James+Farmer+Jr

[|James Farmer Jr]



James Farmer Jr. was the last survivor of the "Big Four" from the Civil Rights movement. The other three were [|Dr. Martin Luther King Jr], Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins. Farmer played a towering role in the movement as a direct-action leader of the organization popularly known as [|CORE].

Farmer was proud of his role in founding CORE and guiding it to becoming one of the most effective civil rights organizations of the 1960's. The motivation for CORE came on a bright spring afternoon in Chicago in 1942 when Farmer, then just a year out of theology school, was walking with a white friend. The two decided to stop for coffee and doughnuts in Jack Spratt's Coffee Shop on the South Side.

From his experience that night at the coffee shop, Farmer created the group "CORE" to make a change. "CORE" under Farmer often served as the razor's edge of the movement. It was to CORE that the four Greensboro, N.C., students turned after staging the first in the series of sit-ins that swept the South in 1960. Farmer also played a major role in the Freedom Rides in the south. The popular sit-ins and [|Freedom Rides] were all ideas from Farmer himself.

Farmer went to jail for "disturbing the peace" in Plaquemine, and was behind bars on Aug. 28, 1963, the day that Dr. King delivered his "[|I Have a Dream]" speech as the climax of the March on Washington. Farmer sent his own speech to the March on Washington, which was read an aide in CORE. "We will not stop," Farmer wrote, "until the dogs stop biting us in the South and the rats stop biting us in the North."

In his last years, Farmer lived alone in a remote house near Fredericksburg. When visitors came, he would joke about the times he had come close to death. Asked by a friend if he had ever seen a tunnel. Farmer acknowledged that he had, but instead of seeing St. Peter at the end of it, he saw the Devil. "And he said, 'Oh, my God, don't let this nigger in! He'll organize a resistance movement and try to put out my fire.' Farmer died Friday, July 9, 1999 at Mary Washington Hospital, in Fredericksburg, Va., where he lived. He was 79.

http://www.core-online.org/History/james_farmer_bio.htm

http://www.cets.sfasu.edu/Harrison/Farmer/farmhome.htm