By George E. Curry | SACOBSERVER.COM WIRE SERVICES

When I learned about the death of Jim Forman, the former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, it brought back many memories. I spent the summer of 1966 working for SNCC in Atlanta. At the time, I was 19 years old and stood in awe of the young warriors who were on the cutting edge of the Civil Rights Movement.

To this day, I can’t think of better examples of bravery. In no way do I mean to minimize or denigrate the contributions of soldiers that go off to war. Of course, they are brave. But they are trained for war and know about the impending danger. Unlike professional soldiers, unarmed civil rights warriors put their lives on the line without being backed up by heavy weapons, troops, planes and ships. SNCC workers went to war armed only with hope, determination and a burning sense of justice.

Forman, always dressed in overalls and often puffing on a pipe, was the resident sage of SNCC. He remained dedicated to human rights until cancer got the best of him at the age of 76. A shrewd tactician, in 1969 Forman dramatically interrupted a communion service at Riverside Church in New York to demand $500 million in reparations from White churches and synagogues as part of a “Black Manifesto.”

Forman was more comfortable serving in the background of an organization brimming with youthful talent: John Lewis, the future congressman; Julian Bond, now board chair of the NAACP; Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture; Charlie Cobb, Willie Ricks, Bill Mahoney, William Porter and so many others that I got a chance to meet and study. I remember being captivated by the stories they would tell upon returning from the field to SNCC’s headquarters in Atlanta.

One of Forman’s books, “The Making of Black Revolutionaries,” first published in 1972, captures both the danger and excitement of the 1960s. The lives of activists were threatened on a daily basis because they threatened the status quo in the Deep South.

Forman writes, “In Dallas County, only 130 Black people were registered to vote out of an eligible 15,115, according to a 1961 Civil Rights Commission Report. Adjoining Wilcox County had never had a Black voter, although its population was 78 percent black. Lowndes County, which also borders Dallas and also had a huge black majority, had never had a registered black person either. That was the way things had been for almost seventy years and that was the way whites intended them to stay.”

But SNCC had other ideas. And though Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, received most of the credit and news coverage, SNCC had been working in many rural communities long before King showed up on the scene.

And that wasn’t easy.

“Sam Block (a SNCC organizer in Mississippi) would eventually receive a severe beating from three whites, which fractured his ribs and put him in bed for a week,” Forman writes. “Yet, in some ways the physical danger and violence seemed no worse to the SNCC workers than the loneliness and other psychological strains.

“’People would just get afraid of me,’ Sam reported. ‘They said, ‘He’s a Freedom Rider.’ Women told their daughters, don’t have anything to do with me, that I couldn’t carry (take) them out because I was a Freedom Rider. I was there to stir up trouble, that’s all. So when I walked down the street, people would say, ‘There’s the Freedom Rider. Look at him.’ They’d say, “Ain’t that the Freedom Rider?’ ‘Yeah, that’s him.’…”
Being ostracized by African Americans paled when compared to the violence of that era.

“…Herbert Lee was killed,” writes Forman. “Herbert Lee of Liberty [Miss.], Black, age fifty-two, father of ten children, active in the NAACP and then in the voter registration project, was killed with a .38 pistol by Eugene Hurst, white, a state representative. Hurst was never arrested, booked, or charged. A coroner’s inquest ruled that the killing was in self-defense and he walked out free forever.”

But the killings didn’t stop there.

Foreman continues, “Three years later, on January 31, 1964, Lewis Allen, one of the key witnesses in the killing of Herbert Lee, was planning to leave Mississippi the next morning and look for work in Wisconsin. That night they found him dead in his front yard. He had been shot with a shotgun three times.”

That’s the environment in which Jim Foreman chose to work. And because of his work, and that of others, we’re now far removed, to a large extent, from that kind of brazen bestiality.

George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service and BlackPressUSA.com. His most recent book is “The Best of Emerge Magazine,” an anthology published by Ballantine Books. Curry’s weekly radio commentary is syndicated by Capitol Radio News Service (301/588-1993). He can be reached through his Web site, georgecurry.com.