Farmer, James

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Farmer, James

January 12, 1920
July 9, 1999

Civil rights leader and educator James Farmer was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where his father was a minister and professor at Rust College. The family moved when Farmer's father took a post at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. Farmer grew up in Marshall and was educated at Wiley College and at Howard University, where he received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1941. During this time he became interested in the philosophy of nonviolence espoused by Mahatma Gandhi in his movement for India's independence. Farmer refused to become ordained to serve a segregated Methodist congregation (he was committed to interracial forums), and his pacifist ideas and opposition to army segregation led him to oppose the wartime draft. Exempted from service by his ministerial background, Farmer dedicated himself to pacifist and civil rights causes.

Shortly after graduating from Howard in 1941, Farmer took a job as race-relations secretary of the pacifist group Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). In 1942, while living in Chicago, he drew up plans for a civil rights group operating on Gandhian principles, and set up an organization with aid from some University of Chicago students. Farmer became the first executive director of the Chicago-based organization named the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Farmer was a committed integrationist, and CORE's early leadership was predominantly white. The congress remained small, and in 1946 Farmer tired of bureaucratic struggles with FOR and gave up his leadership role to work as a labor organizer for trade unions, and later as a civil rights campaigner for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He remained involved with CORE as a field worker.

In 1960, after the Montgomery bus boycott and sit-ins had made nonviolent protest a widespread civil rights tool, Farmer returned to leadership of CORE, by now based in New York City. In spring of 1961 he organized the first Freedom Rides, which were designed to desegregate buses and terminals in the South and publicize denials of civil rights. During the effort Farmer was jailed for forty days—the first of many such imprisonments during the days of the civil rights movement as CORE contingents participated in strikes, sit-ins, voter-education programs, and demonstrations, both in the South and in the North. As CORE's national director, Farmer was one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement and participated in its major campaigns. His eloquent speaking voice and manner made him a popular lecturer and debater. He wrote many articles and essays, and his 1965 book Freedom, When? dealt with the problem of institutionalized inequality and the debate over nonviolence as a protest tactic.

One of Farmer's significant efforts during his years in CORE was his ongoing attempt to improve the position of blacks in the job market and in labor unions. Realizing that African Americans faced disadvantages in schooling and training, Farmer pushed the idea of "compensatory" action by employers and government, including programs for the hiring of numbers of black workers proportionate with a labor pool, and their training in job skills, when necessary. These ideas were a major ingredient in the formation of affirmative action policies.

By 1966, as CORE turned away from its original integrationist goals and nonviolent tactics in civil rights action, Farmer decided to leave the organization. For two years he taught social welfare at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 1968 Farmer, who had long been active in New York's Liberal Party, ran for Congress in Brooklyn on the Liberal and Republican tickets but was defeated by African-American Democrat Shirley Chisholm.

The following year Farmer faced a storm of criticism when he accepted the post of assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in Richard Nixon's Republican administration. Farmer, who felt blacks should reach out to all political parties, was given the job of increasing minority participation in government. He soon grew dissatisfied with his role in HEW, however, and resigned in 1971.

In 1972 Farmer set up the Council on Minority Planning and Strategy, a black think tank, but was unable to secure sufficient funding. In 1975 he became active with the Fund for an Open Society, and from 1977 through 1982 he served as executive director of the Coalition of American Public Employees. Starting in 1982 and continuing through the early 1990s, he taught at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He continued to be a strong speaker for black equality, although he remained out of the political arena. In his later years Farmer developed retinal vascular occlusion, a rare eye disease, and lost all vision in one eye and some vision in the other. Still, he managed to complete a volume of memoirs, Lay Bare the Heart, in 1985. Farmer's forceful leadership and eloquence combined with his dedication to nonviolent principles made him one of the central figures of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

In 1998 Farmer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 1999, and in 2001 a memorial in his honor was unveiled on the campus of Mary Washington College.