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The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, on November 17, 1961. Local activists, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were all involved in the movement. The movement was led by William G. Anderson, a local black Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. In December 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became involved.

The Albany Movement mobilized thousands of citizens and attracted nationwide attention but failed to accomplish its goals because of a determined opposition. However, it was credited as a key lesson in strategy and tactics for the national civil rights movement.^[1]

Campaign[link]

Voter registration drives, petitions, and other civil rights related activity had been ongoing in Albany for decades. However, a new phase of the campaign began with the arrival of three young SNCC activists, Charles Sherrod, Cordell Reagon, and Charles Jones. The three helped encourage and coordinate black activism in the city, culminating in the founding of the Albany Movement as a formal coalition.^{[2][dead link]} It quickly became a broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect of segregation within the city. Bus stations, libraries, and lunch counters reserved for White Americans were occupied by African Americans, boycotts were launched, and hundreds of protesters marched on City Hall.

The Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, carefully studied the movement's strategy and developed a strategy he hoped could subvert it. He used mass arrests but avoided the kind of dramatic, violent incidents that might backfire by attracting national publicity. Pritchett arranged to disperse the prisoners to county jails all over southwest Georgia to prevent his jail from filling up. The Birmingham Post-Herald stated that "The manner in which Albany's chief of police has enforced the law and maintained order has won the admiration of... thousands."^[3]

Dr. King's involvement[link]

Prior to the campaign, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been criticized by the SNCC, who felt he had not fully supported the freedom rides of that summer. Some SNCC activists had even given King the derisive nickname "De Lawd" for maintaining a safe distance from challenges to the Jim Crow laws.^[4] When King first visited on December 15, 1961, he "had planned to stay a day or so and return home after giving counsel."^[5] But the following day he was swept up in a mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions. "Those agreements", said King, "were dishonored and violated by the city," as soon as he left town.^[6]

King returned in July 1962, and was sentenced to forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine. He chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Chief Pritchett discreetly arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail."^[7]

After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the movement began to deteriorate. During one demonstration, black youth hurled rocks and bottles at Albany police. King requested a halt to all demonstrations and a "Day of Penance" to promote non-violence and maintain the moral high ground. Later in July, King was again arrested and held for two weeks. Following his release, King left town.

Legacy[link]

King and much of the national civil rights movement regarded the Albany campaign as a limited success, won at perhaps too high a cost. Despite the mobilization of virtually the entire black community in Albany, few concessions were achieved from the city government. Divisions between radical and moderate blacks were beginning to tell, and the black community seemed to be tiring faster than the city. After Albany, King decided on more tightly focused activism aimed at scoring specific, symbolic victories. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference moved on to cities like Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, where local police took a much harder line and created violent incidents which brought attention and sympathy to the cause.

Historian Howard Zinn, who played a role in the Albany movement, contested this interpretation in chapter 4 of his autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 1994; new ed. 2002): "That always seemed to me a superficial assessment, a mistake often made in evaluating protest movements. Social movements may have many 'defeats'—failing to achieve objectives in the short run—but in the course of the struggle the strength of the old order begins to erode, the minds of people begin to change; the protesters are momentarily defeated but not crushed, and have been lifted, heartened, by their ability to fight back" (p. 54).

Local activism continued even as national attention shifted to other issues. That fall an African-American came close to being elected to city council. Next spring, the city struck all the segregation ordnances from its books. According to Charles Sherrod, "I can’t help how Dr. King might have felt, or ... any of the rest of them in SCLC, NAACP, CORE, any of the groups, but as far as we were concerned, things moved on. We didn’t skip one beat." In 1976, he was elected a city commissioner.

Later referring to the setbacks of The Albany Movement in his autobiography, King had this to say:

The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale ... When we planned our strategy for Birmingham months later, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying to learn from its errors. Our appraisals not only helped to make our subsequent tactics more effective, but revealed that Albany was far from an unqualified failure.^[8]

African American portal

What happened[link]

Charles Sherod had taken on the repressive regime in Southwest Georgia. (Riches 1997:67) Sherod had taken it upon himself to organize a rally with African Americans and students of the Albany State College in Albany Georgia.(Riches 2004:67) In his attempts to bypass the older black leaders of the NAACP and remove the SNCC organizers at the university.(Riches 2004:67)Sherod had failed in his attempts despite the support he had gained from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy Ralph Abernathy. Although the rallies themselves had failed, the Albany movement provided insight on the media and its relation with white supremacists. The Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett had reported to the media that he had defeated nonviolent actions with nonviolence and in return the press provided Pritchett with details of what was planned and who the targets were during the Albany movement, which then caused great distrust among the students and the press.^[9] Although publicity was needed, the distrust everyone who was involved in the rallies felt towards the media could not go unheard. Journalists and the media were banned from mass meetings and conferences.(Riches 2004:68)

Notes[link]

• Terrence Martin Riches,William The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resisitance, Palgrave Mcmillan, 2004, pages 67–68

"You Got To Move" a 1985 documentary about the Highlander Folk School has good footage of the Albany movement, with clips of Charles Sherrod, interviews with Berniece Johnson Reagon, and demonstrators singing Freedom songs.

