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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient
James Leonard Farmer Jr.
Civil rights leader James Leonard Farmer, Jr. was one of 13 Americans who received the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Bill Clinton in White House ceremonies Jan. 15 1996
Farmer, a native of Marshall, Texas is the founder of CORE - the Congress of Racial Equality - which was responsible for the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. Those bus rides testing the federal interstate transportation accommodations at bus terminals as well as other CORE-initiated non-violent activities led in part to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and to the equally sweeping Civil Rights Voting Act the following year. Farmer is the only one remaining of the Civil Rights Big Four of the era. The others were Martin Luther King., Jr., Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the National Urban League.
The Medal of Freedom was be awarded to Farmer and the others on the birthday of Martin Luther King. U.S. Rep. Max Sandlin of Marshall was among the honored guests who attended a reception for Farmer following the White House Ceremony.
James Farmer is one of the giants and a true American hero, Sandlin said. He taught us that it's possible to work toward and achieve meaningful progress through commitment, education, fierce determination and strong faith. Sandlin said, As Americans we are better off as a people and as a nation thanks to James Farmer.
For three Marshall High School students the award is a long time coming. Ben Bates and Craig Moore succeeded each other as student council presidents in 1994 and 1995. Berenda Humble won first prize in the state for her History Fair Project on Farmer when she was an eighth grader. Each was involved in the 1995 effort to name a street in Marshall for Farmer, and in a letter writing campaign and a state-wide petition drive to the White House four years ago to recommend him for the Medal of Freedom. All are college students now, and each was both pleased Farmer had won the award and sad that it took so long.
Dr. Farmer has always had the personal satisfaction for the changes he made in this country, said Humble. Now he is getting the public recognition he deserves and he has needed for a long time.
Craig, now a sophomore at Austin College in Sherman, called Farmer, richly deserving of the award.
It is an honor that should have been extended long ago, Moore said. Farmer is my hero. Most of the hard work (getting the Medal of Freedom) was Dr. Farmer's, of course, but I just feel glad that I helped in a small way. It is just an example that it doesn't matter who you are, you can change public opinion.
Bates is a junior at the University of Texas in Austin. His frustrated letter to the Dallas Morning News after Farmer was passed over in 1995 prompted a lengthy Morning News story on Farmer and his work, as well as editorial endorsement that Farmer deserved the Medal of Freedom. AI will always remember one story about Farmer that exhibits the change he helped implant in this country, Bates said.
Referring to an incident in Holly Springs when Farmer was four years old and was not allowed to purchase a soda from the local drugstore, Bates said, As a child, his nickel was not good enough to buy a Coke even though the nickels of other children were. His legacy is that any child in America may buy a Coke regardless of the color of their skin.
Dr. Farmer has finally gotten an award he truly deserves. Dr. Julius Scott, president of 125 year-old Wiley College, and a friend of both Farmer and his father, said, Obviously, this is a very deserved recognition, both in terms of Farmer's civil rights commitment, and also for his commitment to justice, equality and civilization. Nothing could be more congruent than to do it on Martin Luther King's birthday, Scott continued. Given the ravages of history, Farmer is the only surviving member of the great civil rights innovators.
Don Carleton, director of the Center for American History on the University of Texas campus, is the curator of James and his wife Lula Farmer's personal papers. James Farmer has spent his entire life participating in the struggle for human justice and dignity, Carleton said. His work and activism among such leaders as King, Wilkins and A. Phillip Randolph was one of the driving forces of racial reform in America. It is good to see it recognized.
Farmer's roots are Texan, Carleton pointed out, and the Center for American History serves as the home of his historically valuable papers. Because of Dr. Farmer's generous decision to preserve his papers, future students will have an opportunity to have a deeper understanding of one of the greatest movements for human rights in America, Carleton said.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom was established by President John F. Kennedy, but first awarded by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The executive order creating it says the Medal of Freedom is designed for persons the president deems to have made especially meritorious contributions to the security of national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public and private endeavors.
James Farmer was born in Marshall, Texas January 12, 1920. He graduated from Wiley College in 1938, and received his Masters in Sacred Theology from Howard University School of Divinity in 1940.
He founded the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942, and also served as a labor organizer and lecturer. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress from New York in 1965, and was the Assistant Secretary of Health Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration.
Now blind and a double amputee, he resides in Fredricksburg, Va., and teaches at Mary Washington University there. He has been the recipient of many awards, including more than 22 honorary doctorates.
JAMES FARMER AWARDED THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM
(Senate - February 25, 1998) Mr. ROBB. Mr. President, while this Congress was in recess, the President of the United States awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our country's highest civilian honor, to James Farmer. The Medal was given to Mr. Farmer on January 15, 1998, the birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in a symbolic gesture that reminded us again of the value of freedom, and the debt we owe those who sacrificed greatly for racial equality in America.
