Epitaph for Black Power

...At another, invoking Malcolm X, he proclaims the necessity of "advancing from the ballot to the bullet" and asserts that "it would have been better to organize self-defense units" than merely register voters in the South...

...At one point, he admits the importance of the Supreme Court's "one-man-one-vote decree" in enhancing the possibilities of significant advances in black political power...

...For several years he served as executive secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, briefly, he was Minister of Education for the Black Panthers, resigning during one of that group's numerous factional disputes...

...His book is a reflection of the mentality that fragmented the struggle for racial equality and left a legacy of polarization in its wake...

...the tragedies of Newark, Detroit and Attica are vehicles to be exploited "to further organize resistance and propel the revolutionary struggle forward...

...His program, so far as he has one, is irrelevant...

...Instead, he sees violence as necessary even when the consequences are visited most heavily on black people...

...Nonetheless, the episode was only a small and relatively inconsequential chapter in Forman's career as an activist...

...Indeed, here it is also directed against the middle-class elements who dominated the civil rights movement: He constantly attempts to show us instances of "treachery" and "betrayal" SNCC suffered at the hands of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP and the "liberal-labor syndrome" as typified by Walter Reuther...

...Similarly, the compromise offered to (and ultimately rejected by) the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention is denounced as "crumbs...

...In 1972, such rhetorical excess seems like so much posturing and playing to the media...

...image overseas...

...Forman will not acknowledge that the Freedom Democrats' challenge initiated a process leading four years later to the unseating of discriminatory Southern delegations and, this year, to convention representation for blacks substantially exceeding their proportion of the overall population...

...one Southern governor, two mayors, 500 racist cops dead...

...Unfortunately, it is as political theorist that Forman is especially vulnerable...

...On its positive side, the book stands as a powerful testament to the courage and selflessness of the young volunteers who braved jails, police dogs and mob violence during the Freedom Rides, voter registration drives and civil disobedience activities that focused national attention on racial discrimination in the South...

...On May 4, 1969, accompanied by an entourage of grim-looking bodyguards, he disrupted services at Manhattan's prestigious Riverside Church to publicly issue his "Black Manifesto," a document demanding $500 million in reparations from "racist white 'Christian' churches and Jewish synagogues...

...Though Forman himself admits the campaign brought in only $300,000, he did gain considerable notoriety for his efforts...

...the influence of the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, whom Forman treats with scorn, is greater than ever, while SNCC activists have dropped from public sight...

...Not surprisingly, the reforms that have produced the most permanent and far-reaching changes for blacks evoke Forman's sharpest criticism...

...Like many radicals, he has some valid insights into the workings of the system (for example, that community control is meaningless under the present political structure) but remains incapable of developing them into a coherent formula for the remaking of society...

...For then Forman could be taken seriously when he told a meeting of Black Panthers that the price for political assassination of blacks should be "10 war factories destroyed, 15 blown-up police stations, 30 power plants destroyed...

...His perceptions of society, as it exists now and will evolve in the future, are disjointed, almost irrational...

...Today, in short, his ideas are little more than historical relics, a reminder of much that went wrong with the most important American social struggle of the century...

...Deriving his convictions from Frantz Fanon rather than Mohandas Gandhi, he has come to distrust nonviolence and expresses contempt for the reformist goals of the civil rights mainstream...

...What he has produced, however, is not an agenda for revolution but an unwitting epitaph for black power...

...in fact, he survived countless confrontations with Southern lawmen only by somehow managing to control the intense rage his writing does not conceal...

...He participated in and often helped coordinate nearly all of the crucial civil rights campaigns of the early and mid-1960s...

...The past three summers have been the quietest in a decade...

...The March on Washington is dismissed as a celebration of the Kennedy Administration and a means for the State Department to bolster the U.S...

...In 1968, with militant black rhetoric at its height and the campuses in turmoil, nervous whites or those liberals who were temporarily afflicted with fantasies of revolution might have found its prediction of a triumphant black rebellion plausible...

...Today Forman is perhaps remembered most vividly as the militant who challenged the pulpit...

...today's militants are more likely to seek political office than to engage in guerrilla warfare...

...his tactics are suited to a colonial-era underdeveloped nation rather than a modern industrial state...

...James Forman attempts to answer this question positively in The Making of Black Revolutionaries, an analysis of the civil rights movement, particularly its shift to the rhetoric and objectives of black power...

...James Forman writes with a profound, often justifiable anger...

...The problem with The Making of Black Revolutionaries is that it was written four years too late to have the kind of impact its author undoubtedly hoped for...

...Reviewed by Arch Puddington Research Director, A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund Can American blacks, impelled by historic necessity, develop a revolutionary consciousness strong enough to overthrow the present white power structure and transform our society into some kind of egalitarian workers' state...

...Forman himself was beaten and jailed on numerous occasions...

...The Selmato-Birmingham march, which prodded Lyndon Johnson into pressing for passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is characterized as a "safety valve for the American system...

...Moreover, Forman is inconsistent on the relative merits of political organizing versus direct-action...

...But he understands neither how American society functions nor what black workers want from it...