James Forman Papers [Finding Aid]. Library of Congress
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Locking up Our Own: James Forman Jr. in Conversation with Khalil Gibran Muhammad"
TRANSCRIPT "LOCKING UP OUR OWN: JAMES FORMAN JR. IN CONVERSATION WITH KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD" A conversation with James Forman, Jr. and Khalil Gibran Muhammad Introduction: Leonard Noisette Recorded May 8, 2017 ANNOUNCER: You are listening to a recording of the Open Society Foundations, working to build vibrant and tolerant democracies worldwide. Visit us at OpenSocietyFoundations.org. LEONARD NOISETTE: Good afternoon. Thanks to the Open Society fellowship program for pulling this event together. And thank you all for joining us. I'm Lenny Noisette. I oversee the criminal justice portfolio here in U.S. programs as-- as part of the Open Society Foundations. So I am particularly pleased to be able to kick off what I am sure will be an engaging and informative discussion with James Forman and Khalil-Gibran Muhammad about James's compelling new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Just by way of instruction, James Forman Jr. is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He is a graduate of-- At-- Atlanta's Roosevelt High School, Brown University, and Yale Law School. And was a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court. After clerking, James joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D-- D.C., where for six years he represented both youth and adults charged with crimes. During his time as a public defender, James became frustrated with the lack of TRANSCRIPT: LOCKING UP OUR OWN: JAMES FORMAN JR. -
The Making.Indd
PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTARIES: The Making of “We’ll Never Turn Back” (1963) and “Dream Deferred” (1964) by Harvey Richards Written by Paul Richards, Ph.D. Photos by Harvey Richards In 1963 and 1964, my father, Harvey Richards, made two fi lms about the voter registration drives in Mississippi as part of the movement to end racial segregation in the United States. The fi lms are “We’ll Never Turn Back” (1963) and “Dream Deferred” (1964). They were a collaboration be- tween Harvey and Amzie Moore, a Cleveland, Mississippi resident and long time civil rights activist, designed to help organize and raise funds for the Student Non Violent Coor- dinating Committee (SNCC). The following is the story of how these fi lms were made. Late one February night in 1963, Harvey Richards drove his Oldsmobile station wagon full of sound and camera equip- ment, sporting a California license plate, up to the front door of Amzie Moore’s house in Cleveland, Mississippi. Cleve- land, Mississippi is a small delta town in the northern part of the state, about half a day’s drive from New Orleans, Loui- Harvey Richards (baseball cap) meeting with Amzie Moore (white overcoat) and (left to right) E.W.Steptoe, Bob Moses and unidentifi ed man. siana, where Harvey had spent the previous night. Amzie Moore opened his door and the two men, both 51 years old, met for the fi rst time. Harvey was around 6 foot tall, trim at 180 pounds, dressed in a warm canvas jacket and kaiki baseball cap. Amzie dressed in a plaid shirt and worn kaki pants, looked out his front door at this unannounced white stranger. -
Stokely Carmichael______Toward Black Liberation the Massachusetts Review
National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox The Making of African American Identity: Vol. III, 1917-1968 Getty Images Stokely Carmichael_______ Toward Black Liberation The Massachusetts Review Autumn 1966____Excerpt* Stokely Carmichael came to the U.S. from Trinidad as a child in 1952, In 1966 he became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Later he became a leader of the Black Panther Party. Traditionally, for each new ethnic group, the route Stokely Carmichael, 1973 to social and political integration into America’s pluralistic society, has been through the organization of their own institutions with which to represent their communal needs within the larger society. This is simply stating what the advocates of Black Power are saying. The strident outcry, particularly from the liberal community, that has been evoked by this proposal can only be understood by examining the historic relationship between Negro and white power in this country. Negroes are defined by two forces, their blackness and their powerlessness. There have been traditionally two communities in America: the white community, which controlled and defined the forms that all institutions within the society would take; and the Negro community, which has been excluded from participation in the power decisions that shaped the society, and has traditionally been dependent upon, and subservient to, the white community. This has not been accidental. The history of every institution of this society indicates that a major concern in the ordering and structuring of the society has been the maintaining of the Negro community in its condition of dependence and oppression. This has not been on the level of individual acts of discrimination between individual whites against individual Negroes, but as total acts by the white community against the Negro community. -
Civil Rights Activism in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, 1960-1963
