A Black History Month Remembrance
Bayard Rustin ( 1912-1987) An Unsung Gay Hero of the Civil Rights Movement
By Mary Crone, Co-Editor, GLSO News
Bayard Rustin is acknowledged as one of the most influential and effective organizers of the civil rights movement. He was the primary organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King made his "I have a Dream" speech. And yet, as many civil rights leaders were recalled during the weekend of Rev. King's birthday celebration and the Inauguration of President Obama, I did not hear his name once.
He has been shamefully ignored, most likely because he was gay.
Rustin was raised by his maternal grandparents, Janifer Rustin, a caterer, and Julia Davis Rustin, a nurse and charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NAACP leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson (Lift Every Voice and Sing) were frequent guests in the Rustin home. With these influences in his early life, Rustin became an activist at a young age and campaigned against racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws.
The young Rustin excelled in academics, music and sports at the integrated West Chester, Pennsylvania High School and was class valedictorian his senior year. On one high school trip(1929), he insisted that black ball players be put up in the same hotel as white players, and he was once arrested for sitting in the "whites only" section of the local movie theater.
Rustin moved to Haarlem in 1937 and studied at City College of New York. There he became involved in efforts to free the Scottsboro Boys- nine young black men who had been accused falsely of raping two white women.
In the 1940s, Rustin worked with A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and A. J. Muste, Quaker leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). The three of them proposed a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the armed forces. The march was canceled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order (the Fair Employment Act), which banned discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus. Rustin also went to California to protect the property of Japanese-Americans imprisoned in internment camps. Impressed with Rustin's organizational skills, Muste appointed him as FOR's secretary for student and general affairs.
In 1942, Rustin worked with James Farmer, Jr. (portrayed as a young man in the 2007 movie The Great Debaters) to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). CORE was a pacifist organization based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau and modeled after Mohandas Gandhi's non-violent resistance.
As pacifists, Rustin and other members of FOR and CORE were arrested for violating the Selective Service Act. Rustin could have been granted conscientious objector status but refused to do so because most black men did not have this option. From 1944 to 1946, Rustin was imprisoned in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where he organized protests against segregated dining facilities.
Rustin and Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. This was the first of the Freedom Rides to test the ruling of the US Supreme Court that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel. CORE's Gandhian tactics were opposed strenuously by the NAACP, and participants in the Journey of Reconciliation were arrested several times. Rustin served twenty-two days on a chain gang in North Carolina for violating Jim Crow laws regarding segregated seating on public transportation.
In 1948, Rustin traveled to India to learn nonviolence techniques directly from the leaders of the Gandhi an movement. Starting in 1947 and continuing for most of his life, Rustin assisted African leaders who were working to achieve independence from European nations.
In 1953, Rustin was arrested in California and pleaded guilty to a charge of "sex perversion" (as consensual sodomy was legally defined) and served 60 days in jail. He remained candid about his sexuality, which was still criminalized throughout the United States.
Rustin served as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee's task force to prepare one of the most influential pacifist essays ever produced in the U.S., "Speak truth to power an alternative to violence", published in 1955.
According to the chairman of the group, Stephen Cary, Rustin's membership was repressed at his own request because he believed that his known sexual orientation would compromise the 71-page pamphlet once it appeared.
Rustin took a leave from the War Resisters League in 1956 to go to Montgomery to advise Martin Luther King Jr., during the bus boycott. Although he had studied the philosophy of nonviolence, MLK had not personally embraced it as a basis for activism. In fact, there were guns inside King's house, and armed guards posted at his doors. Rustin persuaded boycott leaders to adopt complete nonviolence, teaching them the techniques of nonviolent direct protest.
The following year, Rustin and King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Many African-American leaders were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation would undermine support for the movement but also knew he was indispensable as a long term practitioner and teacher of nonviolent resistance.
U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. forced Rustin's resignation from the SCLC in 1960 by threatening to openly discuss Rustin's California conviction for "sex perversion" in Congress. Although Rustin was open about being gay and his conviction was a matter of public record, it had not been discussed widely outside the civil rights leadership. Rustin offered his resignation from SCLS and, to his surprise, it was accepted by King. In recent years, U.S. Congressman John Lewis has spoken up for Rustin saying that at the time of his resignation "we did not have the raw courage to keep him in the leadership position he deserved."
In 1963, the aging A. Philip Randolph told the SCLC that Rustin was the only man capable of organizing the March on Washington which was then in the planning stage. The leadership asked Rustin to rejoin them in order to plan the now famous march.
The day before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual." He produced an FBI photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing, to imply that there was a same-sex relationship between the two. Both men denied the allegation, but, despite King's support, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins did not allow Rustin to receive any public recognition for his role in planning the march.
After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Rustin advocated closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party and its labor activist base. Rustin was an early supporter of President Lyndon Johnson, but as the Vietnam War escalated and began to supersede Democratic programs for racial reconciliation and labor reform, Rustin returned to his pacifist roots.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin continued his work for equal rights in this country and around the world. He published Down The Line, a compilation of his writings in 1971. (available on Amazon)
Rustin testified on behalf of New York State's Gay Rights Bill and, in 1986, named the gay lesbian community as "the community which is most easily mistreated." He frequently urged gay and lesbian organizations to stand up for all minorities.
A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said: "Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian." [2]
There is a documentary of Rustin's life, Brother Outsider, that presents him as a peaceful troublemaker and an eloquent speaker who refused to be silenced. Rustin was truly a man that worked for the liberation of all people.
Rustin died on August 24, 1987, and was survived by his partner of ten years, Walter Naegle. Please help me make this remarkable gay man known, order the DVD, read a book, and talk about him.
Editor's note: Brother Outsider, The Life of Bayard Rustin is distributed by California Newsreel www.newsreel.org. Released, 2002 and runs 83 minutes.
Posted: modified by:Del Korte Modify date:2009-03-23 14:27:04