James Farmer Jr., Freedom Ride Organizer On Non-Violent Resistance : NPR: Wednesday May 4, 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride. To commemorate the occasion Fresh Air is replaying interviews with civil rights activist James Farmer Jr., one of the organizers of the 1961 Freedom Ride, and historian Raymond Arsenault. Arsenault's book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice has just been rereleased as a companion volume to the film Freedom Riders, premiering May 16, 2011 on PBS.
The late James Farmer Jr. was one of the architects of the Civil Rights movement in America. In 1942, Farmer co-led what he believed was the first coed civil rights sit-in in American history at a Chicago restaurant that refused to serve African-Americans.
The same year, Farmer co-founded CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, which was one of the first Civil Rights groups to apply Gandhi's principles of non-violent resistance.
