Sowing the seeds of the civil rights movement: Dr. J. Leonard Farmer and Wiley College, Marshall, Texas, as case studies of the educational influence on the modern civil rights leaders

Abstract

In an effort to determine one of the sources for the leaders of the modern civil rights movement, this paper examined the life of one of Texas' pioneer educators, James Leonard Farmer, Ph.D., and one of the colleges in which he taught, Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. Dr. Farmer and Wiley were chosen as case studies in the general supposition that the great majority of the civil rights leaders, from the founding of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942 to the end of the non-violent approach to ending racial discrimination in the early 1970s, were well educated middle-class African Americans. For of those civil rights leaders that education began in the South's historically black colleges and universities. One of the “Big Four” civil rights leaders was James Farmer, son of Texas' first black Ph.D. J. Leonard Farmer, who graduated from Wiley College where his father taught religion, philosophy, and psychology, and preached each Sunday at Wiley College's chapel to a racially mixed audience. He always said Wiley College was the place where he drew the inspiration to end Jim Crow, so I chose his father and his alma mater for closer study.