Christianity and reparations: revisiting James Forman's "Black Manifesto," 1969.

On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at her
beautiful churches with her spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld
the impressive outlay of her massive education buildings. Over and over
again I have found myself asking: "Who worships here?"
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"Letter From Birmingham City Jail" (1963) (1)

Dr. Nave,
... No one living in the United States today has ever owned a slave. I
understand that there are still people and certain places in this
country where racism and hatred toward minorities is prevalent, but my
family, my friends and I personally have never felt superior to people
of color because we are white.
--a Luther College student
October 31, 2002 (2)

James Forman delivered the Black Manifesto (3) at the meeting of the Black Economic Development Conference at Wayne State University April 25-27, 1969, sponsored by the Interreligious Foundation of Community Organization (IFCO). A clearinghouse founded by major Protestant denominations, it gave money to community organizations. The Manifesto demanded that half a billion dollars be given in reparations from American Christian churches and Jewish synagogues. Forman vowed that the funds would be collected "by any means necessary," including "if necessary, church seizures, disruptions, demonstrations, and force." (4)

When IFCO began in September 1967, it was a cooperative effort, funding local organizations for the powerless. In keeping with the perspective of the directors, it was a racially integrated organization. By June 1969 it had grown to 25 members, with membership dues at $1,000 each. (5)

The National Black Economic Development Conference likewise was intended to bring together black leaders in a discussion of strategies and solutions for black-directed community development. Speakers were solicited and invited. The War on Poverty was not working, and the Vietnam War was gaining impetus. At best, the Nixon administration's attitude toward social programs was ambiguous. (6)

The monies collected from the Manifesto were to be used to create a southern land bank in order to fund a farming cooperative, four publishing houses, four black television networks, a research center for training in communications, a grant to the National Welfare Rights Organization, an International Black Appeal, a black Anti-Defamation League, and a black university. (7)

Forman was a former director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent civil rights organization in the 1960s. His call for reparations was by no means new. Nor was it the first time that the church had been called upon to address the subject. In 1816, led by a white Presbyterian minister named Robert Finley, the American Colonization Society started the emigration of free blacks to Liberia. The organization's first president was Bushrod Washington, George Washington's nephew; membership included Francis Scott Key, James Monroe, and Henry Clay. Although not exactly reparations as we know them today, it was an effort to establish an all-black free land. However, the society's motives were considered to be quite sinister. They only wanted to send free blacks to West Africa, leaving slaves and slavery in place. (8) Edward W. Blyden, a father of modern black nationalism, arrived in Liberia in 1850 on an American Colonization Society vessel. (9)

There were other similar earlier church-related endeavors. African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry McNeil Turner favored the efforts of the American Colonization Society and the paying of reparations. In the 1890s, because of the increase in violence against blacks, Turner came to see emigration as the only solution. He called for reparations to former slaves, the building of a steamship company, and middle-class black support. (10)

In the 1950s the Nation of Islam called for the establishment of a separate black nation. In 1962, Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam's leader, stated that "former slave masters were obligated to provide lands for former slaves. The United States would maintain and support this black state for approximately 25 years. This hopefully would lead to some level of economic and political autonomy." (11)

The Sunday after the meeting of the National Black Economic Development Conference, Forman interrupted worship at Riverside Church in New York City, one of the most prominent white Protestant churches in the nation, and delivered the Black Manifesto. Subsequently, the Manifesto was delivered in white churches across the country. Righteous indignation was expressed on the part of whites and some blacks. Simultaneously, angry debates appeared in newspapers across the country. However, a few people agreed with the Manifesto, including Ernest Campbell, pastor of Riverside Church. (12)

In the week following the disruption of the Riverside Church service, the Manifesto caused "shock" and "outrage," deep concerns, and confusion. Although Riverside got an injunction issued against disrupting worship services, in the aftermath there were copycat disruptions elsewhere. Across the country, church headquarters were taken over. Forman increased his demands to $3 billion. Consultations were also held with the National Council of Churches. (13)

According to Robert S. Lecky and Elliot Wright, the disruption of church services had occurred earlier in the 1960s and even before that decade. There were "walk-outs, walk-ins and scuffles. However, the new ingredient was the militant rhetoric, threatening and revolutionary." Huge claims were made on "the most liberal, though poorest segment of society, religion." Likewise, white religious leaders were shocked and appalled at being told that their goodwill was not enough. "Also new was linking economic reparations to religion in the fight against racism and poverty." (14)

Historically, many churches and synagogues had been in the vanguard of the nonviolent civil rights movement, especially with the outlawing of public school segregation in the mid-1950s. Yet new laws were not good enough to erase centuries of racism. For example, there were the riots in Los Angeles in 1965 and riots in Newark and Detroit in 1967. The Kerner Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in March 1968 blamed the major urban riots on white racism and stated that the United States was "moving toward two unequal separate societies, one white and one black." (15)

