Among the most forgotten of black Texans may well be those who taught at the dozen or more colleges and universities established for African Americans following Reconstruction. One of the best examples of them is James Leonard Maxmillian Farmer, who arrived in Marshall, Texas, in 1919 to take up teaching duties at Wiley College. He was the state's first black Ph.D.
Farmer was a theologian, preacher, educator -- and from time to time a trouble maker -- for the administrations of Wiley, Samuel Huston at Austin, Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, and Howard University in Washington D.C. He received his doctorate in sacred theology from Boston University in 1918, and served three black Methodist churches before Bishop Robert Jones appointed him to what was the oldest and most prestigious black Methodist college west of the Mississippi.
Documentation of Farmer's contribution to those colleges and the students they served is difficult for three reasons. His personal letters and papers were tossed into a dumpster some time after his death in 1961. His library, a gift to Wiley College, has disappeared. And the colleges for which he taught have not retained much of their own archives. However through what has been preserved by Boston University, the Board of Higher Education for Negroes of the United Methodist Church, documents retained at the Moreland-Spingarn Library at Howard University and the vivid memory of his son, daughter-in-law and students a picture is emerging.
Farmer's son, James Leonard Farmer, Jr., an icon in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), wrote extensively about his father in his own autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart. His daughter-in-law, Ruthe Farmer Swendson, widow of James' younger brother Nathan, lived near her father-in-law during his retirement days in Washington, D.C. and was able to save his last, unpublished book, but nothing else when Dr. Farmer's daughter, Helen, who had stored her fathers papers in her attic, decided to get rid of them. Ruthe Farmer said Helen hired someone to throw them from the attic of her two story house into the dumpster below.
"I saved the book," she said recently, "because I recognized the box it was in, but I couldn't get anything else. Farmer, who usually signed his writings, "J. Leonard Farmer, was born in Kingstree, South Carolina, on June 12, 1886. Some sources say he was born in 1885. His parents, former slaves, were Carolina and Lorena Wilson Farmer. She was a mulatto, her grandson said, the offspring of a slave and her white slave owner. The family later moved to Pearson, Georgia, where James Farmer entered elementary school.
"Daddy's family was poor, his son wrote in 'Lay Bare the Heart.' He told me that when he was in the first grade he would run home from school and sit on his mother's lap and suck from her breast. In that way food for one could feed two." Ruthe Farmer said her father-in-law told of taking his shoes off and walking to school barefoot, only putting them on when he arrived. Doing so saved shoe leather.
There was high school for blacks in Pearson, so Farmer, having obtained a scholarship from Mary McCloud Bethune, entered Cookman Institute in Daytona Beach, Florida. A straight-A student, he was accepted into Boston University and began his studies there in 1909. He received four $100 scholarships to attend Boston University, according to Matthew Dogan, president of Wiley College from 1896 to 1942, writing for a book, The New Progress of a Race, in 1925.
"He walked to Boston, said Farmer Jr. There was no money for transportation, and nothing to hitch a ride with except an occasional horse and wagon. [He slept] en route in the barns of kind farmers. Ruthe Farmer said he walked from Pearson, Georgia, to Daytona Beach as well.
Boston University records show his address as being Number 5 Abbot Street in nearby Wellesley from 1909, when he entered college, until he graduated in 1918. City directories from the period indicate it was a boarding house. The house still is in existence, and is now small apartments. Farmer's name appeared at that address in several of the city directories for the period 1909 to 1918, as well as in the Boston University records. In 1917, he paid his $2.00 poll tax in Wellesley. He told both his son and daughter-in-law of working full time for a wealthy white woman as a valet and carriage boy. A full time job plus a train commute cut into his study time -- something he duly noted in what he called an apology at the beginning of his master's thesis.
"I found it a matter of impossibility for me to keep an accurate account of the time spent on this thesis as I did not a little of it on the train coming in or going out of town. But I am sure that I have spent no less time than could reasonably be expected," he wrote. The job in Wellesley was important, because in addition to paying additional college expenses, it allowed him to send money home to his impoverished parents.
His father Caroline was blind, reportedly from looking into the sun while tapping trees in order to make turpentine, according to Farmer, Jr. The elder Farmer completed the course work for his Ph.D. in sacred theology by 1917, but did not receive it until 1918, when he had fulfilled the two-year residency requirement. During the added year he attended advanced classes offered by Harvard University on the Boston University campus, and in all cases made nothing but A's in his classes.
