MIM Notes 193 
September 1, 1999

Obituary: James Farmer, founder of Congress of Racial Equality

[Note: This article was withdrawn in a <a href="mn196/farmer.txt">MIM Notes 196 self-criticism.</A>--mim5@mim.org]

by MC45

"The more we learn about the past, the more we must recognize that 
we learn about it in order to bring a more humane society into 
being in this country. Otherwise, historical knowledge is 
meaningless." --James Farmer(1)

James Farmer, a leader in the struggle for Black liberation from 
Amerika in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s died on July 9 at age 79. 
Farmer's most famous contributions to the Civil Rights Movement 
include building the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 
organization and initiating the Freedom Rides. MIM owes an 
historical debt to the Civil Rights Movement for developing the 
conditions in which the Black Panther Party (BPP) attracted mass 
support and advanced the theory and practice of Maoism within u.$. 
borders. James Farmer was an important part of the movement.

Farmer founded CORE in 1942 as a professional organization that 
could hire a director and support campaigns ranging in the 
hundreds of dollars. MIM gives CORE credit for standing by the 
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) later in the 
1960s when other continental Black organizations distanced 
themselves from SNCC's move away from strict non-violence.(2) In 
the 1940s, Farmer lived on an ashram in Harlem, where he studied 
Gandhi's writings and the theory and ideology of non-violent 
protest.(3) Farmer moved around CORE circles and was employed as a 
union organizer and then by the NAACP until 1961, when he was 
hired as CORE's National Director.

A friend of MIM has written that even a cursory study of Black 
history under "the strict Apartheid situation in the USA called 
Jim Crow" reveals that Blacks could and had to form their own 
professional organizations.(4) The oppressors are highly 
organized. The white nation bourgeoisie has two huge multi-
national organizations at its disposal -- the u.$. military and 
government -- as well as privately owned corporations. But the 
oppressed are greater in number than their enemy and can win 
liberation through disciplined organizing of their greater 
numbers. In 1961, when Farmer assumed formal leadership of CORE, 
the organization had more than 12,000 financial contributors 
(compared to 4,500 in 1958).(5)

MIM has great respect for this level of organization. MIM has 
launched its own People's Internationalist Rear-Area Organization 
(PIRAO) -- which is responsible for leading in all areas of 
infrastructure development. The bourgeoisie has done too good a 
job teaching all our youth that the tasks of infrastructure 
development are beyond them. The youth are inclined to join the 
Peace Corps or some other volunteer service for the Amerikan 
government, because they lack confidence in themselves and in the 
oppressed.(6) As we study the history of the Civil Rights Movement 
in this country, and of other progressive activists who have 
achieved broad and genuine change, we must be mindful of their 
methods. The correct revolutionary ideology should lead activists 
to pursue the best-proven methods for strategic success.

John Lewis, who later became the chair of SNCC, participated in 
the 1961 Freedom Rides. Lewis notes that in training for the 
rides, Farmer repeatedly emphasized that CORE had initiated and 
was leading the effort and that participants should recognize 
CORE's role in the civil rights movement as expressed by this 
leadership.(7) According to Lewis, SNCC in later years thought 
CORE claimed credit for SNCC's work. MIM does not know about the 
disagreements between the two organizations, but we do know that 
Farmer's emphasis on CORE's leadership of the Freedom Rides was 
correct.

Such a clear statement of leadership is necessary to assign both 
credit and accountability to political work. The Freedom Rides 
were a dangerous and expensive campaign. "Integrated groups of 
students, ministers, and priests boarded interstate buses to ride 
from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans with an intent to seek 
service in terminals along the route."(8) CORE paid the riders' 
way, and as was demanded by Farmer's non-violent strategy, 
informed FBI Director Hoover, President John Kennedy and Attorney 
General Robert Kennedy, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and 
Greyhound and Trailways bus companies of the planned action.(9) 
MIM Theory 8: The Anarchist Ideal & Communist Revolution explains 
that even if the people organizing a political effort do not take 
credit for its successes, someone will. It is irresponsible and 
poor leadership to launch a political project without clearly 
designating leadership.(10) Activists today have a clearer 
understanding of the Freedom Rides because the leadership was 
clear.