External links[link]

• The Albany Movement (New Georgia Encyclopedia entry)
• Albany GA, Movement ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
• Interview with Chief Laurie Pritchett ~ A transcript of an interview about the Albany Movement
• Oral History Interview with Laurie Pritchett from Oral Histories of the American South

James Forman (October 4, 1928 — January 10, 2005) was an American Civil Rights leader active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the International Black Workers Congress. He was also the author of several notable books.

Activism within the SNCC[link]

In 1961, Forman joined and became the executive secretary of the then newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. From 1961 to 1965 Forman, a decade older and more experienced than most of the other members of SNCC, became responsible for providing organizational support to the young, loosely affiliated activists by paying bills, radically expanding the institutional staff and planning the logistics for programs. Under the leadership of Forman and others, SNCC became an important political player at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. ^[1]

In 1964, Forman, expressing his frustration with the gradualist approach of some Civil Rights leaders, made one of his best known quips: "If we can't sit at the table [of democracy], let's knock the fucking legs off!" ^[2]

Post-SNCC work[link]

After being replaced by Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson as executive secretary, Forman remained close to the leadership of SNCC helping to negotiate the ill-fated "merger" of SNCC and the Black Panther Party in 1967 and even briefly taking a leadership position within the Panthers. ^[3] In 1969, after the failure of the merger and the decline of SNCC as an effective political organization, Forman began associating with other Black political radical groups. In Detroit he participated in the Black Economic Development Conference, where his "Black Manifesto" was adopted. He also founded a nonprofit organization called the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee. ^[4]

As a part of his Black Manifesto, on a Sunday morning in May, 1969, Forman interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries. Although Riverside's preaching minister, the Rev. Ernest T. Campbell, termed the demands "exorbitant and fanciful," he was in sympathy with the impulse, if not the tactic. Later, the church agreed to donate a fixed percentage of its annual income to anti-poverty efforts.^[1]

On May 30, 1969 Forman made plans to pursue a similar course at a Jewish Synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York. Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, showed up carrying chains and clubs promising to confront Forman if he attempted to enter the synagogue. Kahane and the JDL forewarned Forman and the public about their intended actions and Forman never showed up at the Synagogue. ^[1]

Later life[link]

During the 1970s and 1980s, Forman completed graduate work at Cornell University in African and African-American Studies and in 1982, he received a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies.^[1]

James Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing Black and disenfranchised people around issues of progressive economic and social development and equality. He also taught at American University in Washington, DC. He wrote several books documenting his experiences within the movement and his evolving political philosophy including "Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement" (1969), "The Making of Black Revolutionaries" (1972 and 1997) and "Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People" (1984).^[1]

He died on January 10, 2005 of colon cancer, aged 76, at the Washington House, a hospice in Washington, DC.^[1]

Family[link]

Forman's marriages to Mary Forman and Mildred Thompson ended in divorce. He was married to Mildred Thompson Forman (now Mildred Page) from 1959 to 1965, during the most active period of SNCC. Mildred Forman moved to Atlanta with James and worked at the Atlanta SNCC office as well as working as coordinator for tours of the SNCC Freedom Singers.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Forman lived with Constancia ("Dinky") Romilly, the second and only surviving child of the British-born journalist, anti-fascist activist and aristocrat, the Hon. Jessica Mitford, and her first husband, Esmond Romilly, who was a nephew-by-marriage of Sir Winston Churchill. Though obituaries and other posthumous articles about Forman have stated that he and Romilly were married, correspondence between Romilly's mother and aunts state that the couple were not legally husband and wife.^[5]

Forman and Romilly (who later became an emergency-room nurse and married, in 1980, schoolteacher Edwin "Terry" Weber) had two sons:

• James Robert Lumumba Forman (born 1967 and uses the name James Forman Jr. to differentiate him from his father), a professor at Yale Law School[5]
• Chaka Esmond Fanon Forman (born 1970), an actor

Atheism[link]

In one of his books "The Making Of Black Revolutionaries" Foreman devoted an entire chapter to explaining his disbelief in God and his distaste for "religious crap".^[6][7] He also received the African American Humanist Award in 1994.

References[link]

94, Open Hand Publishing Inc., Seattle, (ISBN 0-940880-42-3)

External links[link]

• Washington Post Obituary
• Spartacus
• Stanford University
• James Forman's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• "Letters on the Arab-Israeli Dispute in James Forman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries"