James Leonard Farmer, Jr. (January 12, 1920 – July 9, 1999) was a civil rights activist and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was the initiator and organizer of the 1961 Freedom Ride

Freedom ride

Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decisions Boynton v. Virginia and Morgan v. Virginia...

, which eventually led to the desegregation of inter-state transportation in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

In 1942, Farmer co-founded the Committee of Racial Equality, which later became the Congress of Racial Equality

Congress of Racial Equality

The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE was a U.S. civil rights organization that originally played a pivotal role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement...

 (CORE), an organization that sought to bring an end to racial segregation in the United States

Racial segregation in the United States

Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation or hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines...

 through nonviolence.