In line with other religious-influenced civil rights protest 
practice in the u.$., Farmer was committed to non-violent struggle 
as a matter of ideological principle. Ralph Abernathy (a close 
associate of Martin Luther King, Jr.) remembers Farmer saying in 
the wake of MLK's assassination: "Every racist in this country has 
killed Dr. King. Evil societies always destroy their consciences. 
The only fitting memorial to this martyred leader is a monumental 
commitment now, not a day later -- to eliminate racism. Dr. King 
hated bloodshed. His own blood must not now trigger more 
bloodshed."(11)

But during the Freedom Ride, when Farmer saw the dramatic 
brutality that segregationist whites directed at the 
demonstrators, he suspended this non-violent protest. John Lewis 
recounts that in Birmingham "[a sixty year old Freedom Rider] was 
beaten to the terminal floor and kicked repeatedly in the head" 
causing "permanent brain damage and a stroke that would paralyze 
him for the rest of his life." In Anniston, AL they suffered their 
worst attack to that point, as one of their busses was chased from 
the station and then firebombed. "Testimony presented before the 
U.S. Congress years later described local Klan leaders conferring 
with the Birmingham police in advance of the riders' arrival and 
actually receiving a promise that their mob would be given enough 
time to freely attack the passengers before the police moved 
in."(12)

But Lewis reports that the students involved in the rides did not 
want to stop, fearing that would instruct their attackers that 
violence would stop their anti-segregation work. The Nashville 
Student Movement assumed leadership of the Freedom Ride and 
continued. Farmer continued as the director of CORE through 1966.

Outside of his efforts to work within the u.$. government (in the 
Nixon administration and then in the New York State government in 
the 1980s),(13) MIM does not know much about Farmer's life after 
CORE. As did so many other activists of the 1960s and before, 
Farmer abandoned strategic confidence in the struggle for Black 
liberation later in life. This is obvious in his running for a 
seat on the u.$. Congress -- the legislative arm of the largest 
imperialist government on the planet. It is also clear in his 
reaction to President Klinton's award of the Presidential Medal of 
Freedom in 1998. Frustrated with living in the shadow of MLK's co-
opted legacy, Farmer referred to the medal as "vindication" of his 
role as a civil rights leader. The Associated Press reports Farmer 
as saying "I certainly was ignored and forgotten" among civil 
rights leaders.(13)

Individuals who make important contributions to political struggle 
will be remembered by the people who matter -- the international 
proletariat. And surely, we are not in this for recognition but 
for the liberation of the majority of the world's people. MIM 
studies the history of the civil rights movement in this country 
as a decades-long struggle that brought substantial legal rights 
to the Black nation, and built a sharper path for continuing 
revolutionary struggle. This period contains many lessons on the 
limits of reformist struggle and the limits of non-violence in 
confronting a persistently violent enemy. We urge all activists to 
take the history of political struggle seriously. As Farmer said 
at one time and as Marx said a century before him, the purpose of 
historical study is to change our conditions.

Notes:
1. From a speech about the March on Washington quoted in Charles 
M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition 
and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1995. p. 440.
2. Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound New York: John Wiley & 
Sons, Inc., 1998. p. 200.
3. Payne, p. 390.
4. Review of Chuck D., Rap, Race & Reality in MIM bookstore, 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/
5. John Lewis with Michael D'Orso, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir 
of the Movement New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. p. 138.
6. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/pirao/peacecor.html
7. Lewis, p. 138.
8. Grant, pp. 137-8.
9. Lewis, p. 139-40.
10. "Review: The Kronstadt Uprising by Ida Mett", ITAL MIM Theory 
no. 8: The Anarchist Ideal and Communist Revolution. END 1995. p. 
38-40.
11. Ralph David Abernathy, And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: An 
Autobiography New York: Harper & Row, 1989. p. 451. 
12. Lewis, p. 145-7. 
13. Associated Press 10 July, 1999. 

edited by MC44