THE NAME OF JAMES LEONARD FARMER, JR., founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and driving force behind keystone elements - freedom rides, sit-ins, demonstrations, and his own stirring rhetoric - of the 1960s civil rights movement, is indelibly etched in the annals of this country's race relations.

Less well-known, but of comparable significance in its own right, is that of his father, James Leonard Farmer, Sr., whose career in the first half of this century left deep impress on thousands of fellow blacks - and whites.

James Farmer, Sr. (CAS'13, STH'16, GRS'18), although born in deep poverty and Jim Crow subjugation, became the first black Texan to hold a doctorate when he received the degree in 1918 from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the third of his degrees from Boston University.

And with his formal education completed, he quickly distinguished himself as a prolific scholar and skilled academic administrator, a teacher who came to influence the lives of thousands of students, and a preacher who, remarkably, captivated both black and white audiences in the segregated South. The state of Texas will honor James Farmer, Sr., next March by dedicating a historical market to him on the campus of Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, as part of the school's 125th birthday celebration.

It is difficult in 1997 to imagine the importance of the letters Ph.D. appended to Farmer's name. In 1920, the year after he began his teaching career at Wiley, he was one of only twenty-five African Americans in the United States who held doctorates.

James Farmer's utter determination to earn the coveted degree was apparent in a remarkable trek that brought him to Boston University to begin undergraduate studies in 1909, a trek that perhaps symbolically foreshadows the civil rights marches his son would lead a half-century later.

To start from the beginning, the senior Farmer was born in South Carolina on June 12, 1886, to former slaves. His father at some point became blind, and the family was deeply impoverished. Farmer told his own children how he used to walk to school barefoot to save leather, putting on his shoes only after he arrived at the school building. The Farmers moved to Pearson, Georgia, and since no high school in the state was open to blacks, young James enrolled in the Cookman Institute in Daytona, Florida, the school that black educator Mary McCleod Bethune had founded with money raised by selling her famous yam pies.

His high grades at Cookman won him four annual scholarships of $100 each year to Boston University. The prospect of attending college elated him. But the award included no provision for travel. With the resolve he showed throughout his life (and passed on to his son), Farmer set out to Boston on foot. During the trek of more than 1,200 miles, he said, he slept in barns and occasionally rode in the wagons of kindly farmers. He arrived in time to enroll for the fall of 1909.

He found employment as a valet and carriage boy in Wellesley, eking out the difference between his modest school stipend and his overall expenses and managing to send money to his needy family. During his nine years at BU - he received a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Arts and Sciences and a Bachelor of sacred Theology from the School of theology before completing his doctorate - he earned no grade below A.

He began pastoring Ebenezer Methodist Church in Marshall, Texas, in September of 1917, while still officially a BU student. Earlier that month he had married Parl Marion Houston, his high school sweetheart. Pearl gave up teaching school to raise their children; Helen (born in 1919), James (1920) and Nathaniel (1928). About the time of his marriage he won a fellowship for postdoctoral studies at the University of Basil, Switzerland, an opportunity lost when the United States entered World War I.

Between 1919 and 1934, after two year's service as a pastor, Farmer held a variety of academic and administrative posts at various black Methodist institutions across the South, among them Wiley College. It is axiomatic that the existence of these financially strapped schools was chronically precarious, and this highly educated minister may well have been sent where his academic and administrative skills were most needed.

His former students vividly recall Farmer as an intellectual who would make you think," says Jewel Young Gray, a retired Marshall educator. "If your assignments weren't prepared, he would invite you to get yourself out of class and enroll elsewhere, but he did it in such as way that it wasn't belittling," she says.

After returning to Wiley in 1933, Farmer added the college chapel to his responsibilities. He preached Sunday afternoon sermons in Wiley's old wooden chapel, and as Marshall's white residents discovered Farmer's intellect and preaching ability, a growing number began to attend regularly. Empty rows separated them from the black congregation.

One white couple who attended those sermons was East Texas Baptist University religion Professor Solon Hughes and his wife, Inez, a highschool English teacher and later director of the Harrison County Historical Museum. "I know people think you are a great man," Inez Hughes told James Farmer, Jr. when she met him in 1985, "but in my opinion, your father was greater. My husband Solon and I used to go out to Wiley College every Sunday afternoon to hear his sermonettes." He was a great intellectual," Farmer replied. He was the most intellectual man I ever met," Mrs. Hughes said. If times had been different, I think Solon and he would have been great friends.