Mr. President, James Farmer was one of the six major civil rights leaders of the civil rights era, joining A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. He helped establish, and later led, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He was the father of the famous Freedom Rides through the South. He organized and inspired. He placed himself in great personal danger again and again. Today, he teaches civil rights history to some very lucky students at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Last year, I was pleased to join Congressman John Lewis and others in asking that the President award the Medal of Freedom to James Farmer. Last month, Lynda and I were privileged to be at the White House when President Clinton officially presented the Medal to Mr. Farmer.
Before the White House ceremony, Congressman Lewis and I prepared a tribute to James Farmer, which I ask be printed in the Record following my remarks today. In this tribute, we thank James Farmer for a lifetime of fighting for racial equality in America. We challenge our nation to continue to learn from this great American hero, to continue to reach for a truly colorblind society, to finally lay down the burden of race.
The tribute follows:
A TRIBUTE TO AN AMERICAN FREEDOM FIGHTER
As one man who had the privilege to march and demonstrate alongside this dedicated pioneer during the Civil Rights Movement, and another who has long respected his courage and is proud to represent him in the United States Senate, we both have enormous respect and admiration for James Farmer. Now, all Americans are being given the opportunity both to learn more about this man and to appreciate his lifetime of contributions to our nation as a civil rights activist, community leader and teacher.
Yesterday, on the birth date of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., President Clinton presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our country's highest civilian honor, to fifteen distinguished Americans. We are grateful that James Farmer, one of the `Big Six' leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and the father of the Freedom Rides, was among them.
As the nation prepares to officially celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is also fitting that we join the President in recognizing one of the great soldiers and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1940's, while still in his early twenties, James Farmer was already leading some of the earliest nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins in the nation, over a decade before nonviolent tactics became a vehicle for the modern Civil Rights Movement in the South.
Early in his academic career, James Farmer became interested in the Ghandian principles of civil disobedience, direct action, and nonviolence. In 1942, at the age of 22, he enlisted an interracial group, mostly students, and founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), with the goal of using nonviolent protest to fight segregation in America. During these early years, James Farmer and other CORE members staged our nation's first nonviolent sit-in, which successfully desegregated the Jack Spratt Coffee Shop in Chicago.
Five years later, in what he called the `Journey of Reconciliation,' James Farmer led other CORE members to challenge segregated seating on interstate buses.
In 1961, James Farmer orchestrated and led the famous Freedom Rides through the South, which are renown for forcing Americans to confront segregation in bus terminals and on interstate buses. In the spring of that year, James Farmer trained a small group of freedom riders, teaching them to deal with the hostility they were likely to encounter using nonviolent resistance. This training would serve them well.
During the journeys, freedom riders were beaten. Buses were burned. When riders and their supporters--including James Farmer and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr: were trapped during a rally in Montgomery's First Baptist Church, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered U.S. marshals to come to their aid and protect them from the angry mob that had gathered outside.
In reflecting on the ride from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi, James Farmer said, `I don't think any of us thought we were going to get to Jackson. . . . I was scared and I am sure the kids were scared.' He later wrote in his autobiography, `If any man says that he had no fear in the action of the sixties, he is a liar. Or without imagination.'
James Farmer made it to Jackson and spent forty days in jail after he tried to enter a white restroom at the bus station. On November 1, 1961, six months after the freedom rides began, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered all interstate buses and terminal facilities to be integrated.
Six years ago, James Farmer told a reporter that while the fight against racism in the 1960's `required tough skulls and guts . . . now it requires intellect, training and education.'
Not surprisingly, James Farmer continues to do his part. Just as he taught his freedom riders how to battle segregation over three decades ago, he has taught civil rights history at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, for the past twelve years. He teaches his students how to remember and how to learn from history.
James Farmer has, in truth, spent a lifetime teaching America the value of equality and opportunity. He has taught America that its most volatile social problems could be solved nonviolently. He has reminded us of the countless acts of courage and conviction needed to bring about great change. He has shown us the idealism needed to act and the pragmatism needed to succeed. His respect for humanity and his belief in justice will forever inspire those of us privileged to call him mentor and friend.
As we celebrate the Martin Luther King Holiday on Monday, and as we honor James Farmer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, let us vow to continue to learn. If we truly believe in the idea of the beloved community and an interracial democracy, we cannot give up. As a nation and a people, we must join together and strive towards laying down the burden of race. And we must follow in the footsteps of a courageous leader, to whom, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, we can finally say: thank you, James Farmer.
