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WHY JAMES FORMAN STILL MATTERS  
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Eric Morrison-Smith
February 2, 2026
The Progressive
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_ This Black History Month, let’s reflect on the work of this
revolutionary civil rights leader. _

James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
addresses a rally at the Beulah Baptist Church, in Montgomery,
Alabama, on March 16, 1965, the week before the final march from Selma
to Montgomery, Alabama., Glen Pearcy/Library of Congress

 

ovements rarely collapse because the enemy is too strong. More often,
they rot from within—through the loss of discipline, morale, and
political clarity. The civil rights leader James Forman warned us
about this decades ago. We ignored him.

James Forman was a revolutionary organizer, strategist, and movement
builder who helped shape the Black freedom struggle into something
more militant, internationalist, democratic, and explicitly
revolutionary. As executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
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Forman was a behind-the-scenes organizer who was deeply embedded in
the work of the Civil Rights Movement. He helped organize
sharecroppers, students, and poor Black communities across the Jim
Crow South under constant threat of violence. 

Cut from the same radical cloth as activist and leader Ella Baker,
Forman embraced a democratic organizing tradition rooted in building
local, indigenous power from the ground up.

Forman’s career, as recounted in his 1997 book, _The Making of Black
Revolutionaries_
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on his insistence on political education, discipline, and reflection.
He believed that struggle alone was not enough—organizers also had
to actively study racism, white supremacy, capitalism, and the state
while engaging in daily struggle against them. 

But just as importantly, he believed organizers had a responsibility
to reflect honestly on their experiences, mistakes, and
contradictions, and to write them down so future generations could
learn from them. That kind of intentional reflection is something we
too often neglect today. 

As the head of an organization committed to improving the lives of
boys and men of color by creating and supporting legislation, I have
seen over the past five years how decades of progress can be swiftly
undone. That means the struggle is never over.

I’ve read the academic texts. I’ve heard the moral arguments for
racial justice. I’ve studied abstract theories of revolution. And I
am determined to remember, above all, that we have been here before,
and will be again. What we need now are the reflections of people who
actually went out and tried to make revolution—people like James
Forman, who organized under pressure, made mistakes, learned hard
lessons, and kept going. We can study the past to make way for the
future, collectively adding on to our theoretical narrative, not
writing a new one.

Forman’s short but powerful 1970 manual, “Twenty Enemy Forces
Within a Revolutionary Organization That Must Be Combatted
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was written as a tool for movement self-criticism. It offered a
clear-eyed assessment of the internal habits, liberal illusions, ego,
and organizational weaknesses that quietly undermine revolutionary
movements from the inside. The book, Forman wrote, was meant “to
consolidate the thoughts of many people who have had negative
experiences with the tendencies listed as enemy forces within a
revolutionary organization.”

In the introduction, Forman makes his purpose unmistakably clear:
“Individuals who belong to revolutionary organizations that are
seeking and working toward the seizure of state power must not only
study the theory and practice of other revolutionaries, but must
carefully study our own experiences and draw conclusions from those
experiences that will help others.”

We often spend all our energy diagnosing external enemies, while
ignoring the internal forces that limit our capacity to build real
power. “Twenty Enemy Forces” offers a starting point for that
work, as a guide for action, discussion, and collective learning. I
believe many of our current organizations—and the people within
them—are constrained by the limits of liberalism, and those limits
are actively undermining our ability to win tangible gains for our
communities. 

Forman died of colon cancer in 2005, at age seventy-six. Yet his
life’s work continues in its invitation to build organizations
capable of challenging imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Movements don’t usually collapse because the enemy is too strong,
but because we refuse to confront the internal habits that make us
undisciplined, incoherent, and easy to defeat. This Black History
Month, let us reflect on how James Forman showed us the way. 

_This column was produced for __Progressive Perspectives_
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magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service._

 

_Eric Morrison-Smith is executive director of the Alliance for Boys
and Men of Color, a nonprofit group focused on enacting legislative
work and policies to improve the lives of boys and men of color in
California._

 

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
nonviolence and freedom of speech._

_Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we publish on national politics,
culture, and events including U.S. foreign policy; we also focus on
issues of particular importance to the heartland. Two flagship
projects of The Progressive include __Public School Shakedown_
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efforts to resist the privatization of public education, and __The
Progressive Media Project_ [[link removed]]_, aiming to
diversify our nation’s op-ed pages. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization. _

* Black History Month
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* James Foreman
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* SNCC
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* Left Strategies
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