Bayard Rustin - A Gay Black Hero
Today, of course, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And this is the year in which SB 48 takes effect. This state law requires California schools to teach about the contributions of LGBT people to the development of this state and the nation. For these reasons, it seems appropriate to celebrate the life of Bayard Rustin. Rustin played a key role in the world changing campaign of Martin Luther King to bring to African Americans all the rights and privileges due to them as citizens of this nation. But he did much more as well.
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of articles on the contributions of LGBT people to the betterment of California and the nation.
Why is Bayard Rustin’s name not as well known as the other great leaders of the African American Civil Rights movement? By most accounts, there are two reasons. First he was gay. In those days there was none of the general acceptance of gay people that is widespread now. Publicizing the participation of this openly gay man could have done serious harm to the civil rights movement in which he played such an important part.
The second reason was that he had joined the Communist Party in his early years. This was a time when many African Americans joined the party, or were sympathetic with it. Paul Robeson, a many faceted Black American, was another example. In the 1930s and 1940s the Communists were the only ones who, at least, said they supported equal rights for African Americans. The Democratic Party firmly, and publicly, opposed such rights. And the Republicans certainly were not supportive of such rights either.
At any rate, full public disclosure of his participation could have seriously harmed the Black civil rights movement. So his work remained largely behind the scene.
Rustin’s civil rights work began long before his work with Martin Luther King, Jr. In the 1940s he worked with A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Virtually all of the porters were Black and, at that time, the Brotherhood was one of the leading groups supporting rights for African Americans. In the early 1940s Randolph and Rustin planned a march on Washington, but Randolph called it off when President Roosevelt agreed to their demand that he issue an executive order banning employment discrimination in defense industries.
Rustin was unhappy that the march was cancelled. So, he moved his organizing efforts to several peace movement organizations including the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker Group), and the War Resisters League.
By then, Rustin had been a Quaker for years. The Quakers were a "peace church" and members were exempt from the draft. But conscientious objectors, who were not members of recognized peace church groups like the Quakers, were often sentenced to prison when they refused to be drafted. Rustin refused to take the easy way out. He did not claim his exemption and, in 1944, was sentenced to three years in federal prison in Kentucky.
He entered a prison system that was segregated, and which treated Black prisoners harshly. Perhaps predictably, he began a campaign to end the segregation and harsh treatment. This, of course, led to severe abuse of him by the guards.
After release from prison, in 1947, Rustin began a new civil rights campaign. Recently the US Supreme Court had ruled that discrimination in seating in interstate transportation was illegal. So that year he and the Fellowship of Reconciliation decided to test compliance with the decision. They rode through four southern states to test compliance. As a result, Rustin was sentenced to 28 days of hard labor on a chain gang. By now his resistance to injustice was widely known and he, again, received harsh treatment from his jailers.
In 1953 Rustin was arrested and convicted of public indecency as a gay man. That led to his dismissal from the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. However, for the next 12 years, Rustin served as Executive Secretary of the War Resisters League. During this time he contributed greatly to a compilation of Pacifist strategy published in The Progressive. He was now refining the strategy of peaceful resistance to injustice that would greatly influence the later actions of Martin Luther King.
In 1956 Lillian Smith, a Black souther novelist, arranged to bring Rustin and King together. King had not yet fully embraced the strategy of peaceful resistance and she wanted Rustin to explain the strategy to King. By 1957 Rustin was playing a major role in the foundation of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In that same year Rustin was deeply involved in organizing a Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, DC. The purpose of the pilgrimage was to Persuade President Eisenhower to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision requiring the desegregation of public schools. And Eisenhower did just that. However Rustin also helped organize two youth marches for school desegregation in 1958 and 1959.
And now we get to the point of the most famous March on Washington, in which gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Rustin played a key role in planning that event.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Bayard Rusting worked as a delegate for Freedom House. As such, he monitored elections in Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland, and Zimbabwe. In all these efforts he was trying to plant the flower of democratic principles in these nations.
Rustin came home feeling ill from a 1987 trip to Haiti, where again he was trying to encourage democracy. He was admitted to the hospital with a burst appendix and died of cardiac arrest.
Bayard Rustin spent his life in a largely unsung effort to bring justice and respect, not only for African Americans, but also for millions of people across the globe. This nation, and this world, is a better place because he graced our lives with his presence.
Boyce Hinman
