Black History Month

James Farmer: Civil rights leader and union organizer

James Farmer was one of America’s greatest 20th century civil rights leaders. A founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Farmer led the organization through the famous 1961 Freedom Rides.

Described by the media as one of the “Big Four” civil rights leaders (with Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young of the National Urban League and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP), Farmer (pictured at right at age 79) was nationally known and admired throughout the 1960s.

Of the Big Four, Farmer was the one most directly involved with the labor movement. Over the course of his long career, he worked several stints as a union organizer, first for the Upholsterers in 1940s, then for AFSCME in the mid-1950s. Finally, during the 1970s, Farmer was an official of the Coalition of American Public Employees (CAPE), a project begun by AFCSME President Jerry Wurf bringing together AFL-CIO public employee unions with the National Education Association, the American Nurses Association and several other organizations formally outside the labor movement.

Founding CORE

Farmer was the grandson of former slaves and the son of a small-town Texas minister and teacher. After leaving the South to attend divinity school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Farmer went to work in Chicago for a pacifistic organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). His friends in Chicago included a number of white and black theological students who discovered that when they went for coffee together, they often could not get served. The 23-year-old Farmer wrote a memo to FOR proposing the creation of a new organization that would challenge racial segregation through nonviolent, direct action.

CORE was founded in 1942 and, within a few years, its chapters sprang up throughout the North and Midwest. CORE members “sat in” restaurants, swimming pools, beaches and other public accommodations until their owners or managers agreed to open them to all equally. In 1947, CORE and FOR organized a “Journey of Reconciliation” in an attempt to desegregate interstate buses. A group of eight whites and eight blacks traveled through the upper South together in order to test the compliance with a U.S. Supreme Court decision banning racial segregation in interstate travel. Along the way, the travelers were jailed, attacked and, in some cases, accepted.

Organizing Public Employees

In the 1950s, a number of CORE leaders, including Farmer, left the organization to do other work. Farmer was always committed to the importance of economic equality, as well as social and political equality. He took a job with AFSCME District Council 37, helping to prepare for a major strike by parks department workers in 1954. Farmer recalled in his autobiography, Lay Bare at the Heart, that the Staten Island parks workers “all thanked me warmly, many shaking my hand with both of theirs.” The parks strike was a success, and Farmer then worked on the organizing drive of city hospital workers, who eventually achieved recognition as AFSCME Local 420.

Freedom Rides

By 1960, the civil rights movement and CORE were back on the move, and Farmer became national director of CORE. Soon after the election of John F. Kennedy, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of interstate bus terminals was unconstitutional. CORE decided on a bold plan to take “Freedom Rides” into the deep South to test this ruling.

The 1961 Freedom Riders, traveling on Greyhound and Trailways buses into Alabama and Mississippi, were met with extraordinary violence. One of the buses was burned, and a number of Riders were beaten or jailed.

Freedom Medal

As President Bill Clinton commented when he presented Farmer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 1998, the former CORE leader had “never sought the limelight.” In the late 1960s, after running unsuccessfully for Congress, Farmer worked briefly for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) during the Nixon Administration.

He will be remembered for his long years of organizing, and his unswerving commitment to economic and racial equality — achieved through bold, nonviolent action.

— Jon Bloom

(Jon Bloom is the editor of the New York Labor History Association News Service.)