James Farmer Brings Days of Fear, Hate to Students

The distinguished visiting professor with the patch over his right eye tugs at a tweed sleeve and bends an ear to his chiming wristwatch.

“Twenty-eight minutes past one,” James Farmer announces in that resonant, mellifluous voice to a hushed class of 40 juniors and seniors, leaning forward, pens poised over notebooks.

“As I was saying, those troopers were bellowing: ‘Come on out, Farmer. We know you’re in there.’

“I was meant to die that night. They were kicking open doors, beating up blacks in the streets, interrogating them with electric cattle prods. I got out alive in a hearse.”

It was a lovely spring day on the campus of predominantly white Mary Washington College, a state institution in historic Fredericksburg, Va. Bright sunshine slanting through the budding trees gave a roseate glow to the white-columned Georgian brick buildings.

But the imposing black figure at the lecture desk in Monroe Hall was wrapped in the darkness of another time, in another Southern state.

He couldn’t see the azaleas blushing at the windowsill or sniff the cherry blossoms that just came into bloom around the fountain in the square. There was too much tear gas billowing through the busted windows of the Plymouth Rock Baptist Church in Plaquemine, La. And the splashing fountain brought back the swoosh of the fire hose washing hymn books and Bibles down the aisle as the mob smashed pews and ransacked the church.

“Scared spitless,” Farmer says, recalling that violent summer night a quarter of a century ago.

One moment he is a terrified Freedom Rider pleading with the local telephone operator to put a call through “to the White House, the attorney general, the FBI in New Orleans.”

Then he is a redneck deputy, snarling through jowls chock-full of chaw: “We know you’re in there, Farmer.”

Next he is the spunky female operator of the funeral parlor down the street telling him to “play dead in the back of that hearse” and ordering the driver to take dirt roads known only to blacks since plantation days.

Then he is himself, the founder of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, wondering if that night in Louisiana, less than a week after the march on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Had a Dream” speech, would be his last on Earth.

“This guy is tremendous,” said senior Rich Cooper, one of the students in Farmer’s course, “The History of the Civil Rights Movement,” a full three-credit course in the history department. “He’s a living piece of history. It’s hard for students our age to imagine an America where blacks could not go into a restaurant, had to ride in the Jim Crow coach next to the engine and were hunted down like possums or some other swamp dweller for daring to register to vote.

“Here is a man who has changed history. He’s seen it all, and now the tragedy is he sees nothing.”

But in the classroom the now-blind champion of civil rights sees something he never saw before in his 70 years--a ray of hope, “just a glimmer.”

“The hope for America is with these young people,” he said, gathering up a bundle of their term papers. “Their minds are not closed. At the beginning of the semester, black kids and white kids alike find it difficult to grasp that this is the way things were here.”

With King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young now dead, Farmer is the last of the Big Four of the civil rights movement. “We were the knights of the round-table,” he chuckled, counting the nine steps down to the taxi taking him home for a brief rest before facing an evening class of nearly 200 freshmen and sophomores.

Farmer is now in his fifth year at the college named for George Washington’s mother, where in a student body of 3,500, two-thirds are female and 4% black.

The preacher’s kid from Marshall, Tex., who grew up on a series of black Baptist campuses where his father, a Ph.D. from Boston University, taught theology, is still at it, preaching, teaching with compelling charm a nonviolent approach to racial harmony.

Eloquently he drives home the “fundamental lesson of the civil rights movement: Be better than your former self, not better than the South Africans, and thereby make a better world.”

Students are awed at Farmer’s lack of bitterness toward those who have wronged him and his race.

Sherry Brinser, a Spanish major from Richmond, said: “He’s fascinating. It all happened to him, and yet there’s no bitterness. None. How can he forgive what he can’t forget?”

In the Eagle’s Nest, the student snack bar, some compared Farmer with the actor James Earl Jones: the rich voice, the fullback’s build, the features borrowed from a Roman coin, the deep infectious laughter, the mimic’s ability to play all parts.

They cited the morning lecture when he was suddenly the owner of a diner on U.S. Route 1 between New York and Baltimore, turning away young blacks trying to integrate eateries along what they had renamed “Freedom Highway.”

“We don’t serve Negroes here.”

“Well, that’s fine by us,” Farmer replies in his own voice. “We don’t eat them.”

“He’s very expressive. You think you’re right there,” said Patty Charron, a junior from Springfield, Va.

“But he’s a lot more than just a performer,” insisted Rich Cooper, from Pittsburgh. “He speaks from the heart. It’s not like a lecture, it’s personal history. Others graduating with me agree his is one of the five classes you should take before leaving here.”

In his campus office, surrounded by plaques, awards and 19 honorary degrees, Farmer said: “Two-thirds of the graduates have gone through my class. About 500 a year. A Japanese girl, one of my brightest students, came here just to attend my class.”

