Family Support Act (FSA) (1988)

The Family Support Act was the culmination of a major 1987 congressional debate on welfare. The act provided for an extensive state-managed education and training program with transitional medical assistance, child-care benefits, and stronger child support enforcement.

Under the act, educators are provided opportunities to form linkages with other agencies to strengthen families and help them move toward self-sufficiency. Education is the pivotal goal of the FSA, to help families avoid long-term dependence on public assistance, and the act requires states to make educational services available to participants under the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) training program. Training and employment personnel and vocational and adult educators may join human services staff in providing education and training programs to JOBS clients.

Heralded as an “end of welfare,” critics viewed the FSA as a failure. However, the act generated the expectation among voters that welfare recipients would and should be required to work. Despite the goals of the Family Support Act, the nationwide Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) caseload remained constant in the late 1980s, and then grew by more than a third between 1990 and 1994.

—Michele Rutledge

Farmer, James L. (1920-1999) Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founder

James Leonard Farmer was an American civil rights leader, born January 12, 1920, in Marshall, Texas, and educated at

Wiley College and Howard University’s School of Religion. He helped found the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, was instrumental in its campaign of freedom marches and sit-ins, and served as its national director until

1966.  He left CORE because he felt the organization was drifting away from its pacifist, nonresistance roots. Farmer also served as program director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1959 to 1961 and was a professor of social welfare at Lincoln University in Pittsburgh in 1966 and

1967.  In 1968 Farmer ran for a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives from Brooklyn on the Liberty Party ticket but was defeated by Shirley Chisholm, an African-American Democrat. His political career did not end there, however. From 1969 to 1970 he served as assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare during Richard M. Nixon’s first administration.

Farmer retired from politics in 1971 but remained active in the public sector. He served on many organizational boards and, in 1976, became the associate director of the Coalition of American Public Employees, a group of labor and professional organizations. He also pursued a busy schedule of teaching and lecturing. His autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, was published in 1985, and he received the Congressional Medal of Freedom from President William J. Clinton in 1998. James Farmer died July 9, 1999, in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

See also African Americans.

—William L. Glankler