7 FREEDOM RIDE
G
rowing up in Texas, James Farmersaw whites humiliate his father.
J. Leonard Farmer was a college professor with a doctorate, but
whites in the Lone Star state still looked down on him. One day,
while Dr Farmer was driving his family to a picnic, his car struck a stray pig
crossing the road. He drove on, he explained, because ‘out in these rural
parts, Negroes are killed for less.’ A pickup truck caught up to the picnickers,
and a tall white man carrying a shotgun yelled at Dr Farmer: ‘You done kilt
mah hawg, nigger... Ah wuz gon show that hawg in the county fair. Y’all
gon pay a purty penny fer that hawg.’ To spare his family, Dr Farmer adopted
a Sambo pose. He held his straw hat in his hands and looked downward
while he apologized and asked how much the hog was worth. When the
white man claimed the absurd figure of $45, Dr Farmer handed over his
entire paycheck, which the white man let fall to the ground. ‘Pick it up,
nigger,’ he ordered the professor. When his father bent over to retrieve the
check, Jim vowed angrily, ‘I’ll never do that.... They’ll have to kill me.’
To wage war on racism after the sit-ins lagged, James Farmer led a deci-
sive phase in the civil rights movement. A burly, good-humored man with
humanist convictions and Shakespearean diction, Farmer had pursued racial
equality in pacifist and socialist groups, including CORE, which he co-
founded. Farmer quit CORE over an internal squabble and became a union
organizer. Years later, he returned to the civil rights cause as program direc-
tor of the conservative NAACP, but grew frustrated when he could not inter-
est the association in the sit-in tactic that he pioneered. When CORE invited
him back, he jumped at the second chance. His former boss, Roy Wilkins,
remarked wistfully that Farmer would be riding a mustang pony while he
was riding a dinosaur.
As CORE’s national director, Farmer read stacks of letters from black
southerners complaining that whites abused them for sitting in the front of
buses and using terminal facilities. Such harassment in interstate travel was
barred by the US Supreme Court in two cases – Morganv. Virginia(1946) andFarmer, James(1920–
99): CORE co-founder
who pioneered the sit-in
technique, organized
the Freedom Ride, and
pushed voter registration.