James Farmer

James L. Farmer, Jr.

James Farmer (January 12, 1920 – July 9, 1999) was a Black civil rights activist who was one of the "big 6" leaders of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1942, Farmer along with a group of students co-founded the Committee of Racial Equality, later known as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization that sought to bring an end to racial segregation in America through active nonviolence. Farmer was the organization's first leader, serving as the national chairman from 1942 to 1944.

During the 1950s, Farmer served as national secretary of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. SLID later became Students for a Democratic Society.

In 1961 Farmer, who was working for the NAACP at the time, was reelected as the national director of CORE, at a time when the civil rights movement was gaining power. He immediately planned a repeat of CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a trip of eight white and eight black men challenging segregation in transportation in the upper South. This time, however, the group would journey to the Deep South, and Farmer coined a new name for the trip: the Freedom Ride. On May 4, participants, this time including women as well as men, journeyed to the deep South and challenged segregated bus terminals as well as seating on the vehicles. The riders were met with severe violence and garnered national attention, sparking a summer of similar rides by other Civil Rights leaders and thousands of ordinary citizens. Although the Freedom Rides were attacked by whites, they became recognized as an effective strategy, and the Congress of Racial Equality received nationwide attention. Farmer himself became a well-known civil rights leader. The Freedom Rides captured the imagination of the nation through photographs, newspaper accounts, and motion pictures.

Growing disenchanted with emerging militancy and black nationalist sentiments in CORE, Farmer resigned as director in 1966. He took a teaching position at Lincoln University and continued to lecture. In 1968 Farmer ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican, but lost to Shirley Chisholm. However his defeat was not total; the recently elected President, Richard Nixon, offered him the position of Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Farmer retired from politics in 1971 but remained active, lecturing and serving on various boards and committees. In 1975 he co-founded Fund for an Open Society (www.opensoc.org), which has as its vision a nation in which people live in stably integrated communities, where political and civic power is shared by people of different races and ethnicities. He led this organization until 1999.

He published his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, in 1985, and lived to see CORE move closer to its centrist roots in the 1980s and 1990s. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Farmer taught a class on the civil rights movement at Mary Washington College (now The University of Mary Washington) in Fredericksburg, Virginia until his death in 1999.

Farmer is portrayed by Denzel Whitaker as one of the debaters led by Melvin Tolson, played by Denzel Washington in the 2007 movie, The Great Debaters. The movie tells the true story of the successful debate team of Wiley College, an all-black college in Marshall, Texas.

References

• Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. James Farmer, Penguin-Plume, 1986 ISBN 0-452-25803-0

• There is much discussion by Farmer and Houser on the founding of CORE in several issues of Fellowship magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1992 (Spring, Summer and Winter issues) and a conference in October that year, "Erasing the Color Line in the North," on CORE and the origins of the Civil Rights Movement at Bluffton College in Bluffton, Ohio, attended by both Houser and Farmer. Academics and the participants themselves agreed the founders of CORE were Jim Farmer, George Houser and Bernice Fisher. The conference has been preserved on videotape.

External links/References

• PBS documentary on Journey of Reconciliation with Farmer interviews
• Who is James Farmer?
• James Farmer Memorial Page
• http://www.focusdep.com/quotes/authors/James_L_Farmer/Jr
• http://www.core-online.org/History/james_farmer_bio.htm
• http://www.cets.sfasu.edu/Harrison/Farmer/farmhome.htm
• Oral History with James Farmer
• Guide to the James Leonard, Jr., and Lula Peterson Farmer Papers
• Co-founder of Fund for an OPEN Society
• James Farmer Project