By fall 1968, religious organizations had already pledged $50 million to social programs. According to Charles Spivey Jr., director of Social Justice for the National Council of Churches, "the manifesto told churches to 'put up or shut up.'" (16)

Undoubtedly, Forman was best known as an executive director of the SNCC, but with the change of leadership under Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, he became director of international affairs. He also had been an officer in the Black Panther Party. (17) According to C. Eric Lincoln, in spite of being "eclipsed" by Carmichael and Brown, Forman was still "an able civil rights strategist." After spending four years in the Armed Forces, he left Boston University to be an active participant in the civil rights movement. He was an organizer in Brownsville, Tennessee, for black landowners who had been forced from their land for attempting to vote. As a SNCC organizer, he replaced Bob Moses in the famous Mississippi Project in 1964. Holding to a "radical Marxist" position, Forman also maintained credibility with the Black Church and "respect for black ministers." He was a participant in the Selma campaign of 1965 and was well known by "the white power structure, its lawmen, and jails." (18)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The preamble to the Manifesto was written by Forman himself. Using a Marxist tone, he denounced capitalism and imperialism and proclaimed that the primary purpose of the Manifesto was "to build a socialist society in the United States." This would be a society under the direction of blacks but with worldwide humankind in mind. Forman felt that blacks adhering to capitalism were "black power pimps and fraudulent leaders ... contributing to the continuous exploitation of black people around the world." He referred to the United States as "the most barbaric country in the world" and spoke of revolution, "which will be armed confrontation and long years of guerilla warfare in this country." For Forman, the only protection against white racism was to seize power. (19)

Just what was James Forman's position in relation to religion and American Christianity? In his autobiography, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, he stated that "religion and so-called Christianity [messed up] my young life in terrible ways." At the early age of twelve, preachers in rural Mississippi convinced him that he needed to go to the mourners' bench in order to cleanse his soul. His punishment was related to sins against "a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, and his father, a white God on a throne of judgment, giving white people the right to persecute and enslave black people." (20) At school in Chicago, Forman said, white nuns taught that heaven has assigned places for rich and poor, based upon how one acted on earth. By his mid-twenties, Forman had seen the religious "con game." Therefore, he became an atheist. (21)

Forman had been invited to speak at the meeting of the National Black Economic Development Conference by Dorothy Dewberry, a member of SNCC who was working with the conference planning committee. Organizers concluded that such conferences spent large amounts of money and accomplished little in return. With this idea in mind, and as an organization adhering to a Marxist motif, they pushed to develop a more relevant conference. Since the conference was composed of Christians, it was only logical to demand reparations from Christians and Jews from wrongs dating to slavery. At fault also was the system of capitalism and imperialism. Forman did not just take over the meeting without the knowledge of conferees, as was later claimed. (22)

Two weeks after the conference, the Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed the participants. The Justice Department assembled two special grand juries to investigate the National Black Economic Development Conference. Some conferees cooperated, others did not. According to Forman, the government believed the Black Manifesto to be dangerous. This perception increased, after Forman interrupted the service at Riverside Church on May 4, 1969. (23)

According to Lincoln, the Black Manifesto is not one of the outstanding documents of history. Yet sociologist Charles V. Willie had maintained, "The prophetic comes to us sometimes in preposterous wrappings. It presented us with the uncomfortable task of sorting out the meaningful from the foolish." (24)

In a similar manner, Lincoln had said that the Manifesto forced Christians to look into the mirror and see the "blemishes" in American Christianity. And what was then seen "was not complementary to the faith." With the Manifesto in mind, Father Junius Carter, a black priest of Holy Cross Episcopal Church, said,

Too long, bishops, you have sat on the sidelines and have not acted as
our pastors! I urge you to ... exercise the authority, which has been
given to you by our Lord.... You've talked about black brotherhood, but
forget it, Joe.... You don't mean it.... It's nothing but a ... lie. You
don't trust me, you don't trust black priests, and you don't trust black
people. You say be patient. I'm sick of you.... To hell with love. (25)

With black power in mind, the National Conference of Black Christians (earlier the National Committee of Black Churchmen) was organized in 1966, replacing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as the leading black ecumenical organization of the period. Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC were unable to accept black power as a viable alternative, but the NCBC did accept it. Mary R. Sawyer has referred to the NCBC as having the ability to "interpret black power to an outraged white religious establishment, and to more closely align the institutional Black Church with the sentiments of its more progressively inclined leaders." The circumstances required the development of a new language, "black theology." (26)

In the meantime, James H. Cone, a black Union Theological Seminary professor, wrote a black theology, which saw the black power movement as a part of the providence of God. Interestingly, the majority of the members of the NCBC were clergy in predominantly white denominations, in which they felt marginalized. (27)

