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LOUISVILLE — The legacy of civil right activist James Forman, who died Monday of colon cancer, will undoubtedly include being a catalyst for change in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), church leaders said this week.
Boldly challenging denominations in the 1960s to help African-American people economically develop, Forman called on Presbyterians and other main-line churches to use their dollars to help black people.
“He shook us up, and I’m sure that had a lot of influence” on the programs that the Presbyterian Church developed, said the Rev. Eugene Turner, retired associate stated clerk of the General Assembly.
Forman was 76 when he died at a hospice where he lived in Washington, D.C., according to the Associated Press. Known as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Forman held office in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
He also gained much attention when he publicly called for American churches — including the PC(USA) — to pay slavery reparations. Forman outlined his demands in his “Black Manifesto.”
“He believed firmly that the economic system in the United States was still enslaving African-Americans,” Turner said. And he pressed the PC(USA) “to spend some of its excess millions” to bring about change, he said.
Presbyterians, Forman maintained ‘close’ relationship
The Rev. Gayraud S. Wilmore, who served from 1963 to 1972 as executive director of the denomination’s Council on Church and Race, vividly recalls Forman and his interaction with the PC(USA).
“We were in close relationship with him through the Council on Church and Race, helping him to understand that we were both supportive of what he was doing and critical of it,” Wilmore said.
In fact, it was Wilmore and the council who invited Forman to present his manifesto to the General Assembly of The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1969 in San Antonio, TX.
From that, the General Assembly formed a committee on the self-development of people, the precursor to the Self-Development of People program that currently exists within the Worldwide Ministries Division (WMD).
“The program for Self-Development of People was, in a way, the distinctive Presbyterian response to the reparations demand,” said Wilmore, professor emeritus of African-American church history at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.
“It was our way of meeting some of the challenges of the manifesto,” he said.
Program designed around self-help
The Reverend Fredric Walls, retired director of the Self-Development of People program, concurred with Wilmore.
“It was because of his (Forman’s) work and his presentation that I believe that self-development really got off the ground,” he said.
Through self-development, Presbyterian money was to be used not only for black people, but also “for any poor people anyplace in the world so that they could begin to do things that would help them develop economically,” Walls said.
Walls served as director of the self-development program from 1980 until 2002. He said in that time he tried to “stick pretty close” to the program’s original mandate.
The purpose was to make certain that the indigenous people in the world were the ones deciding what happened with their lives, even when outside resources were being provided, Walls said.
The idea was “that people would be given the right to think and act for themselves,” he said.
“That’s what Forman was saying,” Walls said. “People ought to be involved in the decisions that affect their lives.”
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