Biography
James Forman served as executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1961 to 1966, the years of SNCC's greatest impact, and was the principal administrator behind the southern voter registration campaigns. He was arrested numerous times during civil rights organizing in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, including major arrests during the 1961 McComb voter registration drive and the 1965 Selma campaign. He later authored the 1969 Black Manifesto, which demanded reparations from white American churches and synagogues for slavery and segregation.
On December 10, 1961, Forman was one of eight interracial Freedom Riders arrested in Albany, Georgia after the group attempted to use the white waiting room at the train station — the arrests that helped ignite the Albany Movement. Police charged the riders with disorderly conduct, obstructing traffic, and failure to obey an officer; they were taken to Albany police headquarters. The precise release date and disposition are not established in the catalog record.
Zinn’s contemporary account individually places this activist in the December 1961 Albany custody proceedings. He distinguishes the initial railway-terminal arrests, county-court proceedings and later group releases. Because the release accounts do not resolve every person’s exact custody trajectory, no exact individual discharge date or calculated total is inferred. Howard Zinn, Albany, Southern Regional Council SRC22, January 8, 1962, original PDF page 17. Source: https://www.crmvet.org/info/6201_zinn_albany.pdf#page=17
A separate August 1961 Monroe detention account
Mallory's Memo from a Monroe Jail, printed pages 208 and 213–214 (PDF pages 6 and 11–12), describes SNCC's James Foreman, rendered here under the profile's standard spelling James Forman, being attacked around the Monroe courthouse on August 27, 1961 and carried to jail while bleeding. It later identifies him as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee defense witness. This is a separate Monroe episode, not the December 10, 1961 Albany train-station arrest. The memoir supplies no discharge day or duration; no new case, counter or invented endpoint is created.