Listen to James Farmer speak about the significance of sit-ins in the sixties: http://www.greensboro.com/sitins/audio/farmer.ram
James Farmer, seated, received the highest civilian award of the nation, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on Jan. 15, 1998. Pictured with him are from left, sister-in-law, Ruthe Farmer Swinson; son-in-law, Victor Gonzalez; daughter, Tamy Gonzalez; son-in-law, Bruce Levin; daughter, Abby Farmer; granddaughter, Abigail Gonzalez; and President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton.
James Farmer, Jr. and his sister, Helen, with their mother, Pearl Houston Farmer, taken at Rust College, Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1923.
James Farmer Archives
A Texas State Historical Marker honoring his father, the late James Leonard Farmer Sr., and dedicated by his son.
THE NAME OF JAMES LEONARD FARMER, JR. , founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and driving force behind keystone elements - freedom rides, sit-ins, demonstrations, and his own stirring rhetoric - of the 1960s civil rights movement, is indelibly etched in the annals of this country's race relations.
Less well-known, but of comparable significance in its own right, is that of his father, James Leonard Farmer, Sr., whose career in the first half of this century left deep impress on thousands of fellow blacks - and whites.
James Farmer, Sr. (CAS'13, STH'16, GRS'18), although born in deep poverty and Jim Crow subjugation, became the first black Texan to hold a doctorate when he received the degree in 1918 from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the third of his degrees from Boston University.
And with his formal education completed, he quickly distinguished himself as a prolific scholar and skilled academic administrator, a teacher who came to influence the lives of thousands of students, and a preacher who, remarkably, captivated both black and white audiences in the segregated South. The state of Texas will honor James Farmer, Sr., next March by dedicating a historical market to him on the campus of Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, as part of the school's 125th birthday celebration.
It is difficult in 1997 to imagine the importance of the letters Ph.D. appended to Farmer's name. In 1920, the year after he began his teaching career at Wiley, he was one of only twenty-five African Americans in the United States who held doctorates.
James Farmer's utter determination to earn the coveted degree was apparent in a remarkable trek that brought him to Boston University to begin undergraduate studies in 1909, a trek that perhaps symbolically foreshadows the civil rights marches his son would lead a half-century later.
The Long March - Starting North
To start from the beginning, the senior Farmer was born in South Carolina on June 12, 1886, to former slaves. His father at some point became blind, and the family was deeply impoverished. Farmer told his own children how he used to walk to school barefoot to save leather, putting on his shoes only after he arrived at the school building. The Farmers moved to Pearson, Georgia, and since no high school in the state was open to blacks, young James enrolled in the Cookman Institute in Daytona, Florida, the school that black educator Mary McCleod Bethune had founded with money raised by selling her famous yam pies.
His high grades at Cookman won him four annual scholarships of $100 each year to Boston University. The prospect of attending college elated him. But the award included no provision for travel. With the resolve he showed throughout his life (and passed on to his son), Farmer set out to Boston on foot. During the trek of more than 1,200 miles, he said, he slept in barns and occasionally rode in the wagons of kindly farmers. He arrived in time to enroll for the fall of 1909.
He found employment as a valet and carriage boy in Wellesley, eking out the difference between his modest school stipend and his overall expenses and managing to send money to his needy family. During his nine years at BU - he received a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Arts and Sciences and a Bachelor of sacred Theology from the School of theology before completing his doctorate - he earned no grade below A.
He began pastoring Ebenezer Methodist Church in Marshall, Texas, in September of 1917, while still officially a BU student. Earlier that month he had married Parl Marion Houston, his high school sweetheart. Pearl gave up teaching school to raise their children; Helen (born in 1919), James (1920) and Nathaniel (1928). About the time of his marriage he won a fellowship for postdoctoral studies at the University of Basil, Switzerland, an opportunity lost when the United States entered World War I.
Between 1919 and 1934, after two year's service as a pastor, Farmer held a variety of academic and administrative posts at various black Methodist institutions across the South, among them Wiley College. It is axiomatic that the existence of these financially strapped schools was chronically precarious, and this highly educated minister may well have been sent where his academic and administrative skills were most needed.
His former students vividly recall Farmer as an intellectual who would make you think," says Jewel Young Gray, a retired Marshall educator. "If your assignments weren't prepared, he would invite you to get yourself out of class and enroll elsewhere, but he did it in such as way that it wasn't belittling," she says.
Balancing Lectern and Pulpit
After returning to Wiley in 1933, Farmer added the college chapel to his responsibilities. He preached Sunday afternoon sermons in Wiley's old wooden chapel, and as Marshall's white residents discovered Farmer's intellect and preaching ability, a growing number began to attend regularly. Empty rows separated them from the black congregation.
