Farmer, James Leonard

▪ 2000

      American civil rights leader (b. Jan. 12, 1920, Marshall, Texas—d. July 9, 1999, Fredericksburg, Va.), led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and introduced the nonviolent sit-ins and Freedom Rides that became emblematic of the African-American struggle for equal opportunity and freedom of choice. One of the leading organizations at the height of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, CORE organized demonstrations throughout the South amid vicious responses by whites: CORE volunteers were assaulted, teargassed, imprisoned, and killed. Farmer himself braved a Ku Klux Klan plan to murder him and once escaped Louisiana state troopers by hiding inside a coffin housed in a hearse. His efforts, along with those of others, led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts (1964–65). Farmer grew up in Holly Springs, Miss., where his minister-professor father taught theology at the all-black Rust College; Farmer studied at Wiley (Texas) College and Howard University, Washington, D.C., before working for the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Influenced by the nonviolent methods of Mohandas Gandhi, he cofounded CORE in Chicago in 1942. After the South disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court's 1946 decision stating that segregated seating on interstate buses was unconstitutional, CORE and FOR protested with the first Freedom Ride by blacks and whites together. CORE staged a major Freedom Ride again in May 1961 to test and break down segregated accommodations in interstate transportation. Freedom Riders were beaten, firebombed, and attacked by crowds; only after U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered state officials to provide protection could the ride be completed, after which Farmer spent 40 days in Mississippi jails. Meanwhile, CORE volunteers were peacefully conducting public sit-ins to protest segregation. Scheduled to speak, with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the 1963 March on Washington, Farmer instead listened to the radio broadcast of the event from his jail cell in Louisiana. After resigning as director of CORE in 1965, he ran for congress from Brooklyn, N.Y., as a liberal candidate, was an assistant secretary of health, education, and welfare in Pres. Richard Nixon's first administration, wrote books on labour and race relations, and taught in colleges. In 1998 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Pres. Bill Clinton.

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