01/12/07 Family Service of Rhode Island Board President To Be Inducted into Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall of Fame   Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline will induct Malcolm Farmer, III into the city's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hall of Fame on Tuesday, January 16, 7:30 p.m. at the Rotunda at the Rhode Island Convention Center. "Mac" Farmer is president of the Family Service of Rhode Island board of directors and a partner in the law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder, LLP. Mayor Cicilline established the MLK Hall of Fame in 2003 as a means of honoring individuals for carrying on Dr. King's legacy. As a young attorney in the 1960s, Mac Farmer traveled to the South to work for civil rights.  According to the January 19, 1986 Providence Journal/Evening Bulletin, his experiences included getting "beaten and kicked in a courthouse corridor," and having "a shotgun jammed against his head by an infamous deputy sheriff."   He was also jailed. In one incident, the paper reports that in his courtroom defense of a local civil rights leader in Belzoni, Mississippi he so enraged some onlookers that as he left court he was grabbed by sheriff's deputies.  "They begin hitting the lawyer (Farmer), who falls to the corridor floor.  He is told to pull his knees to his chest and put his hands behind his neck, and the deputies kick him with their cowboy boots." Farmer was also well known for fighting for civil rights and social justice as a member of the Providence City Council in the 1970s and 1980s. Also being inducted into the MLK Hall of Fame Tuesday is the late Rev. Dr. Raymond E. Gibson.   (end)