One white couple who attended those sermons was East Texas Baptist University religion Professor Solon Hughes and his wife, Inez, a high school English teacher and later director of the Harrison County Historical Museum. "I know people think you are a great man," Inez Hughes told James Farmer, Jr. when she met him in 1985, "but in my opinion, your father was greater. My husband Solon and I used to go out to Wiley College every Sunday afternoon to hear his sermonettes." He was a great intellectual," Farmer replied. He was the most intellectual man I ever met," Mrs. Hughes said. If times had been different, I think Solon and he would have been great friends.
No printed copies of those sermons have been uncovered, but poet Melvin Tolson, on the Wiley faculty during the 1930's, offered another glimpse in his Washington Tribune column, "Caviar and Cabbage." describing Farmer's Mother's Day 1938 sermon. I was thrilled," Tolson wrote, by this vivid picture of Jesus the young rebel," who dearly loved his mother while battling the convention of his time. Dr. Farmer," Tolson continued, emphatically represents modern scholarship in the church, as typified by (progressives) Harry Emerson Fosdick and Rabbi Jonah Bondi Wise and Professor William Davis Schermerhorn."
The Farmer family, however, would have to wait a generation to produce a true rebel to agitate against social injustice. Farmer Senior, the reflective scholar sounded his more typical nonactivist note in Plain tale to the Negro by One of His Own Kind." a piece in The Foundation in 1943. Commenting on talk by black soldiers home from World War Ii about continuing on American soil the fight for freedom they had begun in Europe and the Pacific, he advocated compromise with what he called the ruling group," because otherwise, in any conflict of the races...this ruling group could force the liquidation of all Negro institutions and businesses; it could expel or annihilate him, while the most he could do would be to curse and pray but to writhe and bear it. Men who make the laws are not made for the laws."
Farmer, then, was among the many black leaders of his era who believed that prudence and Zeitgeist dictated pressing for a lower rate of progress in race relations that the next generation was willing to accept. Perhaps his caution was directed to his namesake. -- the civil rights activist who in 1942 had founded CORE and begun to lead sit-ins in restaurants in Chicago.
James Farmer, Jr. remembers both the Mother's Day sermon and the Foundation article. He says the difference between him and his father was more apparent than real, although the younger Farmer had his own agenda in mind." While I had the idealism of youth and was more radical," he acknowledges, Dad was old-fashioned. For instance, he pointed out to me that Gandhian principles of peaceful coexistence worked in India only because the Indians outnumbered the British. But basically, both of us were intellectuals and stressed rationalism and logic.
The "Plain Talk" piece represented his feelings. But the sermon represented his reasoning, and I think was influenced by some of the discussions we had -- and by my clinging to the activist social gospel of the Methodist Church. We would frequently have long arguments and sometimes he reflected my side of the arguments."
Be all this as it may, the elder Farmer spent his last years in Washington D.C.. After his 1956 retirement from Huston-Tillitson College in Austin, Texas. He continued to write up to May, 1961, when he lay dying from complications of throat cancer and diabetes in Freedman's hospital in Washington. Meanwhile, to the accompaniment of headlines, CORE and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) volunteers departed on two buses from Washington for New Orleans. The Freedom Rides had begun and young Farmer was on board one of the buses.
He had left a copy of his itinerary with his parents. On the night of May 14, the day before the Freedom riders were to enter Alabama, he got a call that his father had died, and he returned home immediately.
A passage in the younger Farmer's Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement illuminates those events. "Mother emphatically stated," he writes, "that Daddy had willed the timing of his death, which he knew to be inevitable, in order to bring me back before the trip through Alabama. Each day he would unfold the itinerary and squint at it, saying, Well, let me see where Junior is today."
According to his mother, who was at her husband's side in the hospital, his father clung tenaciously to life and consciousness, following closely the daily itinerary. Then came the fatal day. Again from the autobiography, "Mother said...when the itinerary told him I would head into Alabama, he said, "Oh" and he released his grip on life and slipped away. She believed until her death that Dad had consciously done that in an effort to save me." Two days later, James Farmer, Sr. was buried in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan burned one of the buses outside Anniston, Alabama; several riders were hospitalized for smoke inhalation and other injuries. The Freedom Riders on Farmer's bus were savagely beaten at the state line before they made it to Birmingham. With the world watching on television and Police Chief Bull Connor in charge, police allowed a mob of armed whites to attack the riders for fifteen minutes before intervening.
One of the riders was left for dead; another suffered a brain hemorrhage and sent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Did James Farmer Sr.'s prophetic timing -- both as to his own end and to the itinerary's danger signal -- save his son's life? James Farmer, Jr. believes it did.
from Bostonia Magazine 1997
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Medal History