He came to Texas for the first time in 1917. The Methodist Church provides for bishops of the church to assign pastors. Those records show Farmer assigned by Robert Jones, Bishop of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, to fill the pulpit at Ebenezer Methodist Church in Marshall, Texas, from September until the conference met in December. It was a temporary appointment, and Farmer, having fulfilled his obligations, returned to Boston to take the Harvard classes. He married Pearl Houston somewhere near Boston in 1917. He met her while a student at Cookman Institute. She was at a nearby women's normal school in Daytona Beach run also by Mary McCloud Bethune. She had taught for a time in her hometown of Jacksonville, Florida.
The couple would have gone to the University of Basel, Switzerland, had not World War I intervened. Farmer had received a fellowship for a years study. Instead they were sent by Bishop Jones first to Texarkana, where eldest daughter Helen was born, and then to Galveston.
"That, however, was soon considered a waste, and his ministry was given its natural dimensions, religious and academic, in Methodist-related schools, Farmer Jr. wrote in Lay Bare the Heart. He was first appointed to Wiley College in 1919, and James Leonard Farmer, Jr. was born there January 12, 1920. "Because those colleges were short of money, highly trained faculty, and clerics who could preach to the bookish, daddy had to be versatile. At Rust, for instance, he was campus minister, dean of the college, and professor of philosophy and religion. At times he taught sociology, and even psychology. (They believed that anyone with a Ph.D. should be able to teach anything.) Farmer was also fluent in German, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
At Rust College in 1924, Farmers intellect -- and personal habits - ran afoul of the college president. Unfortunately, the letters from Rust College officials to Garland Penn, director of the Board of Education for Negroes, are no longer extant, but judging from the one Penn wrote to Rust College President M.S. Davage on July 28, and to Farmer on August 20, there had been quite a dust-up between Davage and Farmer. I believe it is prudent to quote both letters almost in their entirety, rather than paraphrase them.
My Dear Dr. Davage:
We have received several telegrams and letters from Bishop Jones insisting upon Dr. Farmers return to Rust as Dean. Farmer has been to Waveland [the Methodist encampment of Gulfside in Mississippi] and given Bishop Jones any amount of talk on his side of the question. He has told Bishop Jones a great many things. Bishop Jones in his letter to us [verifies] the talk about Farmer's misleading students on Biblical and Christian matters.
It may be we will have to come straight out and give them a full statement concerning your position as to Farmer's influence upon boys and girls inimical to their best interests. If what you said to me about the boys coming to you with skeptical views as to the Bible I do not think Brother Farmer ought to be teaching boys and girls. I know some things that Brother Farmer has been saying to Bishop Jones. I would not like to see Brother McCoy handicapped by his encounter of any opposition upon the part of Bishop Jones ....
This letter is for you to go over very carefully with Brother McCoy all the details as to Farmer including his use of tobacco, his slight and unwholesome expressions, bordering on vulgarity with the students, even girls. These matters you spoke to me about in detail in addition to his Biblical criticisms.
Yours Faithfully,
Garland Penn
"Brother McCoy was the incoming president of Rust College, and he as well as Bishop Jones were sent a courtesy copy of the letter Penn wrote to Farmer a month later.
My Dear Brother Farmer,
You have been notified by former letter of your reappointment as Dean of Rust College. do not write at length because I am going to see you on Saturday and we can have a little friendly talk as we do such times when we are together. Bishop Jones, Presidents Davage and McCoy have had conversations with you and I understand you have admitted to them that you were indiscreet at least in discussing such profound Biblical matters with the boys as to get them confused in their thinking with reference to the fundamentals of the Bible and Christianity.
I personally know nothing about [what] you have been doing or whether any of the boys were confused and went off at a tangent not consistent with orthodox Christianity. All that I know has been told me. I have always regarded you as a very loved man and I said that I thought when you seriously looked at the matter you would see the unwholesomeness of discussing these things with immature minds. I am glad that you have come to this conclusion and it is therefore with the consent of all the brethren whose names I have mentioned above that you continue at the institution in the same relation for the next year that you have sustained in the past few years. I believe that you will give President McCoy your best and loyal support and that the little flurry will help you and all parties concerned so that next year will be one of the best years we have ever had at Rust College.
With the best to you, your wife and the children, I remain.
Yours faithfully,
Garland Penn.
Farmer left Rust College for Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, the next year. In my opinion, these letters provide an important clue as to why J. Leonard Farmer should now be almost forgotten. Intellectually, he was over the heads of most of his students and many of his contemporaries, most of whom were only two generations away from the enforced illiteracy of slavery. An examination of the subject matter of both Farmer's master's thesis and 300-page doctoral dissertation alone suggest what a chasm existed between what Farmer could have taught and what he was allowed to teach without criticism. In 1916, Farmer titled what was called his senior thesis, "What shall we think of the Parousa?
The Doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ Scripturally and Rationally Considered. The year following he completed his dissertation, "The Origin and Development of the Messianic Home in Israel with Special References to Analogous Beliefs Among Other Peoples." Nearly ninety years later scholar-mythologist Joseph Campbell's best selling books on the same subjects tantalized many, and upset the religious right wing.
Judging from comments as to Farmer's contributions to Huston College, he was much more appreciated back in Texas. He continued teaching the smorgasbord of subjects he had earlier taught in Mississippi, and he took over the registrar's office. This gave him a chance to ensure the college was accreditated by the State of Texas as a full four-year college. An article appearing in 1930 in "The Foundation," Gammon Theological Seminary's alumni magazine described those efforts:
This year [1925] President Brooks secured his service as a professor of social science n which capacity he has served until the present. In 1928 he was selected registrar and acting dean of the college .... When he took over the [Samuel Huston] registrar's office in 1926 he found it in such a condition as greatly embarrassed and endangered the standing of the college with the state. But, as a result of his self sacrificing industry, the state inspector declared last winter that the condition of the registrar's office had improved 400 percent, that the records would be a credit to any institution, and that placed Samuel Huston College in the front rank of educational institutions in the state.
The article, written the year Gammon awarded Farmer an honorary Doctor of Letters, called him a prolific writer, having contributed numerous articles on sociological subjects to newspapers and magazines and having written the Sunday School lessons for the Southwestern Christian Advocate for 11 years [1919 to 1930]. The Southwestern Christian Advocate exists on microfilm, preserving all Farmer's lessons, but so far the secular articles have not turned up.
Farmer joined the faculty at Gammon the following year and regularly wrote for The Foundation as well. Finally in a position to educate Methodist preachers for their profession, he began appealing in print for a well-schooled ministry for our people [who] have not developed beyond the infant stage. They are Christ's lambs, they ought to be his sheep. He wished for men who could reach beyond the appeal to illiterate people of bygone ages. He wanted men who could present these same eternal truths in ways best adapted to the intellectual, emotional, and volitional needs of the present day.
Farmer stayed only three years at Gammon, leaving, his son said, because the incoming president Willis J. King was not a man for whom Farmer wanted to work. He returned to Wiley College. Since the powerful Bishop Jones and Farmer were friends, it is also likely that Jones moved Farmer to the place Jones felt he would been of most benefit. Certainly Wiley, at that time among the most prestigious and financially stable of the Methodist Schools in the South, was likely to be the best platform for Farmers many abilities. He would also be free of administrative duties, since Matthew W. Dogan was at the helm and had been for more than thirty five years at the time of Farmer's second appointment to Wiley.
Upon his return Farmer began filling a unique role in Marshall. As dean of the college chapel, he preached a sermon each Sunday afternoon in the old wooden chapel. Soon the knowledge of his eloquence reached the white community as well as the black, and white Marshallites began attending the Wiley services. One of them was the late Inez Hughes, high school English teacher and later director of the Harrison County Museum. She met James Farmer Jr. for the first time in June, 1985, while he was in Marshall for a lecture and autograph party for his book, Lay Bare the Heart.
I know people think you're a great man, but in my opinion, your father was greater, she told him. "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 told her. "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.
Those sermons may have ended up in that Washington D.C. dumpster; at any rate there are no copies around. One, however, can be reconstructed from Wiley professor, poet, and gadfly Melvin B. Tolson, who wrote a regular column for the Washington Tribune, Caviar and Cabbages. Of Farmer's Mother's Day sermon delivered in 1938, one Tolson called "a word picture to be hung in a gallery of memories," the poet wrote, "I was thrilled by this vivid picture of Jesus the young rebel. He clearly loved his parents, but he loved duty more. Truth was his polestar. The core of the sermon, according to Tolson, was the conflict between the hypocrisy of parents and the frankness of youth. The mouth Christianity of parents and the demands of youth for the everyday practice of the teachings of Jesus."
When people find themselves in a dishonest world in which you can neither practice what you preach nor preach what you practice, parents are likely to respond, take the world as it comes and make the best of it while the Christian youth says Change the world and make it what it ought to be.
Dr. Farmer emphatically represents modern scholarship in the church as typified by [progressives] Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rabbi Jonah Bondi Wise and Professor William David Schermerhorn, wrote Tolson.
Five years later, Farmer, who was teaching at the time at Howard University where he had been recruited by Benjamin Mays, had a warning of a different sort. It came in 1943, a year after his son organized CORE - the Congress of Racial Equality. Writing again for The Foundation, in an article called, "Plain talk to the Negro by One of his Own Kind, Dr. Farmer advocated taking the world as it comes and make the best of it.
Addressing African American soldiers coming home from World War II, Farmer admonished them against continuing the fight for freedom on American soil begun in Europe or the South Pacific.