No printed copies of those sermons have been uncovered, but poet Melvin Tolson, on the Wiley faculty during the 1930's, offered another glimpse in his Washington Tribune column, "Caviar and Cabbage." describing Farmer's Mother's Day 1938 sermon. I was thrilled," Tolson wrote, by this vivid picture of Jesus the young rebel," who dearly loved his mother while battling the convention of his time. Dr. Farmer," Tolson continued, emphatically represents modern scholarship in the church, as typified by.(progressives) Harry Emerson Fosdick and Rabbi Jonah Bondi Wise and Professor William Davis Schermerhorn."

The Farmer family, however, would have to wait a generation to produce a true rebel to agitate against social injustice. Farmer Senior, the reflective scholar sounded his more typical nonactivist note in Plain tale to the Negro by One of His Own Kind." a piece in The Foundation in 1943. Commenting on talk by black soldiers home from World War Ii about continuing on American soil the fight for freedom they had begun in Europe and the Pacific, he advocated compromise with what he called the ruling group," because otherwise, in any conflict of the races...this ruling group could force the liquidation of all Negro institutions and businesses; it could expel or annihilate him, while the most he could do would be to curse and pray but to writhe and bear it. Men who make the laws are not made for the laws."

Farmer, then, was among the many black leaders of his era who believed that prudence and Zeitgeist dictated pressing for a lower rate of progress in race relations that the next generation was willing to accept. Perhaps his caution was directed to his namesake. -- the civil rights activist who in 1942 had founded CORE and begun to lead sit-ins in restaurants in Chicago.

James Farmer, Jr. remembers both the Mother's Day sermon and the Foundation article. He says the difference between him and his father was more apparent than real, although the younger Farmer had his own agenda in mind."While I had the idealism of youth and was more radical," he acknowledges, Dad was old-fashioned. For instance, he pointed out to me that Gandhian principles of peaceful coexistence worked in India only because the Indians outnumbered the British. But basically, both of us were intellectuals and stressed rationalism and logic.

The "Plain Talk" piece represented his feelings. But the sermon represented his reasoning, and I think was influenced by some of the discussions we had -- and by my clinging to the activist social gospel of the Methodist Church. We would frequently have long arguments and sometimes he reflected my side of the arguments."

Be all this as it may, the elder Farmer spent his last years in Washington D.C.. After his 1956 retirement from Huston-Tillitson College in Austin, Texas. He continued to write up to May, 1961, when he lay dying from complications of throat cancer and diabetes in Freedman's hospital in Washington. Meanwhile, to the accompaniment of headlines, CORE and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) volunteers departed on two buses from Washington for New Orleans. The Freedom Rides had begun and young Farmer was on board one of the buses.

He had left a copy of his itinerary with his parents. On the night of May 14, the day before the Freedom riders were to enter Alabama, he got a call that his father had died, and he returned home immediately.

A passage in the younger Farmer's Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement illuminates those events. "Mother emphatically stated," he writes, "that Daddy had willed the timing of his death, which he knew to be inevitable, in order to bring me back before the trip through Alabama. Each day he would unfold the itinerary and squint at it, saying, Well, let me see where Junior is today."

According to his mother, who was at her husband's side in the hospital, his father clung tenaciously to life and consciousness, following closely the daily itinerary. Then came the fatal day. Again from the autobiography, "Mother said...when the itinerary told him I would head into Alabama, he said, "Oh" and he released his grip on life and slipped away. She believed until her death that Dad had consciously done that in an effort to save me." Two days later, James Farmer, Sr. was buried in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan burned one of the buses outside Anniston, Alabama; several riders were hospitalized for smoke inhalation and other injuries. The Freedom Riders on Farmer's bus were savagely beaten at the state line before they made it to Birmingham. With the world watching on television and Police Chief Bull Connor in charge, police allowed a mob of armed whites to attack the riders for fifteen minutes before intervening.

One of the riders was left for dead; another suffered a brain hemorrhage and sent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Did James Farmer Sr.'s prophetic timing -- both as to his own end and to the itinerary's danger signal -- save his son's life? James Farmer, Jr. believes it did.