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Introduction
James Farmer is regarded as a key founder of the Congress of Racial Parity and the last survivor of the “Big Four” who formed the civil-rights move in the United States in the mid-1950s and ’60s,
His essential collaborators in the civil rights movement were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who was killed in 1968; Whitney Young of the Urban League, who died in 1971; and Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who died in 1981.
Significant attention in recent years had been paid o Dr. King’s actions and activities; Farmer played an immense role in the movement as a leader of the association commonly known as CORE.
The farmer was a follower of Mohandas Gandhi, and it was Gandhi’s approach of peaceful direct action that was to become the Farmer’s weapon against discrimination. A stern integrationist, he enrolled both whites and blacks as CORE volunteers.
Some white liberals who generally approved of what Farmer – a liberal himself, was doing frequently advised him to be more tolerant with an intractable society subjugated by whites. They thought that the doctrine of peacefulness was fundamental in its use of striking and protest marches.
The farmer was horrified to learn that in one survey of blacks taken in the 1990s, someone said he considered that Dr. King’s claim to fame was that he had “worked for Al Sharpton” and that lots of adolescent blacks had never heard of Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Farmer or had only the unclear notion of what they had stood for. And so when President Clinton granted him a Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 1998, Farmer said he felt “exoneration, a recognition at stretched last.”
Activity
James Leonard Farmer, Jr., a native of Marshall, Texas, was the creator of CORE — the Congress of Racial Equality — which was accountable for the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. Those bus rides difficult the federal interstate transportation accommodations at bus terminals as well as other CORE-commenced non-violent activities led in part to the passageway of the landmark Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and to the equally sweeping Civil Rights Voting Act the following year. The farmer was one of the Civil Rights Big Four of the era.
In 1961 Farmer, who worked for the NAACP at the time, was asked to lead the Freedom Rides for the CORE and, who had taken a pause from leading the group, went on to be its countrywide director. He also organized the Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides led to the integration of bus terminals and interstate buses. He instantly aimed to repeat the CORE’s Journey of Reconciliation which occurred n 1947, a trip of eight white and eight black men who claimed separation in public transport in the upper South. This time, though, the group would journey to the Deep South, and Farmer invented a new name for the trip: the Freedom Ride. On May 4, members tripped to the deep South, this time comprising women as well as men, and tested divided bus terminals as well as seating on the vans. By the mid-1960s, Farmer was growing disillusioned with emerging militancy and Black Nationalist reactions in CORE and resigned in 1966. He took a teaching position at Lincoln University and sustained to lecture. In 1968 Farmer ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican but lost to Shirley Chisholm. However, his defeat was not total; the recently elected President, Richard Nixon, offered him the position of Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Black American journalists Glen Ford and Peter Gamble portray Project 21 (According to Project 21, it has been a principal voice of the African-American society since 1992. It also says it is ‘an important influence for a new age group of African-American guidance – a generation that is prepared to go beyond ‘the nation’s civil rights institution.) As a Black front group and a network and nursery for aspiring rightwing operatives. They are equally mocking about CORE – ‘a tin cup outstretched to every Hard Right political movement or cause that finds it suitable to hire Black cheerleaders’. They also report how James Farmer, the former head of the original Congress of Racial Equality, confronted Roy Innis on TV for turning ‘the organization into what James Farmer called a “shakedown” gang.’ Ford and Gamble describe Innis as a ‘gangster “civil rights” caricature.’
The Reconciliation Ride
Approximately ten years after John F. Kennedy was elected president, in large part due to extensive prop up among blacks who presumed that Kennedy was more concerned with the civil rights movement than his adversary, Richard Nixon. Once in office, conversely, Kennedy proved less dedicated to the movement than he had emerged during the campaign. To check the president’s dedication to civil rights, CORE proposed a new Journey of Reconciliation, also known as the “Freedom Ride.” The tactics were the same as during other activities: an interracial group would board buses directed to the South. The whites would sit in the back and the blacks in the front. At rest stops, the whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa. This was not civil insubordination, really, explained CORE director James Farmer, “As we were just doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do.” But the Freedom Riders anticipated meeting confrontation. “We thought we could count on the racists of the South to generate a calamity so that the national government would be bound to enforce the law,” said Farmer. “When we started the ride, I think all of us were ready for as much aggression as could be thrown at us. We were ready for the likelihood of death.”
