James Farmer was an ardent integrationist who was committed to the Gandhian techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1942, he helped found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the first civil rights organization in the United States to use nonviolent tactics to protest racial discrimination. A decade and a half later, Martin Luther King, Jr. successfully applied these techniques to the Montgomery bus boycott, bringing international attention to the power of nonviolent mass protest. In his memoirs, Farmer described the impact of the Montgomery protest on the mission of CORE: “No longer did we have to explain nonviolence to people. Thanks to Martin Luther King, it was a household word.”
Born on 12 January 1920 in Marshall, Texas, James Leonard Farmer was the son of a Methodist minister and professor of theology at all-black Wiley College. He became a student at Wiley at the age of fourteen and graduated in 1938. He then attended Howard University’s School of Religion, where he was first introduced to the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi.
After graduating from Howard in 1941, Farmer refused to be ordained as a Methodist minister because the church was segregated at the time. Instead, he began working as secretary for race relations at the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an interdenominational pacifist group. During World War II, Farmer registered as a conscientious objector, opposing the immorality of war as well as the military’s racial policies.
In 1942, after forming CORE with an interracial group of students at the University of Chicago, Farmer and George Houser, a white University of Chicago student, led a successful sit-in at a segregated restaurant in Chicago. CORE’s nonviolent tactics served as a model for the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina and other parts of the South.
Farmer was named the first national director of CORE in 1961. During that same year, he conducted the Freedom Rides from Washington, D.C., to Jackson, Mississippi, a nonviolent effort to desegregate interstate buses and terminals. Freedom Riders met resistance at almost every step of their journey, the most dramatic incident being when a mob attacked the riders and burned their bus when they entered Alabama. When this wave of violence led Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to suggest a “cooling-off” period, Farmer angrily replied, “We have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off anymore, we will be in a deep freeze. The Freedom Ride will go on.”
Although he was listed as the chairman of a CORE advisory committee until 1976, divisions within the organization led Farmer to resign from CORE in 1966. Like other factions of the movement, CORE increasingly came under the influence of younger black separatists, and whites were being purged from chapters despite the organization’s tradition of inclusion. In a 1997 interview, Farmer said: “I don’t see any future for the nation without integration. Our lives are intertwined, our work is intertwined, our education is intertwined. There’s no way we can say we are a separate people, they are a separate people.”
After leaving CORE, Farmer taught at Lincoln University and at New York University. In 1968, he made an unsuccessful run for U.S. House of Representatives against Shirley Chisolm, who by defeating Farmer became the first black woman to serve in Congress. Shortly thereafter, Farmer served under President Richard M. Nixon as assistant secretary to what is now the Department of Health and Human Services.
In 1980, Farmer moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to write his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart. From 1985 to 1998, he was a popular teacher at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg . In 1998, President Clinton presented Farmer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Farmer died in Fredericksburg on 9 July 1999 .