the existence of the organization")[41]—and "Forman wound up first in hospital, and later in Puerto Rico, suffering from a nervous breakdown".
[1] On May 30, 1969, Forman made plans to pursue a similar course at a Jewish Synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York.
Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, showed up carrying chains and clubs promising to confront Forman if he attempted to enter the synagogue.
[1] Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing black and disenfranchised people around issues of progressive economic and social development and equality.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Forman lived with Constancia "Dinky" Romilly, the second and only surviving child of the British-born journalist, anti-fascist activist and aristocrat, the Hon.