The Freedom Ride departed from Washington DC on May 4, 1961. It had to get to New Orleans on May 17. Unlike the innovative Journey of Reconciliation, the Freedom Ride met little confrontation in the upper South.
On May 14, the Freedom Riders divided into two groups to take a tour through Alabama. The first group was “greeted” by a crowd of about 200 fuming people in Anniston. The mob stoned the bus and cut the tires. The bus coped with getting away, but when it stopped about six miles out of town to put on new tires, it was bombed. The other grouping did not charge any better. It was met by a mob in Birmingham, and the Riders were harshly beaten.
Despite the violence, the Freedom Riders were claimed to continue. Jim Peck, a white who had fifty wounds from the beatings he got, insisted, “I think it is principally significant at this time when it has become nationwide news that we carry on and show that diplomacy can prevail over aggression.” The bus company, nevertheless, did not want to be in jeopardy of losing another bus to a bombing, and its drivers, who were white, did not want to risk their lives. After two days of ineffective conciliations, the Freedom Riders, being afraid for their security, departed to New Orleans. It happened that the Freedom Ride ended.
At that point, nevertheless, a group of Nashville protesting scholars chose to go to Birmingham and go on the Freedom Rides. Diane Nash, who coped with organizing the group, later enlightened, “If the Freedom Riders had been ended as a result of aggression, I strongly considered that the future of the action was going to be cut small. The notion would have been that any time a movement starts, everything everyone needs to do is assault it with enormous brutality, and the blacks will stop.”
Rewards and recognitions
Dr. Farmer has always had the private pleasure for the alters he made in this country, said Humble. Now he is getting the public gratitude he is worthy of, and he has necessitated for a long time.
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, visibly, this is a very merited appreciation, both in terms of Farmer’s civil rights obligation and also for his assurance to righteousness, parity and civilization.
The degrees and honors he had been awarded:
- Doctor of Humane Letters Adelphi University, New York, 2/2/94
- Doctor of Laws Butler University, Indiana, 5/13/95
- Doctor of Laws University of Rhode Island, 5/23/93
- Doctor of Humane Letters Jersey City State College, New Jersey, 6/3/69
- Doctor of Humanities Manchester College, Indiana 5/23/72
- Doctor of Literature DePaul University, Illinois, 1970
- Doctor of Letters St. Francis College, Maine, 5/23/70
- Doctor of Public Service Central Michigan University, 6/69
- Doctor of Humanities The University of the Americas, Mexico D.F. 5/70
- Doctor of Laws Capital University, Ohio 5/18/85
- Doctor of Humane Letters John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, 6/4/89
- Doctor of Laws Baker University, Kansas 6/1/69
- Doctor of Laws Anderson College, Indiana, 6/14/71
- Doctor of Humanities Morgan State College, Maryland, 6/1/64
- Doctor of Laws Central State University, Ohio, 6/13/77
- Doctor of Humanities Wiley College, Texas, 5/6/84
- Doctor of Humane Letters Sojourner-Douglas College, Maryland, 7/6/86
- Doctor of Laws Antioch University, Ohio, 1/15/94
- Doctor of Laws Westminster College, Pennsylvania, 2/26/92
- Doctor of Humane Letters Lake Forest College, Illinois, 5/12/80
- Doctor of Humane Letters Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University, 2/20/97
- Doctor of Humane Letters Mary Washington College, Virginia, 5/17/97
References
James Farmer Scholars Program Who is James Farmer? University of Mary Washington 2007.
James L. Farmer, Jr..” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web.
Transcript, James Farmer Oral History Interview II, 7/20/71, by Paige Mulhollan, Internet Copy, LBJ Library.
Humphrey, Hubert H., Joseph L. Rauh, and John G. Stewart. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 : The Passage of the Law That Ended Racial Segregation /. Ed. Robert D. Loevy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.
Lucas, Ben. We Insist! The Contribution of Popular Entertainers to the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1965 2003.
Mickenberg, Julia. “Civil Rights, History, and the Left: Inventing the Juvenile Black Biography.” MELUS (2002): 65
Ralph, James R. Northern Protest Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993
The papers byJames Farmer Civil Rights: From Black and White to Color. 2004.
Do you need this or any other assignment done for you from scratch?
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