James Farmer, who died in June at the age of 79, was one of America's greatest 20^th century civil rights leaders.

A founder of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, 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 was nationally known and admired throughout the 1960s. When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Four along with Rosa Parks stood at his side.

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 Union in the 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 AFSCME President Jerry Wurf bringing together AFL-CIO public employee unions with the NEA, the American Nurses Association and several other organizations formally outside the labor movement.

Founding CORE

James 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, Farmer went to work in Chicago for a pacifist 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 the FOR proposing the creation of a new organization that would challenge racial segregation through nonviolent direct action. Farmer and others were influenced by the techniques developed by Gandhi in India, who was waging a campaign for freedom from British colonialism, based on the principles of militant, but absolutely nonviolent action.

The Congress of Racial Equality was founded in 1942, and within a few years, CORE 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 the 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 Supreme Court decision banning racial segregation in interstate travel. Along the way, the travelers were jailed and attacked by some, and accepted by others.

Organizing Public Employees

In the 1950s, a number of CORE leaders, including James 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. Therefore, he welcomed a job offer from Jerry Wurf to work for AFSCME District Council 37, helping prepare for a major strike by the Parks Department workers in 1954. Expecting Wurf to send him to Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where most black workers lived, Farmer was surprised to be sent, instead, to Staten Island. 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 James Farmer became National Director of CORE. Soon after the election of John F. Kennedy as President, the United States 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, broadcast around the world. One of the buses was burned, and a number of riders were beaten or jailed. Over the next few years, CORE became famous and young whites and blacks all over the United States joined, including Michael Schwerner, one of those murdered during the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964.

Freedom Medal

As President Bill Clinton commented when he presented James 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 praised his victorious opponent Shirley Chisholm, who became the first black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Farmer then worked briefly for the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare (now Department of Health and Human Services) during the Nixon Administration. Illness kept him out of the media spotlight for the past 25 years, but those who heard him at colleges and conferences were still amazed by the power of his rich-bass-baritone voice and by his words. 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 is the editor of the New York Labor History Association News Service.