by Bernice Powell Jackson

With the death of James Farmer, we have lost another warrior who served fearlessly on the battlefield for justice. And it occurred to me once again how many leaders of the civil rights movement we really had, contrary to popular opinion and the media accounts. Indeed, we are often asked today why we don’t have "a leader" in the contemporary civil rights movement, when the reality always was that we had leaders in the plural and today is no different.

James Farmer, former head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was clearly one of them. Farmer, who was one of the many civil rights leaders devoted to the strategy of non-violence, was often on the cutting edge of the movement. It was to CORE that students from North Carolina turned after staging the nation’s first sit-ins at a Greensboro lunch counter and it was CORE which began the Freedom Rides in 1961. Three of the students who were the first fatalities of the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 were CORE members.

Yet his was a name that many Americans never knew. Sadly, many young people today not only don’t know of him, but have never heard of Roy Wilkins or Whitney Young or Daisy Bates or Fannie Lou Hamer. Farmer was appalled to learn that in one survey of young blacks, some did not even know who Martin Luther King Jr. was, thinking he was someone who had worked for Al Sharpton.

When President Clinton awarded Farmer the Presidential Medal of freedom in 1998, he felt somewhat vindicated. "He was one of the founding fathers not just of the new South, but of the New America," said Congressman John Lewis, himself a leader in the civil rights movement and who, along with Mr. Farmer, was beaten and jailed on the Freedom Rides.

The grandson of a slave, James Farmer was the son of a minister/scholar and a teacher and spent most of his youth in a protected black college environment. He went to the Howard University School of Religion, but decided against becoming a Methodist minister like his father because the Methodist church in the South was segregated. As a conscientious objector during World War II, Farmer worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where his commitment to integration and non-violence only intensified.

James Farmer risked his life for his beliefs on many occasions. On one such night, armed Louisiana state troopers kicked down doors and beat up blacks on the streets of Plaquemine, as they looked for Farmer. "I was meant to die that night," Farmer himself recalled, adding that the only way he got out was because a funeral home director had him play dead in the back of a hearse that carried him out of town.

He was jailed many times in protests across the South. Indeed, on August 28, 1963 as Martin Luther King, Jr. was delivering his famous speech, Jim Farmer was sitting in jail in Plaquemine, LA and had to send his own speech via an aide. "We will not stop until the dogs stop biting us in the South and the rats stop biting us in the North," Farmer wrote.

In his later years Jim Farmer taught at several colleges and briefly worked in the Nixon administration in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. But he soon realized that he could be more effective outside the government. He had been in failing health for many years, battling a severe case of diabetes.