James Farmer

A founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), James Farmer was one of the major leaders of the nonviolent African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Academic world

James Farmer was born January 12, 1920. His father was James Leonard Farmer Sr., the son of a slave, who was an ordained minister and who had earned a doctorate from Boston University. He is believed to have been the first African American man from Texas to receive a doctorate. A campus chaplain and professor of religion and philosophy, he worked at several small black Methodist colleges in the South.

Growing up in the academic world, Farmer encountered less racism than other African American children in the South during that era. But as he entered his teens, segregation (the separation of blacks and whites in public places) began to disturb him deeply.

Farmer was an excellent student and began attending Wiley College in Texas at the age of fourteen. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1938. He went on to study religion at Howard University, hoping to use the ministry as a way to participate in the civil rights movement. At the time, Howard boasted some of the best minds of the day. It was there that Farmer learned about the ideas of Indian spiritual leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who led the civil disobedience and nonviolent protest movement for India's independence from Britain. As his studies progressed, Farmer began to have doubts about entering the ministry. He wrote his graduate thesis on religion and racism, and he became disillusioned with the Methodist Church, which was segregated by race.

Pioneer in civil rights

In 1942, Farmer became a founding member of CORE in Chicago, Illinois . He organized the country's first sit-in with about twenty-five others, black and white, at a coffee shop that refused service to blacks. (See Sit-in Movement .) CORE eventually gained national recognition, and Farmer was elected chairperson, then an unpaid position. He also worked as a labor organizer.

After the successful Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama in 1956, in which the African American residents of the town refused to ride Montgomery's segregated buses for a year, forcing the bus system to desegregate, Farmer immersed himself in the civil rights struggle. He joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP worked mainly through the court system and was never a confrontational group. Farmer, interested in developing the direct action, nonviolent techniques that Gandhi had used, took a second look at CORE.

Organizes the Freedom Rides

In 1961, Farmer took a paid position as national director of CORE and soon initiated the freedom rides , one of the most important campaigns of the civil rights movement. Although discrimination was illegal on interstate bus lines, many Southern states still had segregated waiting rooms and made blacks ride at the back of the bus. Farmer and a dozen others set out in 1961 to challenge these practices. In direct violation of Jim Crow laws of the South, which required the separation of blacks and whites in public places, black freedom riders planned to sit in the front of the buses while white freedom riders sat in the back. They would “desegregate” every station along the way by having the black riders use the “white” waiting rooms while the white riders used the “colored” facilities.

Opposition to the freedom riders in the South was strong. There were a few ugly incidents at first, but it was in Alabama that violence erupted. Riders were severely beaten by mobs there and one of the buses was firebombed. Farmer missed the violence because he had to leave the group when his father died. He rejoined for the final leg of the freedom rides and was arrested and imprisoned for forty days. In the end, U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy (1925–1968) ordered desegregation of buses, and the effort brought great support to the civil rights movement.

Changing course

By the mid-1960s, Farmer realized that disagreement within the ranks of the protestors themselves threatened the civil rights movement. Many members of the movement were growing dissatisfied with nonviolent tactics, claiming they were not working fast enough. Also, a growing number of factions were competing for attention and support. Farmer resigned from CORE in 1965.

In his later career, Farmer held several academic teaching positions. In 1968, he ran for Congress in New York , but he was defeated by an African American, New York assemblywoman Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005). In 1969, Farmer briefly served as assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where he implemented affirmative action programs—programs designed to correct past discrimination with active measures to ensure equal opportunity. He wrote books on labor and race relations as well as an autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart (1985). President Bill Clinton (1946–; served 1993–2001) awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Farmer died in Fredericksburg, Virginia , at the age of 79.