James Forman was born on October 4th, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois.
He spent his early life on a farm in Marshall County, Mississippi. Upon graduating from Englewood High School in Chicago, he attended junior college for a semester. He then joined the U.S. Air Force as a personnel classification specialist. Having completed a four-year tour-of-duty, he enrolled at the University of Southern California; however, his studies were interrupted when a false arrest charge kept him from taking his final examinations. This also gave a new meaning to the racism he had observed in the armed services and elsewhere. Forman despised that he could not be treated for the value of him as a person without the color of his skin being involved (National Visionary Leadership Project).
In the 1980s, Forman led the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee, started a short-lived newspaper, and formed the Black American News Service. Forman also earned his masters degree in African American Studies from Cornell University in 1980 and his PhD from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies, in 1982. Forman was a visionary and a transcendent personality that helped right the wrongs done to African Americans throughout his life ("African American Movement for Reparations" 40).
In the 1980s, Forman led the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee, started a short-lived newspaper, and formed the Black American News Service. Forman also earned his masters degree in African American Studies from Cornell University in 1980 and his PhD from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies, in 1982. Forman was a visionary and a transcendent personality that helped right the wrongs done to African Americans throughout his life ("African American Movement for Reparations" 40).
James Forman also wrote a book titled "The Making of Black Revolutionaries", in which the book is useful in showing the mentality of those in the African American civil rights movement. Forman was a consistent figure in the revolutionary movement and in the process of creating more revolutionaries to fight against civil injustices (Forman 15).
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