James Leonard Farmer Jr. was born in Marshall, TX in 1920. His father, James Farmer Sr., was a Methodist minster and one of the first African American men in the state to earn a PhD. The family moved to Mississippi and back to Texas during Farmer's childhood as his father took teaching positions at various colleges. Farmer was accepted at the age of 14 to Wiley College in Marshall, TX. In 1938, he graduated and moved on to Howard University in Washington, DC, where he studied religion. His master's thesis examined the interrelatedness of economics, religion, and race.
During his time at Howard, Farmer began to work with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist Quaker organization. In 1942, Farmer cofounded the Committee of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial civil rights organization dedicated to the idea that racial equality is necessary for a just society. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Farmer was a prominent civil rights leader, fighting to end segregation.
In early 1961, he became the National Director of CORE, now the Congress of Racial Equality. He led the first group of Freedom Riders, an interracial group of activists who rode buses in southern states to desegregate them. Farmer and his fellow activists were repeatedly threatened and attacked, as they worked to confront the racial segregation across the south. Farmer was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom but could not attend the March because he had been arrested in Louisiana while protesting segregation. His speech was read by a fellow CORE member, Floyd McKissick, who would take over as director of the organization when Farmer resigned in 1966. Farmer's resignation was prompted by increasing conflict over whether civil rights activists should take more confrontational action in their protests.
He spent the 1970s working with the Council on Minority Planning and Strategy and organizations which promoted integrated housing. In 1984, Farmer accepted a position as a professor at the College of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA, where he taught until 1998, a year before his death. He published an autobiography, "Lay Bare the Heart," in 1986. In 1998, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work for racial equality.
Roy Wilkins was born in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri. His parents had moved to the city the year before from Mississippi, fleeing threats of racial violence against his father, a minister. Wilkins's mother died when he was young, and he and his younger sister went to live with their aunt and uncle in St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1923 with a bachelors degree in sociology.
In 1922, Wilkins had become the editor of a local black newspaper. After graduating, Wilkins moved to the Kansas City area to work as the editor of the Call, a weekly paper that served the African American communities of Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. In 1931, Wilkins became the assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, serving with Executive Secretary, Walter White. It was this position which led to his participation in the planning of the 1941 march on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph, which was cancelled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order banning discrimination in the national defense industry.
When Walter White died in 1955, Wilkins was unanimously named Executive Secretary of the NAACP by the Board of Directors. The landmark Supreme Court decision banning school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education, was issued the year before, and during his tenure as Executive Secretary, Wilkins had to grapple with the competing strategies of the growing number of civil rights organizations. In 1963, Wilkins was one of the leaders of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the event, his speech addressed the continuing existence of segregation in schools and called on Congress to take decisive action.
Wilkins retired in 1977 and lived the rest of his life in New York, NY.
Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912, Bayard Rustin was raised by his grandparents. He attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church with his grandfather and Quaker Meeting with his grandmother. Rustin's grandparents were active members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which meant that as a child Rustin met civil rights activists and advocates, including W.E.B. Du Bois.
After taking classes at both Wilberforce University in Ohio and Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, Rustin moved to New York’s Harlem neighborhood and earned money as a singer. He studied at the City College of New York and by the late 1930s, he joined the Young Communist League because of the Party’s commitment to civil rights for African Americans.
Rustin left the Communist Party following the outbreak of World War II and shifted his political activity to the Socialist Party where he met A. Philip Randolph. In 1941, Randolph and Rustin led an effort to march on Washington in protest of racial discrimination in the defense industry. Randolph cancelled the march after President Frankin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 requiring equal access to federally-funded defense jobs. In 1942, Rustin advised James L. Farmer, Jr, George Houser, and Bernice Fisher, as they founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As a pacifist, Rustin opposed World War II and never registered for the draft. He was arrested in 1944 for violating the Selective Service Act and served 28 months in prison.
After his release in 1946, Rustin continued to work for racial justice while practicing nonviolent civil resistance. He participated in a 1947 effort to integrate public transportation in the United States, travelled to India in 1948 from associates of Mahatma Gandhi's techniques in non-violence resistance.
In 1953, he was arrested in California for homosexual activity. At the time, homosexuality was illegal in many US states. Rustin was not outspoken about his sexuality, but he also never denied that he was homosexual in order to avoid prosecution. This arrest as well as his brief membership in the Communist Party were often used to discredit him, his work, and his causes. Concerns about Rustin's vulnerability to criticism meant that other civil rights leaders often wanted his involvement in specific actions to be anonymous. For example, although he was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, some of the March's leaders said that he should not receive any public credit for his work in case it endangered the March.
Rustin founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute in 1965, which guided the AFL-CIO in its work on civil rights and economic justice. He continued to work for economic justice and African American civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s. He also became active in the movement for gay and lesbian rights. A lifelong pacifist, he opposed the war in Vietnam. He died in 1987, survived by his longtime partner Walter Naegle. In 2013, Naegle accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom given posthumously to Rustin for a lifetime of fighting for human rights and peace in the US and internationally