James Forman, the new executive secretary of SNCC, and suggested that he organize a group of Freedom Riders to test the Albany train station. Forman liked the idea. He was a publicist who had come South from Chicago to write stories about the movement. Forman could be abrasive—he had been thrown out of the sharecroppers’ “tent cities” in Fayette County, Tennessee, on charges of “factionalism”—and he had brought to SNCC’s autumn meeting a taste for apocalyptic heroics that had struck Bob Moses as amusing.