“Once thought of becoming a doctor,” he reminisced, his hands laced behind his head. “Couldn’t stand the sight of blood. That’s another of life’s jokes, considering all the busted heads I’ve seen.”

Instead, he studied for the ministry at Howard University in the nation’s capital, where his father taught the New Testament and Greek. But he decided against ordination “because the Baptist Church, like others, was still segregated. Even today, to this nation’s shame, segregation is nowhere as complete as at 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning.”

Taking up the civil rights struggle at age 22, Farmer employed the Gandhi techniques of nonviolence to organize a sit-in at the Jack Spratt Coffee House in Chicago in May, 1942. Thus began CORE.

“A lot of soup was dumped over heads and garbage jammed into sandwiches,” he said, before the movement was strong enough to invade the South with unarmed legions of black and white Freedom Riders.

In later years, Farmer was a union organizer, ran for Congress in Brooklyn, N.Y., and lost to Shirley Chisholm, went on the lecture circuit and engaged in a memorable debate with Malcolm X. He angered his liberal friends by serving as assistant secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Richard M. Nixon Administration.

His personal life was never easy. There was resentment among both his black and white friends against his devoted wife Lula, who was white and his staunchest supporter. She died in 1976 after a long, debilitating battle with Hodgkin’s disease.

In 1979, Farmer lost the sight of his right eye to retinal vascular occlusion, a rare disease that he thinks was brought on by those hours of exposure to tear gas in Louisiana. “But the doctors say there is no evidence in the literature.”

He reached the sixth chapter in “Lay Bare The Heart,” his poignant autobiography, when the left eye began to go.

“I had to resort to a powerful magnifying glass to go on writing in longhand on yellow legal pads,” he said.

When he began teaching, he could make out vague, shadowy shapes in the first few rows of lecture chairs. “Now I don’t see the students at all. I just hear voices.”

Then, with booming laughter, as if the joke had just occurred to him, he pronounces himself “literally color blind. Used to be I could tell black kids from white kids by their voices. But as blacks move into the middle class and attend Eastern colleges, they begin talking like whites. You can’t tell anymore by their enunciation and pronunciation.

“No, I don’t think black English will disappear. Blacks who speak downtown English still speak the ghetto language when they go back to visit the family or attend church.”

One reason Farmer’s classes are the most popular on campus is the gallery of national figures he summons up from personal experience:

The Kennedys: “When the Freedom Riders reached Montgomery and rioters held us virtual prisoners in the First Baptist Church, Bobby Kennedy telephoned Martin Luther King to get me to halt the march and have a cooling-off period. My response was: ‘We have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off anymore, we will be in a deep freeze.’ The attorney general was furious, and that fury was shared promptly with his brother, the President. So I was never on good terms with the Kennedys.”

Lyndon Johnson: “At first I was welcome in the Oval Office: ‘From Marshall! Doggone, Jim, that’s Lady Bird’s hometown. Her daddy had a filling station there.’ That bond of Texas engulfed us. But I soon fell from grace when I refused to go along with a moratorium on demonstrations during the campaign against Goldwater.”

Adam Clayton Powell: “A clever man. He had more charisma than Jesse Jackson, but he didn’t like the NAACP, which we joked meant, ‘Never Annoy Adam Clayton Powell.”’

Louis Farrakhan: “Racism of any color is bad. I hate the things he stands for, but I’d fight for his right to be heard.”

On the day civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy died, April 17, Farmer told the class about encouraging Abernathy to write his controversial autobiography, “And The Walls Came Tumbling Down.” But “I warned him: ‘Don’t tell all.’

“He just grinned, but now I wonder if his death wasn’t hastened by the inner turmoil he must have gone through wondering if he had done an injustice to his dear friend, dearer than a brother, Martin Luther King. I just wish he hadn’t written those three pages about Martin’s sexual escapades on his last night alive. It wasn’t needed. There was nothing new. It had all been written before.”

In February, Black History Month, Farmer is a guest speaker at dozens of colleges. Whenever an opportunity arises, he encourages black athletes to get their diplomas before turning pro.

“It’s not easy,” Farmer sighed. “They are quick to ask: ‘Hey, professor, where did it ever get you? Show us your new BMW.”

But the professor says he learns a lot from his students, especially from their term papers. “I give them a choice of a research paper or writing some personal experience with race relations. More than half chose a personal experience. They tell of having a black friend in childhood.

“In most cases, as they approached puberty, entered middle school, they were yanked apart by parents or neighbors who ostracized them and called them nigger-lovers.

“It came as a revelation to me that so many white kids had black playmates and had that traumatic experience. It came up in paper after paper read to me. Their poignant childhood memories show that race has colored--no pun intended--every aspect of this country’s life. None of us, black or white, is untouched by it.”