James L. Farmer, Jr.

Farmer was born in Marshall, where his father taught religion at Wiley College. He finished high school at fourteen and entered Wiley, where under Melvin B. Tolson he debated on the 1935 team that beat the national champions from the University of Southern California, a story told in the 2007 film The Great Debaters. At Howard University Howard Thurman introduced him to Gandhi's nonviolent protest. In 1941, the year he would have been ordained, the Methodist church placed its Black members in a segregated jurisdiction, and Farmer turned from the pulpit to the fight against Jim Crow.

What the plaque says

James L. Farmer, Jr.(Jan. 12, 1920-Jul. 9, 1999)Civil rights leader James Leonard Farmer, Jr., son of Pearl (Houston) and Dr. James L. Farmer, Sr., lived here as a child from 1925-30. James, Sr. taught at Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson University). In 1942, James, Jr. founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which trained civil rights leaders in Ghandi-inspired nonviolent civil disobedience tactics to protest racial discrimination. Under Farmer's leadership, CORE organized the 1961 "Freedom Riders" to desegregate interstate transportation in the Deep South. Farmer was an Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Deparment of Health, Education, and Welfare (1969-1970). He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George Washington Carver Museum — steps away
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 0.4 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 1.0 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• Site of Old Anderson High School, Kealing Junior High School — steps away
• Laurine Cecil Anderson — steps away
• George Washington Carver Branch Library — 0.2 mi
• Susanna W. Dickinson — 0.3 mi