According to Lecky and Wright, as early as 1966, the NCBC accused white religious leaders of paternalism in their relations with blacks and in their dealing with the situation of poverty. By 1968, the National Conference had loudly denounced paternalism and embraced black power as positive. (28)

The situation led to a call for black clergy in white denominations to "come home." The call was made by blacks in historic black denominations. Instead black clergy in white denominations refused to do so, believing black denominations to be too conservative. As an alternative these clergy chose to form black caucuses in white denominations. (29)

Forman presented the Black Manifesto at Wayne State University in April 1969. Three days later the executive board of the NCBC endorsed the Manifesto. Furthermore, there was speculation that the NCBC's Urban Mission statement had provided the impetus for Forman to deliver the Manifesto in the first place. (30)

However, according to Sawyer, because of Forman's "alienating" approach, no denomination would agree to fund the Black Economic Development Corporation (BEDC) directly. Instead the National Conference of Black Christians became the channel to BEDC and looked forward to serving black caucuses as the conduit for funds from white denominations. Interestingly, Calvin Marshall, a member of the NCBC board of directors, also was elected chair of BEDC. With BEDC now under control of the NCBC, funds to the caucuses increased. Yet funds addressing the issues pertaining to the Black Manifesto decreased. (31)

By the summer of 1970, BEDC had received only $300,000 in reparations. A substantial amount was given to Black Star Publications in Detroit. According to Forman, it was virtually impossible to get black ideas into print, because publishing houses were an extension of "capitalism and exploitation." Instead these new black publishing houses would be open to radical ideas. (32) Then, IFCO withdrew support from the Black Manifesto. It had offered an operating budget of $290,000 for a staff of 50 people for one year. Lucius Walker came under pressure from the IFCO board of directors and resigned as director. According to Forman, earlier IFCO had gotten greedy, seeing the money received as a way to increase their own personal power. (33)

SNCC also rejected the Manifesto. Shortly afterward SNCC was dissolved as an organization. One faction revived the organization, calling itself the Student Coordinating Committee. But Forman was removed as director of international affairs. (34)

Lincoln has powerfully analyzed the importance of the Black Manifesto by concluding, "It showed the world what more than 30 million African-Americans endured at the hands of whites, and ... dangers related therein." Then he said, "the voice of prophecy is seldom welcome at the dinner table, and for black America it often seems that white America never has time to listen." (35)

What are the implications of the Black Manifesto for contemporary American Christianity, if any? In the June 20, 1995, meeting of the predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta, a "resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its defense of slavery" was adopted. The convention acknowledged its part in "the historical acts of evil such as slavery" and that it had continuously "reaped a bitter harvest" from it. Approximately 500,000 African Americans now belong to the Southern Baptist Convention, which has a membership of 15.6 million members. On behalf of its African American members, Gary Frost, the first African American vice-president of the SBC, accepted the apology. (36)

The following September, the president of the National Baptist Convention of America, E. Edward Jones, denounced the Southern Baptist Convention's apology for racism. His convention is the second largest African American Baptist denomination. Jones contended that "more action was needed." An apology needed to be more than merely words. "For the civil rights struggle is still going on and we need more than an apology," Jones declared. Moreover, Southern Baptist "voices were silent during the racial atrocities of the past." Then Jones questioned whether an apology would have been forthcoming if the SBC had not targeted the fast-growing black middle class as potential members. (37)

Stephen Long, a religion professor at Duke Divinity School, contends that the problem today is "cheap forgiveness," which "is a sign that we have not taken sin seriously." Instead Long has called for the renewal of the ancient practice of penance: "Without penance forgiveness is cheap." For example, he proposes that the United Methodist Church give to its black sister denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, their most expensive piece of property in Washington, D.C. It should be given with the acknowledgment that the white Methodist denomination had gathered its wealth at the expense of black people. (38) But to my knowledge his suggestion has not been accepted.

There is yet another dimension worthy of exploration. In 1994, Renee Kemp, an African American reporter for a television station in San Francisco, told of her trip to Ghana for the purpose of bringing the "diaspora back to Africa." Attracting 2,000 people, the trip consisted of African Americans and Caribbeans. Late one night they went to see the slave dungeons at Cape Coast, an oceanside city. (39)

These slave dungeons were "cold, damp tombs where millions of slaves were crammed," Kemp said. "This was the place where our forefathers and mothers made the last sight of home. At one point, a middle-aged woman collapsed filled with emotions, and we all cried!"

