Civil Rights Pioneer Dead At 79

James Farmer, the last of the Big Four civil rights pioneers of the 1950s and '60s, died on July 9, 1999, at age 79.

Farmer founded the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942.

Twenty years later, he led the freedom riders in a nonviolent campaign to desegregate interstate buses and terminals.

Farmer, who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr., had been in ill health in recent years. He died at a hospital, according to Ron Singleton, a spokesman for Mary Washington College where Farmer was a professor. No further details were available.

"He was an authentic activist willing to challenge obscene laws and unfair customs through nonviolent direct action," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"He challenged injustice at its root," Lowery said. "He was willing to take to the streets and stimulate and precipitate. He was a catalyst."

Farmer had taught at Mary Washington College since 1985, and battled pneumonia and complications from diabetes that included blindness for the past five years.

The civil rights leader received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.

"James Farmer helped to make America a better nation and I was saddened to learn of his death," President Clinton said in a statement from Beverly Hills, Calif.

Farmer helped recruit CORE members James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, all of whom were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 during the Freedom Rides. Their slayings were the subject of the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."

In the early 1960s, Farmer often faced threats of violence himself.

"Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination," he said in a 1991 interview. "I think we were all scared. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking."

Farmer was born in Texas and grew up in Mississippi. He entered Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in 1934 as a 14-year-old freshman. He graduated from theological school at Howard University in 1941. He was a conscientious objector during World War II.

Division within CORE over leadership and direction led Farmer to resign in 1966, and he settled into a quieter life. He taught at Lincoln University and New York University. Later he made an unsuccessful run for Congress against Shirley Chisholm, who by defeating Farmer became the first black woman to serve in Congress.

Farmer moved to the Fredericksburg area in 1980 to write his autobiography, "Lay Bare the Heart." The book charted his involvement in that struggle, and also his personal observations about gradually going blind from a rare ailment called retinal vascular occlusion.

"He is simply irreplaceable," said Kweisi Mfume, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "James Farmer leaves this cetury as one of a few select men and women to be responsible for great change. His legacy begs that he not be forgotten."