Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement

Preface

Preface Gail Beil, journalist, biographer ofJames Farmer's father, and longtimefriend and supporter ofFarmer himself, planned to work with him on the preface to this new edition ofLay Bare the Heart. When foiling health prevented Farmer from writing the preface, she wrote the following , summarizing what she believed the author himselfwould have said. JAMES FARMER DIDN'T WANT his written chronicle of the Civil Rights movement to end with Lay Bare the Heart. As late as 1996, he spoke of a new book he would call The Old Warrior Speaks. Because he has lost his eyesight and both legs and suffers from congestive heart failure, another book is unlikely. However, in the thirteen years since Farmer penned his autobiography of the 1960s civil rights movement, he has spoken on hundreds of college campuses and has been interviewed again and again. Those speeches and interviews reveal that he has not backed away from his commitment to ending racism by non-violent means. Racism, he insists, is still alive in the United States thirty-five years after another Texan, President Lyndon B.Johnson, eliminated Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Farmer remains a consummate integrationist. "Separatism was not the kind of America 1was working for at all," he said of the movement in that direction led by African American leaders who reject his idea of integration. "I understand it, though 1 grieve. 1 grieye for my people because there is no future in separatism. Our lives are too intertwined ," he told the Dallas Morning News inJanuary 1996. "None of us is going anywhere else. We are going to be here forever. So we're going to have to live with detente if not rapprochement." One of the ways in which he would diminish the lure of separatism and the cancer of racism is by encouraging residential integration, he told the Marshall News Messenger. "Racism is taught from generation to generation . Children reason that 'minorities don't live among us so there must be something wrong with them.''' The public schools should be enlisted as well. "Change the curricula of schools from kindergarten through college and teach the young- sters that the difference in skin color, hair texture, shape of features, the way people dress, the way they talk, the music they listen to merely indicates difference-not inferiority or superiority," he said in an interview with the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia. "That can be taught. It can be done easily. There has not been the will to eliminate racism. Perhaps we are approaching the day when that will surface." Farmer, the father of affirmative action, saw that the concept had been twisted since then-Vice President LyndonJohnson first proposed it at Howard University in 1963. "Numerical goals and timetables are not euphemisms for quotas," he said in a 1991 Marshall News Messenger interview. "It means that line managers or foremen would be told, 'I don't see any black faces here. Your goal for such-and-such is to go out and recruit some.' But they had to be qualified. Affirmative action did not mean hiring unqualified people." He still sees its worth. In March 1998 he told the members of the Texas State Historical Association, "I think that the need for affirmative action is just as great, even greater now than it was at the beginning . We need to move from color blindness to color-consciousness to eliminate color discrimination. If we didn't have affirmative action, I think the nation would drift rapidly back to the old system of blacks and other minorities being the last hired and the first fired. It can stop when we have effectively eliminated all the gaps in education, housing and all the other fronts where racism affects the quality of life and living." Farmer called war on Jim Crow much easier than the one which must still be waged on racism. Attacking it is more complex, because the manifestations are more subtle. He hasn't given up the fight. "Why do you think I'm killing myself speaking on college campuses wherever they will have me?" On January 15, 1998-the tenth birthday of his beloved granddaughter , Abigail-President Bill Clinton awarded Farmer the Medal of Freedom. In doing so, the president said, "Visionary civil rights hero,James Farmer has inspired millions of Americans with his passionate convictions, committed activisim and unwavering dignity. He never sought the limelight, and, until today, I frankly think he's never gotten the...