James Farmer
African Americans' rights activist (1920-1999)
James Leonard Farmer Jr. (January 12, 1920 – July 9, 1999) was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement "who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation, and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr." In 1942 he was a co-founder of what became known as CORE, or the Congress of Racial Equality. He was the initiator and organizer of the first Freedom Ride in 1961, which eventually led to the desegregation of interstate transportation in the United States.
As a young man, Farmer had co-founded the Committee of Racial Equality in Chicago along with George Houser, James R. Robinson, Samuel E. Riley, Bernice Fisher, Homer Jack, and Joe Guinn. It was later dedicated to ending racial segregation in the United States through nonviolence. Farmer served as the national chairman from 1942 to 1944.
By the 1960s, Farmer was known as "one of the Big Four civil rights leaders in the 1960s, together with King, NAACP chief Roy Wilkins and Urban League head Whitney Young."
Biography
James L. Farmer Jr. was born and raised in Marshall, Texas, at a time when racial discrimination was law throughout the Southern States. His father James K. Farmer Sr was a Methodist minister and also taught at Wiley College in town.
When Farmer was ten, his Uncle Fred, Aunt Helen, and cousin Muriel came down to visit from New York.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “James Farmer” as african Americans' rights activist (1920-1999). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3806642. VIAF identifies the subject as 22162973. The Library of Congress control number is n84129162. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1999, 1942 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Farmer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.