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"Any revolutionary movement cannot
succeed if the power of that movement is not in the hands
of the poor." – James
Forman
Jim Forman died last week at age 76, the same
age Martin Luther King Jr. would have been this week if he had
not been assassinated. These
two allies and rivals in the most dramatic and effective social
movement of this country's last century still have much to teach
us. And, although Forman is much less well known, he in particular
may have set an example that we need right now.
Every year during this week, the corporate
media treats us to a version of King's life focused on his eloquence,
his religiosity,
and his work for racial equality. Every year a few progressive
voices point out that King opposed imperialistic violence as well
as police brutality, and that he struggled to end poverty and injustice
that remain with us today. Rarely does anyone mention that King,
while accomplishing amazing things that perhaps no one else could
have done, was often a moderate, a diplomat, a public face, and
a power broker in a movement being pushed in more aggressive directions
by people like Jim Forman.
We still have moderates today. Most of them are not as brilliant,
as inspiring, or as dedicated as Martin Luther King Jr. And most
of them are MORE moderate. But we've got thousands of them. What
we do not have is the band of brothers and sisters that was the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We do not have
a group of people effectively setting the nation's agenda by laying
their lives on the line for complete justice now and nothing less. And
we are the weaker for it. The right wing has its extremists who
make its moderate positions middle-of-the-road. We only have moderates,
who must therefore be dismissed as extreme.
In the past week, we have seen many progressive
organizations speak out for election reform and voting rights,
denouncing the
suppression of black votes that was seen in Ohio and other states
last November 2nd. This includes hip new online groups like MoveOn
and 527s like ACT. But between November 3rd and January 6th, these
organizations made no significant contributions to preventing the
theft of an election. From the day that Senator John Kerry conceded
to the day Congress certified the vote, members of what Jim Forman
used to call the liberal-labor syndrome refused to stick their
necks out. Even now, they will not suggest that there is
any doubt Bush won. This describes the behavior of every
international union and of the AFL-CIO, as well as the 527s, MoveOn
(which sent a message to the Ohio region prior to a Jan. 3 rally,
but nationally focused on Social Security that week), People for
the American Way (which released a report on election problems
along with a coalition of groups but did not connect it to any
effort to stop the certification of the election or any suggestion
that Bush did not win), and – of course – the majority of Democratic
senators and representatives. Various small groups did act, and
Rev. Jesse Jackson became a leading spokesman for those objecting
to a stolen election. The coalition cobbled together was surprisingly
successful in moving Congress Members and Senators to at least
give lip service to the matter. The seeds of something may have
been sown. But a mass movement was not organized. Civil disobedience
was not used. (One arrest in the U.S. Senate was not reported
on and accomplished nothing.)
Why are there no sit-ins today? Why is nobody going to jail for
justice? Why is our culture not in upheaval over the injustices
of our laws and practices? Surely it is not because we live in
a time lacking in injustice. The illegal aggression against Iraq – and
the use of napalm and depleted uranium there – cries out for civil
unrest while we snooze or study "issue framing" or work
on our graduate degrees. The attacks on our civil rights by the
Justice Department, the drastic shifting of wealth and power to
a tiny corporate elite, the lowering of wages and increasing of
work hours, and the virtual elimination of any real right to organize
a union – these things scream at us to sacrifice, to lay our lives
down as those before us did to make a better world. But we can't
be bothered, we wouldn't want people to look at us funny. After
all, the television tells us things are looking up. And yet the
confinement of a whole generation behind bars and under the gaze
of a prison industry, the heedless destruction of our environment,
and ever-new forms of discrimination – these things leave a bitter
taste in our mouths, which we cover with soda or beer. Maybe we
sign a petition on a website just to make sure we're doing our
part. Maybe we push a button on a screen to vote for a candidate
and count on the computer to count our vote.
Jim Forman did not wait for the Democratic
Party to set an agenda. He
gave us a model of aggressive and militant action based on principles
of equality, social justice, and non-violence. Toward the late
sixties he grew more accepting of the idea of violent struggle,
and in doing so I believe he was horribly wrong. But what he showed
us through the early and mid sixties was aggressive non-violent
organizing. He organized, meaning he reached out to people, figured
out what they would fight for, inspired them to fight for it, coordinated
their work, found the resources to pay them for it, communicated
their work to the world, and bailed them out of jail. One of the
reasons Forman is not better known is that he actively sought to
avoid stardom, and one of the reasons he did so was that he wanted
to develop many leaders in a grassroots movement. Many of those
he mentored are still leaders today. Several, including Julian
Bond whom Forman made his communications person at SNCC, have spoken
fondly of Forman in the past week.
