James Farmer, Jr. sat in the living room of the Weisman Hirsch Home in mid-October, 1982. He was in Marshall for the first time since 1938 to participate in the filming of "Marshall Texas/ Marshall Texas," fellow Marshallite Bill Moyers' documentary. He was here because he was only a couple of days home from the hospital where doctors had tried, unsuccessfully it turned out, to save his failing eyesight.

Farmer shakes then-President Clinton's hand as he is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Photos courtsey of the Center for American History at the University of Texas.

"Do you mind if we leave him here until we're ready to shoot, asked production assistant Shana Gazit. "We don't want him out in the weather more than Bill needs him to be."

The answer was obvious.

I only wish I had done my homework and known more about the Congress Of Racial Equality, the civil rights organization he founded in 1941. Aa a child of the 1960s, I had lived through the Civil Rights Movement, participated in my own timid way, and had some idea of what its leaders had suffered. But my husband Greg and I spent four years in rural Germany during the height of the sit-ins, marches, brutality and bombings. Our only access to news from the United States was the international version of Time Magazine. So I remembered CORE's activities only vaguely.

His hair was graying and he wore a black eye patch that became the trademark of his later years, but Farmer's powerful voice was the same as it must have been when he challenged his followers to enter the Lion's Den of riot-torn Montgomery, Alabama. There was little accent to indicate he had spent the first 18 years of his life in Texas, where he was born, or Mississippi where, at age three, he learned about second-class citizenship the hard way. He wanted a Coke and couldn't understand why a little white boy could buy a Coke at the soda fountain in Holly Springs, but he, son of a revered Bible scholar and college professor, could not.

Our first conversations were about his father, J. Leonard Farmer, Texas first black Ph.D., and about his Wiley College English professor and debate coach, a man named Melvin Tolson. He clearly revered his father and wondered if he had disappointed him when he did not follow Dr. Farmer's footsteps into the Methodist ministry and scholarly pursuits. At least that was the impression he left me.

To say he was humble is not at all correct. He was comfortable enough in his own skin and didn't need the obsequities many "important" persons demand. We talked as friends would.

In the days that followed, I became Farmer's chauffeur and his eyes, picking him up at the hotel, delivering him to Wiley or to Ebenezer U. Methodist Church, and remaining with the crew until that day's work ended.

The last night of filming Moyers, David Grubin, "MT/MT"s producer, the rest of the crew, Max Lale and the Beils broke bread at 313 S. Washington and listened as Farmer related some of his experiences in Marshall and beyond. It was the first of many meals and rich conversations we would have in the next 17 years until Farmer died on July 9, 1999.

Farmer was barely 14 when he graduated from Central High in 1934 and entered Wiley on a scholarship earned in a series of oratorical contests sponsored by the black Elks Clubs of Texas. I listened as he described that time to Moyers.

He quoted Tolson.

"Farmer, what are you reading these days."

"Tolstoy! War and Peace," I told him.

"All right. You're drinking the broth of knowledge, but why don't you eat the meat?"

Farmer explained. "He meant I was reading fiction, Ôthough it was good fiction, but there were more important things I should be reading."

As he described this encounter and re-lived it in his mind's eye, which still saw quite clearly, he told Moyers.

" The meat Ð the banquet of my years at Wiley was the tutelage of Tolson."

Tolson taught English, but that was only part of his contribution to education at the corner of Wiley Avenue and University. He was also the debate coach, the drama director and the resident poet. For all three he received no extra remuneration. In the final analysis, however, he was richly paid. He tolerated no laziness, inspired all who sat in his classes.

The plaintiffs in two lawsuits, one against the University of Oklahoma and another against the University of Texas School of Law were both Tolson's students; Hemann Sweat from Wiley and George McLaurin from Langston University, where Tolson taught following 24 years at Wiley.

Those cases led to the ground-breaking "Brown vs. the Board of Education," ending for all times de jure school segregation. Chief attorney in all three was Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Farmer's long-time friend and supporter of CORE activities.

Nearly three generations of students have come and gone since Farmer, now-Georgia Congressman John Lewis; Methodist minister Jim Lawson and 10 others, black and white, boarded two buses in Washington, D.C. one chilly day in May 1961 bound for New Orleans. The Freedom Rides had begun and Farmer was on the front seat of the Greyhound bus. `

CORE member Jim Peck, a white man, took his place in the back of the one from Trailways.

I watched as much as listened as Farmer told the story of that fateful summer to a history class at Wiley. He regaled them with the experiences suffered by the first wave, so badly beaten and bloodied they had to be rescued by brave black ministers in Montgomery.

He told them that his father's death from cancer the day before the buses were to roll into Alabama took him off the first bus. The tires were slashed on it as it left Anniston and it rolled to a stop at a little country store outside of town. It had been followed from the station to the store by young white thugs ÐKu Klux Klan members - who broke a couple of windows, tossed in fire bombs, then held the doors shut. Had Farmer been on it, he would have been killed. The others almost were.

The horror of the events that day was lost on the students. To them, I'm afraid, they were listening to an old man tell war stories, listening in much the same way they would have if Bob Hayes or Emmet Smith stood before them talking about the Dallas Cowboys.

Twenty years later, when I was relating the same events to a history class at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. I asked them a question.

"Why do you think Farmer and Martin Luther King and others used the tactic of non-violence all during the demonstrations of the 1960s."

The uncomfortable silence was finally broken by a young man.

"Because they were scared," he volunteered.

They were, Farmer later told me, but not for the reason the young man thought.

"Anybody who went through that and says he wasn't scared is not telling the truth."

I thought about John Lewis- beaten bloody twice on the first trip; PeckÐleft for dead in a pool of his own blood; Professor Herbert Berghof, who suffered a stroke when the Montgomery toughs used his head like a football. I'm not sure, almost 50 years after it all happened, if young people can even fathom what those days were like.

It is their loss. And lost as well is the belief so many of us had in the sixties that one single person could change to course of the world.

In January 1999 I watched from my seat in the Blue Room of the White House as James Leonard Farmer, Jr. was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

His receiving it marked the successful conclusion of a crusade begun three years before by the students of Marshall High School, joined by Congressman Max Sandlin of Texas and Senator Charles Robb of Virginia.

Sadly, since then the honor has been cheapened, given to people whose greatest achievement was being a presidential crony. But it meant something then. And it meant something to those Marshall student council members.

They knew Farmer had changed the world.

In that same spirit, they had made their mark on it as well.