SUTTELL, BRIAN WILLIAM, Ph.D. Campus to Counter: Civil Rights Activism in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, 1960-1963. (2017) Directed by Dr. Charles C. Bolton. 296 pp. This work investigates civil rights activism in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, in the early 1960s, especially among students at Shaw University, Saint Augustine’s College (Saint Augustine’s University today), and North Carolina College at Durham (North Carolina Central University today). Their significance in challenging traditional practices in regard to race relations has been underrepresented in the historiography of the civil rights movement. Students from these three historically black schools played a crucial role in bringing about the end of segregation in public accommodations and the reduction of discriminatory hiring practices. While student activists often proceeded from campus to the lunch counters to participate in sit-in demonstrations, their actions also represented a counter to businesspersons and politicians who sought to preserve a segregationist view of Tar Heel hospitality. The research presented in this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which ideas of academic freedom gave additional ideological force to the civil rights movement and helped garner support from students and faculty from the “Research Triangle” schools comprised of North Carolina State College (North Carolina State University today), Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Many students from both the “Protest Triangle” (my term for the activists at the three historically black schools) and “Research Triangle” schools viewed efforts by local and state politicians to thwart student participation in sit-ins and other forms of protest as a restriction of their academic freedom. -
Remembering the Struggle for Civil Rights – the Greenwood Sites
rallied a crowd of workers set up shop in a building that stood Union Grove M.B. Church protestors in this park on this site. By 1963, local participation in 615 Saint Charles Street with shouts of “We Civil Rights activities was growing, accel- Union Grove was the first Baptist church in want black power!” erated by the supervisors’ decision to halt Greenwood to open its doors to Civil Rights Change Began Here Greenwood was the commodity distribution. The Congress of activities when it participated in the 1963 midpoint of James Racial Equality (CORE), Council of Federated Primary Election Freedom Vote. Comedian GREENWOOD AND LEFLORE COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI Meredith’s “March Organizations (COFO), Southern Christian and activist Dick Gregory spoke at the church Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson. in the spring of that year as part of his cam- Carmichael and two other marchers had paign to provide food and clothing to those been arrested for pitching tents on a school left in need after Leflore County Supervisors Birth of a Movement campus. By the time they were bailed out, discontinued federal commodities distribution. “In the meetings everything--- more than 600 marchers and local people uncertainty, fear, even desperation--- had gathered in the park, and Carmichael St. Francis Center finds expression, and there is comfort seized the moment to voice the “black 709 Avenue I power” slogan, which fellow SNCC worker This Catholic Church structure served as a and sustenance in talkin‘ ‘bout it.” Willie Ricks had originated. hospital for blacks and a food distribution – Michael Thelwell, SNCC Organizer center in the years before the Civil Rights First SNCC Office Movement. -
Black Panthers Hold Forth at Camoius Pally , Identifies BARBARA AUTHIOR
Eldridge Cleaver FBI File #100-HQ-447251 Section 29 4* -:i-, Assoc. Dir. Dep. AD Adm. LAW OFFICES Dep. AD Iny. WALD, HARKRADER & ROSS Asst. Dir.: Adm. Serv. Ext. Affairs ROBERT L.WALD CARLETON A.HARKRADER WM.WARFIELD ROSS 910 SEVENTEEN THOMAS H. TRUITT ROBERT M. LICHTMAN STEPHEN B.IVESJR. Fin.& Pers. WASHINGTON, DONALD H. GREEN NEAL P. RUTLEDGE GEORGE A. AVERY THOMAS C. MATTHEWS, JR. THOMAS J.SCHWAB JOEL E. HOFFMAN Gen. Inv. (202) 87, TERRY F. LENZNER DANIEL F;O KEEFE,JR, DONALD T. BUCKLIN Ident. JERRY D.ANKER CHARLES C.ABELES ROBERT E. NAGLE CABLE ADORE ALEXANDER W.SIERCK TERRENCE ROCHE MURPHY WILLIAM R.WEISSMAN TELEX: 2 I ntell. STEPHEN M.TRUITT, TONI K.GOLDEN KEITH S.WATSON JAMES DOUGLAS WELCH ROBERT A. SKITOL STEVEN K.YABLONSKI SELMA M. LEVI] THOMAS W. BRUNNER C.COLEMAN BIRD GREER S. GOLDMAN Plan. & In GERALD B. WETLAUFER LEWIS M. POPPER MARK SCHATTNER OF COU Rec. RICHARD A. BROWN AVRUM M. GOLDBERG DENNIS D. CLARK Mgt. PHILIP I DAVID R. BERZ CAROL KINSBOURNE LESLIE S. BRETZ S.& T. Serve. ROBERT B. CORNELL DAVID B. WEINBERG ANTHONY L.YOUNG CHARLES F, ROBERT M.COHAN STEVEN M. GOTTLIEB STEVEN E. SILVERMAN Spec. Inv. NANCY H. HENDRY SHEILA JACKSON LEE + JAMES R. MYERS Training . GLORIA PHARES STEWART RANGELEY WALLACE * ON LEAVE Telephone Rm. Director's Sec'y February 14, 191 DELIVERED BY HAND FBI/DOJ OUTSIDE .,OLE ALL INFOTOTAT: CONTAIN Mr. Clarence M. Kelley HERMIN IS TN b Director DAT 09-11-2( U/P/EL b7C Federal Bureau of Investigation United States Department of Justice Washington, D.C. -
Waveland, Mississippi, November 1964: Death of Sncc, Birth of Radicalism
