Rustin, Bayard Taylor

Source:

 African American National Biography

Rustin, Bayard Taylor

(17 Mar. 1912–24 Aug. 1987),

civil rights organizer and political activist, was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Archie Hopkins and Florence “Cissy” Rustin. Hopkins abandoned his sixteen-year-old lover before their child was born, and it was not until Bayard was eleven that he discovered that Cissy was his mother, not his sister, and that his “parents” Janifer Rustin, a caterer, and Julia Rustin, a nurse, were, in fact, his grandparents. Throughout his life, Bayard Rustin referred to Janifer as “papa” and Julia as “mama” and enjoyed a more comfortable family life than his complicated origins might suggest.

Rustin attended the public schools of West Chester and displayed a precocious talent for dissent. In grade school he resisted teachers who tried to make him write with his right hand, and in high school he refused to compete in a state track meet unless he and a fellow black student could stay in the same hotel as their white teammates. In both cases he won. The teenage Rustin was less successful in his attempts to desegregate West Chester's movie theater, however, resulting in the first of nearly thirty arrests for civil disobedience. On graduating from high school in 1932, Rustin attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, though he spent barely a year there before being dismissed, either for refusing to join the ROTC or for falling in love with the son of the university's president. He then returned to West Chester to study at Cheyney State Teachers College and appeared as a tenor soloist on several radio shows in Philadelphia. He also became active in the Society of Friends, a move that pleased his grandmother, who had been raised in the society and remained a Quaker in spirit, even though she had joined the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

Bayard Rustin, civil rights leader, in his Park Avenue South office, New York City, April 1969. (AP Images.)

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After Cheyney State dismissed him in 1937 for an indiscretion that he later alluded to as “naughty,” Rustin left for Manhattan (Anderson, 38). There he attended a few classes at the City College of New York but divided most of his time between social activism—serving as an organizer for the Young Communist League (YCL) in Harlem—and music. In 1939 he sang in the chorus of John Henry, an all-black musical starring Paul Robeson, and performed with the blues singer Lead Belly and the folk-song revivalist Josh White at the Café Society Downtown, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village. Although he sang at demonstrations—and in jails—throughout his career, Rustin increasingly focused on social and political organizing.

In 1941 he began working with the labor leader A.-Philip Randolph, who mentored Rustin on the tactics and strategies required of mass political organizing and persuaded him to abandon communism in favor of democratic socialism. Randolph also introduced Rustin to the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the pacifist leader of the Indian resistance to British rule, and to A. J. Muste, who adhered to the Gandhian principle of achieving social change through nonviolent direct action and who led the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization. In 1942, after Muste appointed him the FOR's youth secretary, Rustin traveled throughout the nation in the hope of recruiting a cadre of pacifists and raising awareness of the plight of Japanese Americans placed in internment camps. Given the vast public sympathy for the war effort once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, that proved to be no mean task and often a dangerous one. In 1944 federal authorities imprisoned Rustin for refusing to appear before his military draft board.

On release from prison in 1947 Rustin joined the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in its Journey of Reconciliation, an attempt to end segregation in interstate travel by sitting in the front seats of buses designated by law and custom for whites only. The unwillingness of southern whites to countenance such a change became clear in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when Rustin was dragged from the front of a Trailways bus by police and sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang. The failure of CORE's campaign did not shake Rustin's belief that nonviolent direct action could help destroy Jim Crow, however, and in the early 1950s he embarked on a series of lectures and workshops promoting civil disobedience in the United States, Europe, South Africa, and Ghana. Many in the international peace movement viewed Rustin as an inspirational speaker and expert tactician and expected that he might replace the aging Muste as head of the FOR.

Instead, in 1953, the FOR board demanded Rustin's resignation after his arrest in Los Angeles on a morals charge, the euphemism of the day for performing homosexual acts in public. Rustin agreed to leave the organization immediately, reflecting both his inner conflict about his sexual orientation at that time and the prevailing homophobic mood of 1950s America. Even though he was unwilling to abandon his sexual preference, he agreed with Muste that his homosexuality was wrong and that his actions had diminished the FOR's moral standing.

