James Forman

James Rufus Forman was born on October 4, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois. His mother was Octavia Allen Forman, and his biological father was Jackson Forman, a cab driver whose surname James did not learn was his own until his teenage years, when he came upon his birth certificate and discovered that the man he had known — John Rufus — was in fact his stepfather. As an infant he was sent to live with his grandmother on her farm in Marshall County, Mississippi, returning to Chicago's South Side around the age of six, where he attended Catholic school and later graduated with honors from Englewood High School.

After service in the U.S. Air Force and study at Roosevelt University and elsewhere, Forman turned toward the freedom struggle then rising across the South. In 1961 he became executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a post he held until 1966. Older and more seasoned than many of the young organizers around him, he built SNCC from a loose student network into a disciplined organization — handling fundraising, records, and logistics while lending his body and counsel to the Freedom Rides, the Mississippi voter-registration drives, and the Selma to Montgomery marches.

In 1969 Forman delivered the Black Manifesto at the National Black Economic Development Conference and dramatically at New York's Riverside Church, demanding reparations from white churches and synagogues for the injustices borne by Black Americans. In later years he taught, earned advanced degrees, and set his life's testimony to paper in The Making of Black Revolutionaries, alongside Self Determination and other writings. He died in Washington, D.C., on January 10, 2005.

We honor James Forman — the steady architect of a movement, who bore the unglamorous labor of freedom so that a people might stand.