Bond has said that, according to the publisher,
he is the only professor who teaches a course using Forman's "The
Making of Black Revolutionaries," a 553-page book that gives
a first person account including Forman's childhood but focusing
on his
years at SNCC. The book ends in 1969 and was published in 1972. There
is probably no better book to read if you have an interest in organizing
a social movement. Forman wrote for the sake of educating those
who came next. He wrote what worked and what didn't, where he
thinks he went wrong, and where he thinks his friends and colleagues
went wrong or betrayed him. All the infighting and rivalries and
comically bad blunders that we see in organizations today were
right there in SNCC, and there is much to learn from an account
of them. SNCC did not accomplish what it did because it was free
of problems, but because it was a movement. What we have today
are merely organizations or ethical careers and hobbies, and that
goes for the "labor movement" too – it's not a movement. If
it wants to become one between now and the AFL-CIO's 50th Anniversary
Convention this July in Chicago, it would do well to study the
making of black revolutionaries.
The labor movement has improved in some ways
since the days in which Walter Reuther was a force against which
the Civil Rights
movement had to push, the days when labor leaders viewed Jim Forman
as a communist, something far worse than a racist. On Labor Day
weekend 1967, Forman addressed the National Conference for a New
Politics convention in Chicago. In the middle of this speech,
he said:
"There are more than 15,000 American white
Nationals in South Africa and millions of U.S. dollars invested
in plants there. Walter Reuther is supposed to have said that
the goose gets fatter no matter how much they cut off. The weakness
in his analysis is that he fails to realize that General Motors
and most other monopoly concerns in the United States are getting
fat on the lives of black people in Africa and all over the world. For
him and other so-called union leaders to attack the problem of
more wages for some but not all American workers, and to participate
in the slaughter and murder of our people in South Africa, is
in fact for them to make themselves enemies of the people…."
Forman's criticism of Reuther (as well as
the decline of the labor movement!) had begun at least as early
as the 1956 Democratic
National Convention in Chicago, and he credited his learning
experience there with the aggressive position he took at the
1964 convention. In 1956 the newly formed Leadership Conference
on Civil Rights wanted to get a strong civil rights plank into
the platform and thought they could do so if it were brought
to a vote on the floor. Reuther said that labor delegates would
make enough noise to demand a roll-call vote on the resolution. But
they did not. There was nothing but silence, and the platform
was approved with a weak position on civil rights, but without
a fight over a tough civil rights stance.
"I thought," wrote Forman, "of the trick that
had been played on the blacks across the country who could not
see what I saw or hear what I heard. What a fake the entire
platform hearings must be, I thought. They probably had the
resolution already written in the National Committee meeting. They
had the hearings only as a pretense of democratic procedure,
to let people talk. I learned and I remembered."
In 1964, when African-Americans from Mississippi
sent their own delegation to the DNC in Atlantic City, various
leaders spoke
to them and urged them to back down and agree to recognize the
party's official delegates, who had been elected in a process
that excluded blacks. Those urging this compromise, which would
have given the blacks two seats, included Jack Pratt of the National
Council of Churches; Bayard Rustin, the great organizer of the
March on Washington; Joseph Rauh, general council for the UAW,
whom Reuther had threatened to fire if there was a floor fight;
and King. But Bob Moses and Forman, both of SNCC, urged the
delegates to stand firm. And they did so.
"Five years of struggle," Forman later wrote, "had
radically changed the thought processes of many people, changed
them from idealistic reformers to fulltime revolutionaries. And
the change had come through direct experience." And in
the next four years, blacks in Mississippi substantially gained
the right to vote. At the convention of the NAACP in 1966, by
which time Forman and others had started shouting "Black
Power!", Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his support
for racial integration, the first time a president or vice president
had straightforwardly done so.
But did we learn anything? The DNC platform committee meeting
in 2004, chaired by a black woman, strung anti-war activists
along for days before tossing them a half an incoherent sentence
in the platform. And they accepted it. And anti-war delegates
at the convention in Boston kept their mouths shut. Their candidate
lost, and the war continues. Did we learn anything? Should
we not, sometimes, borrow an acronym from the right and ask WWJD,
but use the J for Jim?
What Forman learned is encapsulated in the
quote at the top of this article. Assistance from the wealthy and powerful is
all well and good, but it cannot be counted on. It will not
spread into a movement. It will not hold fast when the going
gets rough. A poor people's movement must be controlled by poor
people. This lesson was taught by Gandhi and others,
and it is a lesson that community organizations like ACORN attempt
to build on. But we are back in the 1950s now in terms of the
work that it takes to build a movement. Our 1960s will not come
until the 2010s, and won't come even then if we don't demand
it now and organize for it now and dedicate our lives to it now.
Demand what? The right to vote, the right
to health care, the right to publicly funded elections, the
right to a living wage,
the right to organize a union, the right to democratic media,
and the right to trade and environmental policies created of,
by, and for the people.