Although the arrest chilled his friendship with Muste, Rustin's other mentor, A. Philip Randolph, stood by him, sending Rustin to Alabama in December 1955 to advise Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Rustin counseled King on the theories and practicalities of nonviolent direct action and helped transform the young minister's narrowly defined boycott into a fully formed Gandhian mass movement. King later wrote of the Montgomery protest that “Christ furnished the spirit while Gandhi furnished the method” (quoted in Anderson, 188). He might have added that Rustin furnished the essential tactical knowledge, based on a lifetime of practicing nonviolent resistance. Along with Ella Baker, Rustin also founded In Friendship, a New York–based group, to raise northern awareness of, and money for, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a regional civil rights body led by King, which Rustin had helped organize in 1957.

In March 1960 Rustin headed the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, after the state of Alabama indicted the SCLC leader on trumped-up charges of tax evasion and perjury. Three months later, however, the congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to announce publicly—and mendaciously—that King and Rustin were lovers; Powell was furious that Rustin had planned a demonstration at that summer's Democratic National Convention without consulting him. Even though he knew the charges were false, Rustin resigned as King's special assistant, to prevent a scandal he feared would jeopardize the movement at a critical juncture. Rustin later commented that King's refusal to support him or even to ask him personally to resign was “the only time Martin really pissed me off” (quoted in Levine, 121).

Exiled from the main leadership of the civil rights struggle, Rustin worked from 1961 to 1962 with the World Peace Brigade, an organization dedicated to the nonviolent overthrow of colonial rule in Africa. He returned a year later to an American civil rights struggle in which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had joined the SCLC and CORE in supporting nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation. Randolph, King, and Rustin believed that only a mass demonstration could build on those protests and persuade Congress to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, and Randolph insisted that his deputy should organize that mass protest. Building on a lifetime of working with civil rights, labor, and peace activists across the nation, Rustin orchestrated a broad, multicultural coalition of support for the March on Washington in August 1963. Most of the 250,000 marchers and the millions watching on television that day would remember King's “I have a dream” speech, but the overall success of the demonstration owed as much to Rustin's meticulous attention to detail as to King's stirring rhetoric.

The March on Washington served as a springboard for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but it also marked the high point of unity in the civil rights movement. While younger members of SNCC and CORE began to embrace Black Power, Rustin argued that blacks, poor whites, and other disenfranchised Americans could win social justice only through the same broad-based coalitions that had ended segregation. His equivocal stance on the Vietnam War provoked even more fury from former allies like Julian Bond of SNCC, who believed that Rustin had sold his soul to President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party. The reality was somewhat more complex. Rustin certainly wanted influence in the Democratic Party, and he feared that opposing Johnson's policies in Vietnam would jeopardize the president's domestic War on Poverty. But Rustin's support for a gradual, negotiated withdrawal of U.S. troops also reflected an evolution in his thinking about war and peace. He had begun to question his absolute pacifism after World War II, in part because of guilt about being a conscientious objector in a war that had resulted in the Holocaust. Like many former communists, he also despised the Soviet Union's repressive domestic and foreign policies and feared that a victory for the Vietcong would destroy any vestiges of democracy in South Vietnam.

Rustin's influence on international politics and the civil rights agenda waned in the 1970s and 1980s. He earned praise for his work to aid Haitian and Southeast Asian refugees, but was criticized for supporting increased U.S. economic and military aid to Israel, and for comparing the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Ku Klux Klan. On domestic matters Rustin gave qualified support to the affirmative action programs favored by most African Americans, but he continued to favor policies that would radically redistribute wealth to the poor of all races.

In his final decade Rustin became more open about his homosexuality, but he did not take an active role in the growing gay rights movement. He died in New York City in August 1987 after being hospitalized for a burst appendix and then suffering a heart attack in the hospital. He was survived by his partner of twelve years, Walter Naegle. Rustin's most enduring legacy is his stewardship of the 1963 March on Washington, a demonstration that reflected his own dream of a grand multiracial coalition working peacefully for social and economic justice.

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