WAVELAND, MISSISSIPPI, NOVEMBER 1964: DEATH OF SNCC, BIRTH OF RADICALISM University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire: History Department History 489: Research Seminar Professor Robert Gough Professor Selika Ducksworth – Lawton, Cooperating Professor Matthew Pronley University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire May 2008 Abstract: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced Snick) was a nonviolent direct action organization that participated in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. After the Freedom Summer, where hundreds of northern volunteers came to participate in voter registration drives among rural blacks, SNCC underwent internal upheaval. The upheaval was centered on the future direction of SNCC. Several staff meetings occurred in the fall of 1964, none more important than the staff retreat in Waveland, Mississippi, in November. Thirty-seven position papers were written before the retreat in order to reflect upon the question of future direction of the organization; however, along with answers about the future direction, these papers also outlined and foreshadowed future trends in radical thought. Most specifically, these trends include race relations within SNCC, which resulted in the emergence of black self-consciousness and an exodus of hundreds of white activists from SNCC. ii Table of Contents: Abstract ii Historiography 1 Introduction to Civil Rights and SNCC 5 Waveland Retreat 16 Position Papers – Racial Tensions 18 Time after Waveland – SNCC’s New Identity 26 Conclusion 29 Bibliography 32 iii Historiography Research can both answer questions and create them. Initially I discovered SNCC though Taylor Branch’s epic volumes on the Civil Right Movements in the 1960s. Further reading revealed the role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced Snick) in the Civil Right Movement and opened the doors into an effective and controversial organization. -
Book Review the Black Police: Policing Our Own
BOOK REVIEW THE BLACK POLICE: POLICING OUR OWN LOCKING UP OUR OWN: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN BLACK AMERICA. By James Forman Jr. New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. Pp. 306. $27.00. Reviewed by Devon W. Carbado∗ & L. Song Richardson∗∗ INTRODUCTION Since Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014,1 the problem of police violence against African Americans has been a rela- tively salient feature of nationwide discussions about race. Across the ideological spectrum, people have had to engage the question of whether, especially in the context of policing, it’s fair to say that black lives are undervalued. While there is both a racial and a political divide with respect to how Americans have thus far answered that question, the emergence of Black Lives Matter movements2 has made it virtually im- possible to be a bystander in the debate. Separate from whether racialized policing against African Americans is, in fact, a social phenomenon, is the contestable question about solu- tions: Assuming that African Americans are indeed the victims of over- policing, meaning that by some metric they end up having more inter- actions with the police and more violent encounters than is normatively warranted, what can we do about it? And here, the answers range from abolishing police officers altogether, to training them, to diversifying po- lice departments. It is on the last of these proposed solutions — the diversification of police departments — that we focus in this essay. The central question we ask is: What are the dynamics that might shape how African American police officers police other African Americans? Asked another way, what do existing theories about race and race relations, ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ∗ Associate Vice Chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. -
'The Only Position for Women in SNCC Is Prone'
‘The Only Position for Women in SNCC is Prone’ 29 ‘The Only Position for Women in SNCC is Prone’: Stokely Carmichael and the Perceived Patriarchy of Civil Rights Organisations in America 1 Sabina Peck Second Year Undergraduate, 1 University of New South Wales There is the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement ... There are those, some of the young people [of SNCC] especially, who have said to me that if I had not been a woman I would have been well known in certain places, and perhaps held certain kinds of positions. – Ella Baker, 19702 Until relatively recently, historiography concerning the Civil Rights movement and its organisations has been fairly devoid of the study of the participation of women, focusing instead on certain charismatic, notably black male individuals such as Martin Luther King Jnr., Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X.3 Steven Lawson, for example, has traced the evolution of 1 Note the following abbreviations are used throughout the article: CORE- Congress of Racial Equality MFDP – Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People SCLC – Southern Christian Leadership Conference SNCC – Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee 2 Ella Baker, Developing Community Leadership, Taped interview with Gerda Lerner (December 1970) paragraphs 15 and 14, respectively. 3 Joan C. Browning explores the extent to which women’s activities have been glossed over in Civil Rights Historiography in her article, ‘Invisible Revolutionaries: White Women in Civil Rights Historiography’ Journal of Women’s History, Vol. -
