Let’s time travel back to the early 1950s. Of course, many of you weren’t even born yet, but as humanists we can make use of our “pretend” apparatus to try to understand and empathize with various human experiences:
You’re a young man who’s graduated from high school with honors, and you’ve served with the Air Force during the Korean War. Since 1952 you’ve also been a political science student at the University of Southern California. _It is now 1953 and you’re in your second semester, studying for five hours straight at USC’s Doheny Library. At around eight that evening you take a break, grabbing a book entitled Love and Hate by psychiatrist Karl Menninger, and you – a black man in a white community _– go stand outside the library for a while looking at the stars. Two Los Angeles police officers drive up and start to taunt and insult you, accusing you of looking suspiciously like a robbery suspect. They _deny you the right to a phone call, take you to the main jail downtown, throw you into _a cell, and beat you up when you ask to go to the toilet. They torture and interrogate you, but you have been falsely accused and refuse to give them the confession they want. They give up after three days and _proceed to dump you, without money and without a means to get home, outside the jail.
This travesty of justice happened to James Forman who, as executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), became a leading figure in the 1960s civil rights movement. Forman’s incident with police brutality took place 11 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and nearly 40 years before an amateur videographer captured Los Angeles police beating Rodney King nearly to death in 1991. But the funeral dirges reverberating on this theme in post-civil rights America over half a century later still have not stopped playing.
Despite the ongoing conservative backlash, the good news for humanists is that much social progress has continued to flow out of the civil rights movement. However, with America’s economic inequality, the heavily racialized mass incarceration rates, the rise of educational apartheid, the rise of white nationalist hate groups and the persistence of racial injustice, are the good intentions of humanists enough?
How We Met
It was through my good friend, P. Anna Johnson, that I became acquainted with Dr. Forman for the last 15 years of his life. Anna operated Open Hand Publishing, which focused on publishing books by people of color at a time when corporate publishing houses saw no market for books promoting cultural diversity.
One of Open Hand’s books to which Anna had gotten rights was The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Forman’s autobiography and personal account of the civil rights movement. Originally published in 1972, the New York Times called it “A searing, jolting document that will leave the reader full of that savage indignation that tears the heart.” In one chapter of the book Forman explained his disbelief in God, which I found intriguing given the conventional image I had of the civil rights leaders, excepting A. Philip Randolph (who led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first largely African American labor union) and James Farmer (who headed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)), both of whom in 1973 were among the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II, written by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson. Not long after I made an off-hand remark to Anna about how I would love to write an article about Forman, I felt so honored when he called me. In 1991I did write that piece about Forman, which was published in the AAH Examiner, the journal of African Americans for Humanism, then edited by Norm R. Allen Jr., former editor of The Human Prospect.
When Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film “Selma” came out, I was curious to see how it would depict Forman. After I saw the movie I wrote an email to Anna, who had known him since 1958, telling her of my disappointment in seeing the James Forman portrayed in the movie nothing like the James Forman I remembered. Anna agreed and then some:
The depiction of Jim, and of the role SNCC played in that movie, was deplorable and totally inaccurate. SNCC had been working on voter registration for 3 years prior to King’s arrival there, and it was SNCC that did the groundwork for voter registration in Selma. In the movie, Jim was made to look like a young fool. In fact, he was older than King. Chaka [Forman] was consulted prior to the movie being made, and his suggestions were disregarded.
Forman’s Far-Reaching Family
For most of his adult life Forman had friends from widespread backgrounds and ethnicities. He fathered two sons, Chaka and James Jr., with his common-law wife, Constancia Romilly, whose father Esmond Romilly was a nephew-by-marriage to Winston Churchill. I knew aboutConstancia, as she was mentioned in his autobiography. What I didn’t know in the mid-1990s was revealed when my husband, Patrick Inniss, and I had brunch with Forman. He arrived to Seattle after visiting his mother-in-law in California. When our conversation touched on the 1963 bestseller exposé of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, it suddenly dawned on me that the book’s author, Jessica Mitford, was indeed the “mother-in-law” whom Forman had just visited.
Jessica Mitford, one of the six notorious “Mitford Sisters,” was married to Robert Treuhaft, whose law firm Treuhaft, Walker, and Bernstein, based out of Oakland, California, in 1964 represented the more than 700 students arrested during the two-day Free Speech Movement sit-in at the University of California in Berkeley. Treuhaft’s firm also represented the Black Panther Party, anti-Vietnam war protesters, and well as SNCC and CORE. One could make a strong case that Treuhaft, Walker, and Bernstein was one of the preeminent radical left-wing law firms of the day.
In the summer of 1971 a student from Yale Law School interned with Treuhaft, Walker, and Bernstein. Her name was Hillary Rodham.
James Forman, Secular Humanist
In his autobiography Forman wrote of how in his childhood he became suspicious of a certain preacher:
We ourselves raised a few chickens, but they always seemed to be saved for the preacher who came quite often to our house to eat. Mama Jane, as I always called my grandmother, would not let us three children sit with the preacher at dinner; we ate afterward when the grown-ups and the preacher had finished. The preacher always ate plenty of the chicken. We got chicken feet, hard, fried chicken feet whenever the preacher came for dinner.
In Chapter 11 of his autobiography, “God is Dead: A Question of Power,” Forman relates what happened to him around the time he entered Chicago’s Roosevelt University in the fall of 1954.
The next six years of my life were a time of ideas. A time when things were germinating and changing in me. A time of deciding what I would do with my life. It was also a time in which I rid myself, once and for all, of the greatest disorder that cluttered my mind – the belief in God or any type of supreme being.
[…]
I reached the point of rejecting God out of personal experience and observations....
Dedicated to fighting oppression, Forman challenged not only ancient gods but ancient hierarchies. At the 1994 Free Inquiry Convention in Orlando, Florida, James Forman received the African American Humanist of the Year award.
The following words, written by former SNCC Mike Miller for James Forman’s memorial service in Washington, DC on February 5, 2005, struck a deep chord with me. Yes, this is was the very essence of the man:
As with other of SNCC's more visible people, Jim was called on to make national fundraising tours. I arranged those in Northern California. At a house party at the home of a very well-to-do white family, Jim and I sat down with about 20 other mostly-white couples for dinner – before he would talk and the host would make a pitch for contributions.
We went around the table, and introductions seemed to have been properly made when Jim, before anything else could happen, got up, put his hand out toward one of the Black wait staff, and said, "Hello, my name is Jim Forman." I think if she'd been carrying a serving tray she would have dropped it! Luckily, we didn't have to find out. After a moment's hesitation, she responded. Jim did the same with the rest of the people serving and preparing our meal. That was Jim's egalitarianism par excellence.
But here's what's especially important to me. Jim did that in a way that didn't embarrass his host and hostess or any other of the guests at the dinner. Nothing in what he did was a put-down of anybody else. It was simply an affirmation of who he was and what he stood for – and, because of that, an affirmation that could get others to look at how they viewed people whose color, status or whatever was different from their own.
SNCC tried to be like that: living what it thought was the way the world should be. Some of us in SNCC did better at that than others. Jim was among the best.
During the course of his life Forman witnessed the lamentable depths of inhumanity few of us shall ever know. Yet what I remember most about him was his soft smile when he would tell me stories of civil rights victories and say, “It was a beautiful thing.”
Sources
James Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries (Open Hand Publishing, Inc., 1985).
Personal Email Correspondence from P. Anna Johnson to Olga Bourlin (January 27, 2016)
http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/social-sciences-and-law/social-reformers/james-forman