James Leonard Farmer Jr. was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement "who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation, and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr." He was the initiator and organizer of the first Freedom Ride in 1961, which eventually led to the desegregation of interstate transportation in the United States.
James Farmer
Booking photo from 1961
Bust at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.
Mugshots of Freedom Riders, as displayed at the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia
The Greyhound bus attack site (center) is south of Anniston on Old Birmingham Highway (right). See Freedom Riders National Monument (2017 photo)
Violence at the Anniston Trailways Terminal, at 901 Noble St., is commemorated with a mural (2012 photo)
A mob of white people beat Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Alabama. This picture was reclaimed by the FBI from a local journalist who also was beaten and whose camera was smashed.