Much has been heard about the new Negro after this war. During the First World War much was said and written the new Negro after that war. But except for such development as would naturally have taken place, one's eyes have failed while he waited and looked for this new Negro to make his debut. The age group that was then to have constituted the that new Negro would now be contributing to the rank and file of Negro leaders. But from the standpoint of what was meant by the "new Negro" except as would naturally accompany a greater intelligence, one cannot discern any very marked change in leadership. If anything, Negro weeklies have become less vitriolic and inflammatory .... Meanwhile all sections of the country have been becoming more alike in unfriendly attitudes toward the Negro.
Advocating compromise with what he called the ruling group, Farmer said to do otherwise in any conflict of the races with...this ruling group could force the liquidation of all Negro institutions and businesses; it could rescind every freedom which he now employs; it could expel or annihilate him; while the most he could do would be to curse and pray, but writhe and bear it. Men who make the laws are not made for the laws.
Farmer Jr. remembers both the Mothers Day sermon in 1938 and has read Plain Talk. He said the difference between him and his father was more apparent than real. "While I had the idealism of youth and was more radical, dad was more old fashioned. For instance he pointed out to me that Gandhian principles of peaceful resistance 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 it was influenced by some of the discussions we had - and by my clinging to the activist social gospel of the Methodist Church, James Farmer said. We would frequently have long arguments, and sometimes he reflected my side of the argument.
Clearly the apparent loss of Dr. Farmer's sermons and secular writings make it difficult to judge how this son of slaves who was apparently on the cutting edge of what is now called liberation theology could have influenced the country had he either stayed in Boston or Washington, D.C. instead of laboring in the Jim Crow South.
He left Texas for the last time in 1956, having spent the previous ten years at what is now Huston Tillitson. He had returned to Texas from Howard University when he was told that without spending 20 years in the same Methodist Conference he would not be able to draw a retirement income from the Methodist Church. This time Pearl did not come with him. Nathaniel was still in secondary school and the Farmers had purchased a home of their own instead of living in inadequate college housing. It was a home she wasnt willing to leave, said Ruthe and James Farmer.
James Farmer thinks the reason his father chose Huston-Tillitson rather than Wiley when he came back to Texas is because he was hoping for an appointment as a college president. It was something that never happened. Dogan had retired from Wiley in 1942, but the college was still on as firm a footing as small, black private colleges could be. There is nothing to prove it, but Bishop Jones, who headed the board of trustees at both Huston and Wiley, may have made the final choice for Farmer.
Judging from the papers of the Methodist Board of Higher Education, Huston was in serious financial trouble. Correspondence between Samuel Huston's president, Robert F. Harrington, and M.S. Davage, by then the director of the Board of Higher Education for Negroes, indicates that teachers had to wait for their pay checks from time to time, that bills were going unpaid, and that the schools budget was out of balance. In 1955, Huston and Tillitson merged and M.S. Davage -- the same man who complained about Farmer to Bishop Robert Jones some thirty years previously -- was named president of the combined colleges. Farmer left Texas for Washington the next year.
Farmer returned to Howard University as professor emeritus, but sometime before 1961 contracted cancer of the mouth - related to years of "smoking like a stack," to use Ruthe Farmer's description. In May, he lay dying from the cancer and the complications of diabetes in the Freedmans Hospital in Washington, D. C. when his son and twelve other members of CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] set out to test the nation's interstate transportation system for discrimination based on race, outlawed by the Boynton case, a Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in interstate travel, but unenforced in the South.
The Freedom Rides had begun and Farmer was on one of the two buses which left Washington, D.C. bound for New Orleans. He went with his father's blessing, being told, "Son, I wish you wouldn't go, But at the same, I am more proud of you than I have ever been in my life, because you are going. Please try to survive.
His mother believed that Dr. Farmer timed his death to save his son's life. As he wrote in Lay Bare the Heart, Farmer, Jr. had given his itinerary to his parents, and each day Pearl Farmer would unfold it and tell her husband where the buses were.
Mother emphatically stated that daddy had willed his death, which he knew to be inevitable, in order to bring me back before the trip through Alabama, Farmer, Jr. wrote. When the itinerary told him that the next morning I would head into Alabama, he said, Oh. Then he released his grip on life, she said, and slipped away. Farmer returned that night to Washington, D.C.
The next day, May 16, 1961, the Trailways bus, on which Farmer had been riding, arrived in Birmingham where Police Chief Bull Conner allowed a mob to attack the Freedom riders for fifteen minutes before intervening. The Greyhound bus had been torched earlier in the day by the Ku Klux Klan outside Anniston. All twelve Freedom Riders were beaten or suffered smoke inhalation. Dr. J. Leonard Farmer was buried two days later in Freedmans Cemetery in nearby Maryland.