Bayard Rustin
—Chrissie
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Bayard Rustin was an incredibly important part of the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. He was born on 17 March 1912 in Westchester, Pennsylvania. He never knew his father and did not find out until adulthood that the woman he believed was his older sister was actually his mother. The family was solidly middle class due to the success of his grandfather’s catering business. His grandmother was a Quaker and charter member of the NAACP, influences that he quickly acted upon and continued to throughout his life. As a high school football player, he organized a demonstration at a hotel and restaurant that refused to allow the Black members of the team to stay. He was also arrested at least once as a teenager for sitting in the whites-only section of a movie theater.
He attended Wilberforce College, an historically Black College, in Ohio, beginning in 1932. He was expelled in 1936 for organizing a student strike. He continued his studies at Cheney State Teachers’ College and the City College of New York. While in college, he joined the Young Communists League but left because he felt they were paying insufficient attention to race issues. He was hired in the summer of 1941 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and with fellow members A. Phillip Randolph and AJ Muste planned a march on Washington DC to demand desegregation of the defense industry. Randolph met with FDR to discuss the issue and the President agreed that desegregation was needed. He issued an executive order that did so, thus making the march unnecessary, and it was cancelled. Rustin wanted to still have the march, just change the subject from desegregation of the defense industry to desegregation of the military (something that would not be required by another executive order until 1948 and would not be complete until 1960).
He organized early demonstrations to desegregate buses, and was arrested and/or beaten by police for this and other such work on more than one occasion. In 1942, he was involved in the creation of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which advocated for civil rights with specifically nonviolent tactics. As a Quaker and a pacifist, Rustin refused to be drafted in 1942. He was offered alternative service, as was the standard for conscientious objectors in the Second World War, but refused this as well because it would still be work in support of war. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in federal prison, but served only 26 months. He was first placed in Ashland Federal Prison in Kentucky, where he organized protests among the prisoners about the segregated conditions, prompting authorities to move him to Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where he did the same thing.
After the War, he and other members of CORE organized the Journey of Reconciliation to test the recent Supreme Court decision in Morgan v. Virginia that banned segregation on interstate busses. In 1947, he was arrested for and convicted of violating segregation laws in North Carolina, resulting in a sentence of three weeks working in a chain gang. The next year, he attended a conference on nonviolent resistance in India, then spent the next few years using what he’d learned to support anticolonialist movements in Africa.
In January 1953, he was arrested in Pasadena, California on charges of “sex perversion,” the legal euphemism for sodomy. The arrest, conviction, and sixty-day jail sentence outed him publically. While he had not hidden his homosexuality, it had not been widely known to the public. From this point forward, some in the Civil Rights movements considered him a liability. He was forced to resign from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and was pushed to the background in other organizations. He worked with the War Resisters League for a few years, then joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his work on the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956.
Rustin was instrumental in shifting Dr. King to a wholly pacifist approach. While he had always preached nonviolence, King had not been averse to demonstrators protecting themselves from attack in his earlier work. The two of them also organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As plans were being made for demonstrations related to the 1960 presidential election, his homosexuality and former, if brief, membership in the communist party caused some of his colleagues to fear he would become a distraction from the work. And so, despite his skill with organizing and complete dedication to the movement, King bowed to pressure to distance himself from Rustin when Representative Adam Clayton Powell (D-New York) threatened to tell the press that the two men were lovers. A planned march at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles was also cancelled to prevent such rumors from spreading. Rustin voluntarily stepped away, for the good of the cause.
He continued civil rights work, but was now completely behind the scenes, no matter what organization. But, in 1962, while planning a march in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, A. Phillip Randolph remembered how useful Bayard Rustin had been with the planning for the cancelled 1941 march. The effort began relatively small until the attack on peaceful protestors in Birmingham, Alabama, which forced the Kennedy Administration to work more publically and more quickly on Civil Rights legislation and convinced Dr. King that the efforts should be expanded to a nationwide strategy. The focus on the march shifted from simple commemoration to a push for social and economic justice, taking on the title of the March for Jobs and Freedom. Hoping for a showing of around 250,000 people, Randolph and Rustin set to work organizing everything from the pamphlets explaining the goals of march, how people should get there, and what they should bring for lunch to the number of first aid stations and toilets that would be needed. They also had to make sure the presenters’ speeches stayed in line with the overall message, putting them at odds with some of the more vehement speakers. Rustin himself was the one to read the list of goals and demands to the crowd. The march was, of course, an overwhelming success, and is now best known as the venue for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Rustin shifted his efforts toward labor issues. Working with the American Civil Liberties Union, he founded and directed the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which focused on economic and civil rights issues for the ACLU. He emphasized the need for unity across the working class, irrelevant of race. His shift toward economic equality was a natural outgrowth of the earlier movement: it made no difference if Blacks had the legal right to sit at the lunch counters if they couldn’t afford to eat there. He felt that working within the existing party system would be most effective means to achieving this goal. As part this affiliation, he made a point of publically supporting Lynden Johnson’s policies about containment of Communism, perhaps to further distance himself from his earlier affiliation with the party. He also continued his anti-colonialist work in Africa and with other minority and dispossessed groups worldwide. As he worked closely with the Democratic Party, some of his former colleagues accused him of becoming a “sellout.”
He did not participate in gay activism until the early 1980s. He was encouraged by his partner, Walter Naegle, in part because the only way they could create a legal familial bond was for Rustin to adopt Naegle. He described the position of the LGBTQIA community of the time as the same as Blacks prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and said that their treatment was the new measure of social change.
Rustin died on 24 August 1987 of a ruptured appendix. His influence on the Civil Rights movement was, until recently, largely forgotten in the popularly known history of the Civil Rights movement. His posthumous award of the Medal of Freedom by President Barak Obama in 2013 and other efforts of recognition have returned him to his place in the narrative.