WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - “When my brother and I were children we would come to D.C. to visit my father. His office was around the corner from the Library of Congress. He brought us here almost everyday. He taught us the Dewey Decimal System here. He always said that this was our history,” said James Forman, Jr.
With those words he and his brother Chaka donated a 70,000-piece collection of their famed father’s work.
“The James Forman Papers are a valuable addition to the library’s unrivaled resources for the study of the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.
James Forman, while executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was instrumental in organizing major civil rights campaigns of the era, including the 1963 March on Washington. The bulk of the Forman Papers collection dates from 1960. They chronicle his life and role in the civil rights movement. Included are correspondence, memoranda, diaries, speeches and other writings, notebooks, transcripts of interviews, subject files, scrapbooks, appointment books, photographs, and video and sound recordings.
Mr. Forman’s activism is well documented in the collection, particularly his tenure with SNCC and the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee. His involvement in the Congress on Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party is also covered.
He died in 2005. The donation was made in late January 2008.
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