Farmer's War

The great legislative and judicial battles have been won. Local obstructionism yields, barrier by barrier, community by community, under the weight of law and the pressure of protest.

Now the crucial challenge facing the civil rights movement is to make legal equality meaningful in economic and educational terms. The change of focus was emphasized by last week's announcement that James Farmer would resign March 1 as national director of the Congress of Racial Equality to head a new anti-poverty group, the Center for Community Action Education.

Farmer, 45, a Howard University divinity graduate, helped organize CORE in 1942. He has made it the most militant nonextremist group in the civil rights movement. Attractive, articulate and aggressive, Farmer has also propelled himself into the confidence of the Johnson Administration.

The Office of Economic Opportunity has so much faith in Farmer that it is planning to pay about 90% of the non profit center's initial expenses, starting with a grant of some $900,000. The center's ultimate goal is a multimillion-dollar program aimed at improving literacy and job skills among the chronically unemployed. Farmer's war on poverty -- he calls it "my brainchild" -- will concentrate on the most difficult hard core cases, men between their mid-20s and mid-40s.

Thus Farmer will be carrying out the proposition sometimes forgotten by CORE -- that picket lines may pay off old scores, but vocational training will pay grocery bills.

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