Working from Within

During his presidential campaign, Richard Nixon virtually ignored America's Negro population, and got only 10% of its vote. Since taking office, he has repeatedly voiced his desire to establish a better rapport with Negroes, but has been unable to persuade any leading black figure to join his government. Last week the President announced the appointment of a noted civil rights leader, James Farmer, to a top Administration post--one that will be used deliberately to assuage and assist the black community.

In the job of Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Farmer will be a key adviser to HEW Secretary Robert Finch on urban affairs. One of his priority tasks will be to establish liaison between the Administration and the strident young blacks who distrust government generally, but particularly a Republican government.

Farmer opposed Nixon when he ran for Congress during the last election in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district. A registered Liberal, he ran on the Republican ticket but supported Hubert Humphrey. The Negro district elected Democrat Shirley Chisholm, making her the first Negro Congresswoman. In recent weeks, Farmer has been increasingly impressed by Nixon ("He means to bring the nation together").

Pulpit Natural. Born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920, Farmer was a member of the black intellectual elite from the start. His father, a college professor, was the state's first Negro Ph.D.; he read Aramaic and Greek. At 18, Farmer received a B.S. in chemistry from Wiley College. Seemingly a natural for the pulpit (he had won a $1,000 prize for oratory), Farmer got a divinity degree from Howard University but was never ordained. He was repelled by the then segregationist policies of the Methodist Church, which inevitably led him into the infant civil rights movement. For the next 28 years, he dedicated himself to the black revolution.

In 1942, when Martin Luther King Jr. was only 13 years old, Farmer took part in a sit-in at a Chicago restaurant. A year earlier, he had founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which immediately began an assault on racial barriers in the South. In 1955, he took part in King's famed boycott against the Montgomery bus company, which forced the company to desegregate.

But such victories were no longer enough. After Farmer left CORE in 1966, he was dismayed to see his organization, which had been militantly for integration, suddenly turn toward separatism. Committed to the notion of Black Power, it limited the role of white members--even though white CORE Volunteers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman had given their lives in Mississippi only a year earlier. To the new radical leaders, Farmer's type of militancy was not aggressive enough for the times. Another disappointment came in 1966, when Farmer was asked by the Johnson Administration to head a literacy program funded by a $900,000 grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity. The project was killed, reportedly because big-city politicians suspected that it would in effect become a black voter-registration drive and would cut into their white middle-class bastions.

Low Key. Farmer accepted the Nixon appointment, which pays $36,000 a year (less than he makes lecturing), after receiving encouragement from black students and leaders ranging from the moderate Whitney Young to the Black Power Theoretician Dr. Nathan Wright. As for becoming the first Negro to take a key job in the Republican Administration, Farmer explains: "A man has to decide one of two things. Either he is going to be a revolutionary and try to destroy the system, or he is going to make it work. I reject the notion that the way to progress is to make things as bad as possible."

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