The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class
The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class William P. Jones The very decade which has witnessed the decline of legal Jim Crow has also seen the rise of de facto segregation in our most fundamental socioeconomic institutions,” vet- eran civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote in 1965, pointing out that black work- ers were more likely to be unemployed, earn low wages, work in “jobs vulnerable to automation,” and live in impoverished ghettos than when the U.S. Supreme Court banned legal segregation in 1954. Historians have attributed that divergence to a nar- rowing of African American political objectives during the 1950s and early 1960s, away from demands for employment and economic reform that had dominated the agendas of civil rights organizations in the 1940s and later regained urgency in the late 1960s. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and other scholars emphasize the negative effects of the Cold War, arguing that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights organizations responded to domestic anticom- munism by distancing themselves from organized labor and the Left and by focusing on racial rather than economic forms of inequality. Manfred Berg and Adam Fair- clough offer the more positive assessment that focusing on racial equality allowed civil rights activists to appropriate the democratic rhetoric of anticommunism and solidify alliances with white liberals during the Cold War, although they agree that “anti- communist hysteria retarded the struggle for racial justice and narrowed the political Research for this article was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities/Newhouse Fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. -
With Determination and Fortitude We Come to Vote: Black Organization and Resistance to Voter Suppression in Mississippi
WITH DETERMINATION AND FORTITUDE 195 With Determination and Fortitude We Come to Vote: Black Organization and Resistance to Voter Suppression in Mississippi by Michael Vinson Williams On July 2, 1946, brothers Medgar and Charles Evers, along with four friends, decided they would vote in their hometown of Decatur, Missis- sippi. Both brothers had registered without incident but when the men returned to cast their ballots they were met by a mob of armed whites. The confrontation grew in intensity with each step toward the polling place. After a few nerve-racking moments of yelling and shoving, the Evers group retreated, but the harassment did not end. Medgar Evers recalled that while they were walking away some of the whites followed them and that one man in a 1941 Ford “leaned out with a shotgun, keep- ing a bead on us all the time and we just had to walk slowly and wait for him to kill us …. They didn’t kill us but they didn’t end it, either.” The African American men went home, retrieved guns of their own, and returned to the polling station but decided to leave the weapons in the car. The white mob again prevented them from entering the voting precinct, and the would-be voters gave up.1 1 This article makes use of the many newspaper clippings catalogued in the Allen Eugene Cox Papers housed at the Mitchell Memorial Library Special Collections Department at Mississippi State University (Starkville) and the Trumpauer (Joan Harris) Civil Rights Scrapbooks Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, Mississippi. -
The Rise of the Black Power Movement in SNCC by Bonnie Belshe Author of Lesson: Bonnie Belshe Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, CA Bonnie [email protected]
“You’ve Got to Work For Power”: The Rise of the Black Power Movement in SNCC By Bonnie Belshe Author of Lesson: Bonnie Belshe Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, CA [email protected] Group Concept: Voice Subject/Course: AP US History/ US History Lesson Plan Title: “You’ve Got to Work For Power”: The Rise of the Black Power Movement in SNCC Image: “Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, speaks to reporters in Atlanta in May 1966. That year, his use of the phrase "black power" at a rally in Mississippi grabbed the nation's attention.” Bettmann/Corbis Return to Materials and Media Master List “You’ve Got to Work For Power”: The Rise of the Black Power Movement in SNCC By Bonnie Belshe Brief narrative: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was created, in part, because of the success of students sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters starting in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee. Following the advice of Ella Baker, SNCC was formed independent of other civil rights organizations, particularly that of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Martin Luther King, Jr. Inspired by Baker and the Reverend James Lawson, SNCC was formed in 1960 to reflect the growth of students in the civil rights movement. SNCC was an integrated student-run organization. After a series of relative successes--most notably the Birmingham Movement led by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, and the Childrens’ March--leaders within the Civil Rights Movement wanted to hold a March on Washington in support of the proposed Civil Rights Act that was stalled in Congress in 1963.