We're up against a well-funded and trained
opposition. And
we're up against an even less democratic media than existed in
the 1960s. Forman understood the power of the press. He had
been a reporter for the Chicago Defender. He became the press
agent for SNCC. When news was not covered locally, he would
arrange for a friendly subscriber to the AP or UPI wire service
to request a story. And he understood the need to produce your
own media. He brought on Julian Bond to publish a newsletter,
and he insisted on having the news reported from everywhere SNCC
worked. Forman endlessly demanded that his staff document their
work. In his own words:
"I felt very strongly about the importance
of field staff sending in frequent and detailed reports on their
activities – so strongly that at one point, we in the Atlanta
office took the position of 'no field report, no subsistence
check.' The point was not to burden the already overworked field
secretaries with another task but to strengthen our network of
communications."
Forman smuggled out of the South film of
a police dog attacking, and he surprised people when, in the
middle of delivering an
outraged response to a sudden injustice, he could simultaneously
make sure that press photographers were able to get a good picture,
not of him, but of the scene. He knew the value of mass communications. His
speeches included recommendations to copy the transcript and
publish it in local newsletters. He was an incessant organizer. And
in 1969, among the expenses for which he and others demanded
money in "The Black Manifesto" were: "four major
publishing and printing enterprises for black people," and "four
television networks to provide an alternative to racist and capitalistic
propaganda."
But if Forman understood the media so well,
why isn't he better known today? Why did coverage of his death appear as nothing
beside the sanctification of Ronald Reagan on all channels all
the time? One reason may be that we have been losing the battle
for better media all these years. Another important reason is
simply that he was not killed. He might be as well known as
Malcolm X today, if not King, had he been assassinated. In addition,
as noted above, he tried not to become the focus.
But there are a number of other reasons,
I think, that Forman is not better known. One reason is that he did not often compromise
with those in power, nor did he compromise his rhetoric. He
spoke against capitalism and for revolution. He did not always
speak strictly for nonviolence. He shouted for Black Power,
not only for integration. And he was impolite. At a United
Nations Conference in Africa in the summer of 1967, as Newark
and Detroit exploded, he read remarks prepared by himself and
others in SNCC, which included:
"Our brothers and sisters are dying in
the streets of the United States as we utter these words. They
are engaged in rebellions and revolts against white people who
have denied them their liberty and exploited our labor for centuries. Yet
the United States representatives sit at this conference and
talk about freedom blowing in the wind. There is indeed something
blowing in the wind, Mr. Chairman. It is blowing all over the
world and it is a determination by the oppressed black, brown,
and colored people who form a world majority that the day of
the white man exploiting all of us is over."
Forman's impoliteness extended to outspoken
opposition to Israel's policies toward Palestinians. In 1969 he carried impoliteness
so far as to disrupt a service at Riverside Church in New York
to demand that white churches pay $500 million in reparations
to African-Americans. If the movement for reparations ever succeeds,
Forman may be honored as one of its pioneers. Until then, he's
known – where he's known at all – as someone who pushed for a
change that has not yet come (and must therefore be ridiculed
or attacked). We forget how many things he pushed for that are
now taken for granted.
In addition, Forman did not appeal to Americans'
religiosity. "This
God was supposed to be just," he wrote of his early thinking
about religion, "yet we black people had to pray and pray
and hope that justice would come to us one day. This seemed
too slow to me. The myth of whites getting their just deserts
in hell while we finally got rewarded in heaven was responsible
for much of the apathy of black people, I thought."
And later: "When a people who are poor, suffering with
disease and sickness, accept the fact that God has ordained for
them to be this way – then they will never do anything about
their human condition. In other words, the belief in a supreme
being or God weakens the will of a people to change conditions
themselves."
That's not the kind of talk that will endear
you to religious Americans. But I believe it is correct and of immense importance. And
I believe more people know it than have the strength of character
to say it out loud.
Forman did not have all the answers, and
he faults himself plenty even in his own reporting on events
of the 60s. But he never
lacked the nerve to speak the ugly truth. And because he didn't,
others were able to face it and to believe they could change
it. That he developed leaders rather than acting as a public
face for the movement should allow us to recognize him as a great
leader indeed. The things he fought for and the words he spoke
are part of our culture now. When we say "One Man, One
Vote" or "One Person, One Vote," we are quoting
Jim Forman. When we talk of an Ohio Freedom Winter or an Immigrant
Workers Freedom Ride, we are echoing the work Forman did putting
organizers across the South and black and white activists, himself
included, on buses in the face of beatings.
But, like ancient customs that pretend to
reenact once deadly rituals, our activism has become in many
ways a charade. We
imitate the great ones, even as we forget them. We ride busses
around the country and give our bus rides grand titles, when
the problems we face have nothing whatsoever to do with the freedom
to ride buses.
We must return to the place of "The Making of Black Revolutionaries" and
recognize that SNCC was a small group of activists, just like
we are, but that their dedication built a massive movement. Jim
Forman died last week a man who had made this world a better
place. May his example live on.
David Swanson served for three years as communications coordinator
for the community organization ACORN and
now serves as media coordinator for the International
Labor Communications Association.
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