James Farmer

James Leonard Farmer Jr. was born on the twelfth of January 1920 at Marshall, Texas, the son of James Leonard Farmer Sr. — a Methodist minister and the first Black holder of a doctorate in Texas, in religion from Boston University — and Pearl Houston Farmer, a teacher. The Farmer household was educated, devout and itinerant: across the first decade of James's life his father held faculty appointments at Wiley College, at Rust College in Mississippi, at Samuel Huston College and at the Howard School of Religion. The young James was admitted to Wiley College at fourteen — the lowest entry-age the institution recorded — and completed the bachelor's at eighteen and the Bachelor of Divinity at Howard at twenty-one.

He chose at Howard not to be ordained on grounds of segregation in the southern Methodist Episcopal Church and accepted in 1941 the post of secretary of race relations at the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He drafted there the Memorandum on Race Relations of February 1942 — the founding text of what would within months become the Congress of Racial Equality. He co-founded the organisation at Chicago in April 1942 with a small interracial circle that included George Houser, Bernice Fisher and Bayard Rustin (placed in this archive). CORE conducted across the following decade the sit-in at Jack Spratt's Restaurant in Chicago in May 1942 — fifteen years before Greensboro — and the Journey of Reconciliation of 1947 that established the operational pattern of the later Freedom Rides.

He served as national director of CORE from 1961. His decisive operational achievement was the Freedom Rides of May 1961 — the convoy of integrated Greyhound and Trailways buses from Washington to New Orleans that he organised to test the federal court order in Boynton v. Virginia desegregating interstate-bus terminals. The Rides — through the Birmingham and Anniston firebombings of the fourteenth of May 1961, the Montgomery riot of the twentieth of May, and the Mississippi imprisonments at the Parchman penitentiary that summer — produced the September 1961 Interstate Commerce Commission order desegregating all interstate travel.

He directed CORE through the 1963 March on Washington, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the 1965 Selma campaign before resigning in 1966. He served in 1969 in the Nixon administration as Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. He taught at Mary Washington College in Virginia from 1985 and died at Fredericksburg on the ninth of July 1999, at seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of CORE.