According to Kemp, the night before, there was a ceremony of cleansing. Tribal leaders from all across Ghana had gathered to apologize--in turn, they "washed stools and skins," the Ghanaian ceremony of apology. They asked to be forgiven on the part of their ancestors, in particular, those who had "accepted guns in ... exchange for men, women...." They acknowledged that slavery had existed for thousands of years in Africa. However, with proof of the barbaric nature of American slavery, the chiefs wanted to be forgiven." (40)

It was the first time that this ceremony of atonement had ever been made as an apology for the Ghanaians' part in the slave trade. The slave trade would not have worked without their participation in it. Kemp made the point that after watching "the ritual of apology" the message was "there can be no more excuses. Africa's children can no longer afford to do harm to one another." (41) This was one of black Africa's first explicit acknowledgments of its complicity in the African slave trade.

Historians John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr. have stated that Africa suffered greatly from the slave trade as well. Some of the best people on the African continent were sent into the slave trade, making the situation all the more ready for colonialism and imperialism later in the nineteenth century. (42)

The first Pan-African Conference on Reparations was called by the Organization of African Unity, and the Republic of Nigeria, April 27-29, 1993, in Abuja, Nigeria. The conference produced the Abuja Proclamation, a declaration calling for the paying of reparations to Africa and its diaspora "for damages done because of enslavement, colonization, and neo-colonialism." According to the Proclamation,

Damage sustained by African peoples is not a "thing of the past" but is
painfully manifest in damaged lives of contemporary Africans from Harlem
to Harare, in the damaged economies of the black world from Guinea to
Guyana, from Somalia to Surinam. (43)

Likewise the conferees called for the international community to recognize that there was a moral debt owed that has not been paid. African peoples have been the "most humiliated and exploited peoples of the last four centuries of modern history." (44)

On a personal note, while I was a student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in 1969, James Forman delivered the Black Manifesto. The next few days were filled with expressions of righteous indignation on the part of students and faculty. They were appalled by the demand itself and the method by which it was delivered. I was one of the few African American students at the time, and I do not remember my exact response. Martin Luther King Jr. was my hero, and not those to his left, like Forman. However, when I finished seminary in 1971, I was, at least, a card-carrying member of the NCBC. Earlier, in 1960-1961, the year I finished Louisville Male High School, I had participated in the sit-in demonstrations as a member of the NAACP Youth Council, along with other black youth and a few whites. Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken not only to our movement but also at Southern Baptist Seminary, April 19, 1963.

Although the Black Manifesto failed, its failure was related to more than the Marxist rhetoric used by Forman. It also was related to the American mindset of the period. Forman only demanded "a few crumbs" of "$15 a nigger."

There is another way to interpret the general response to the Manifesto. King once said, "Anything that gets white folks so upset must have some good in it." (45)

1. Quoted in Jerry K. Frye, "The Black Manifesto and the Tactics of Objectification," Journal of Black Studies (September 1974), 65.

2. The statement is from an e-mail sent to Guy Nave, a black Luther College religion professor, by a white student.

3. See http://www.nca.org/images/aboutas/archives/blackmanifesto.pdf.

4. Frye, "The Black Manifesto," 66; Charles D. Lowery and John F. Marszalik, Encyclopedia of African American Civil Rights (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 51.

5. Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism and Reparations, ed. Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliott Wright (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 12.

6. Ibid., 7.

7. Frye, "The Black Manifesto," 66; Lowery and Marszalik, Encyclopedia, 51.

8. Frye, "The Black Manifesto," 65; Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 48-49.

9. Redkey, Black Exodus, 48-49; Robert G. Weisbord, Ebony Kinship (London: Greenwood, 1973), 12-27.

10. Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996), 2315-16.

11. Ibid.

12. Frye, "The Black Manifesto," 65.

13. Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism and Reparations, 3.

14. Ibid., 4.

15. Ibid., 6.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 66.

18. C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 112.

19. Ibid., 113-14.

20. James Foreman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: Open Hand Publishing, 1985), 546.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 544-45; To Make Our World Anew, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 536.

23. Ibid., 545.

24. Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma, 116.

25. Ibid.

26. Mary R. Sawyer, Black Ecumenism (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994), 67.

27. Ibid.

28. Black Manifesto, 6-7.

29. Sawyer, Black Ecumenism, 82-83.

30. Ibid., 84-85.

31. Ibid., 85-86.

32. Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 545.

33. Ibid., 549.

34. Ibid.

35. Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma, 116.

36. "SBC Renounces Racist Past," Christian Century (July 5-12, 1995), 671.

37. "Black Baptists Reject Apology by SBC," Christian Century (September 27-October 4, 1995), 879-80.

38. "Recovering the Practice of Penance," Christian Century (April 7, 1993), 36.

39. Renee Kemp, Essence (October, 1995), 60.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 8th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000), 49.

43. "The Abuja Proclamation," http://www.arm.arc.co.uk/abujaProclamation.html.

44. Ibid.

45. Quoted in Frye, "The Black Manifesto," 74.

Lawrence H. Williams

Professor of Africana Studies and History

Luther College, Decorah, Iowa

[e-mail]