Pioneer Leader James Farmer, Last Of Civil Rights Movement's `Big Four', Dies At 79

Jet, July 26, 1999

James Farmer, a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and member of the "Big Four" who shaped the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and '60s recently died at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA, at age 79.

Farmer, who helped found CORE in 1942, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., NAACP chief Roy Wilkins and Urban League head Whitney Young were known as the "Big Four" civil rights leaders. Farmer was the last surviving member.

He had been in failing health and battled pneumonia and complications from diabetes that included blindness and the amputation of both legs.

His most celebrated achievement as head of CORE was to lead the Freedom Rides in 1961. It was a nonviolent effort to desegregate interstate buses and terminals, but participants encountered violence.

He helped recruit CORE members James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner who were murdered in Mississippi during the Freedom Rides.

In the early 1960s Farmer often faced threats of violence himself. "Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the Civil Rights Movement was either a liar or without imagination," Farmer said.

"James Farmer helped to make America a better nation, and I was saddened to learn of this death," President Clinton said in a statement.

Clinton awarded the civil fights pioneer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January of last year.

"He was one of the elder statesmen of the movement, an authentic activist whom we looked to with great reverence," said Rev. Joseph Lowery, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Farmer was born in Texas and grew up in Mississippi. He graduated from theological school at Howard University in 1941 and was a conscientious objector during World War II.

After college he worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and started contemplating how to change racist practices in America. He became a proponent of Mohandas Ghandi's nonviolent living methods, something King later exposed, and founded CORE while living in Chicago.

He resigned from CORE in 1966 to teach at Lincoln Univ. and New York Univ. Later, he lost a bid for Congress against Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman, and briefly served as a HEW assistant secretary in the Nixon administration.

Farmer moved to the Fredericksburg area in 1980 to pen his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, and he taught at Mary Washington College since 1985.

Farmer is survived by two daughters, Tami Gonzalez of Partlow, VA, and Abbey Levin of Darnestown, MD, and a granddaughter.