James Forman 1928-2005: Civil Rights Pioneer Dies At 76

Civil rights organizer James Forman has died at the age of 76. In the early 1960s he served as executive secretary of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was seen as a major strategist within the civil rights movement. He helped plan the 1963 March on Washington and organized Freedom Summer in 1964.

While registering voters and organizing protests in the South he was repeatedly harassed, beaten and jailed. He once wrote "Accumulating experiences with Southern 'law and order' were turning me into a full-fledged revolutionary."

After leaving SNCC, he temporarily moved to Africa and became one of the first to call for reparations to pay to African Americans. He made reparations an issue in May 1969 when he interrupted a Sunday church service at New York's Riverside Church. He demanded white churches pay $500 million in reparations.

Also in 1969, he helped organize the Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit, where a "Black Manifesto" was adopted. In 1972 Forman published his best-known book "The Making of Black Revolutionaries."

He continued his activism until this year. In July he traveled to Boston during the Democratic National Convention to take part in a protest organized by the D.C. Democratic delegation to call for statehood.

* Robert Moses,former field secretary for SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. In 1964, he organized Freedom Summer in Mississippi. He joins us on the phone from Jackson Mississippi where he now runs a math literacy project called The Algebra Project.
* Rep. John Lewis, (D-GA).
* James Forman, excerpt of his speech, "The Dynamics of the Black Manifesto" at the University of Pennsylvania, October 1969.

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