Bayard Rustin is not a name made famous when talking about Black History Month. Could it be because he was an openly gay man who once had ties to the communist party? Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1912 to a sixteen-year-old girl whom he thought was his sister he was raised by his grandparents who were Quakers and "believed were based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family were equal." As a teenager, he staged a sit-in at a restaurant that would serve his white football teammates, but not him. And when he told his grandmother that he was a homosexual her response was "I suppose that's what you need to do."
In 1937 he moved to New York City where he enrolled in City College and began singing with the Josh White Quartet and in the musical John Henry with Paul Robeson. This is when he joined the communist party believing at the time in what they were preaching. But he left shortly thereafter when they told him he had to stop demonstrating against desegregating the armed forces. This opened up a file for him in J. Edgar Hoover's file cabinet.
In 1941 he joined pacifist Revered A. J. Muste's Fellowship of Reconciliation that toured the country speaking out against racial injustice. In 1944 he was arrested for failing to appear before his draft board and refusing alternative service as a conscientious objector. He was given three years but ended up serving twenty-six months. He so pissed off the authorities with his desegregation protests and his open homosexuality that they sent him to a higher security prison.
After leaving prison he joined CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation which was an early version of the Freedom Rides that were testing the Supreme Court's ruling in Morgan v Virginia (1946) that any state forcing segregation on buses crossing state lines would be in violation of the Commerce Clause. It would be an extraordinary effort but he would once again find himself in prison--this time on a chain gang in North Carolina.
Continuing his beliefs in nonviolent protest, Rustin traveled to India in 1948 to attend a world pacifist conference. Gandhi had been assassinated earlier that year and his teachings touched Rustin deeply. He wrote "we need in every community a group of troublemakers. The only weapon we have is our bodies and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn."
In January 1953 Pasadena, California he was arrested for "lewd conduct" and "vagrancy" stemming from an encounter with two white men in a car. With that incident and his ever-growing FBI file, the Fellowship of Reconciliation asked for his resignation. He came to believe that "I know now that for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer."
In 1956, after talking to labor leader and activist A. Philip Randolph Rustin went to Alabama to help Dr. King with the Mongomery Bus Boycott. He mainly stayed out of the spotlight but introduced King to Gandhi's teaching while writing publicity materials and organizing carpools. He also helped King organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1956-57. His low point came when in 1960 black leader Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York became enraged that King and Rustin were planning a march outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles warned King that if he did not leave Rustin he would tell people that the two of them were lovers. King canceled the march and put some distance between himself and Rustin, who resigned from the Southern Leadership Conference. King "lost much moral credit...in the eyes of the young," the writer James Baldwin wrote in Harper's magazine over this.
The idea for the 1963 March on Washington came from A. Philip Randolph who wondered if younger activists were given the short end of the stick to economic issues as they pushed for desegregation in the South. In 1962 he got Rustin on board and the two began making plans to commemorate the anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
"Birmingham changed everything," John D'Emilio writes in his 2003 biography, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. In 1963 as the nation watched in horror as Bull Connor in Birmingham turned fire hoses and attack dogs on children. This caused Kennedy to get to work on a civil rights bill, and suddenly, D'Emilio explains, "the outlook for a march on Washington" shifted. "King who had not shown much interest in earlier overtures form Rustin and Rudolph began to talk excitedly about a national mobilization, as if the idea were brand new."
Rustin left for Alamba to see King and expanded the march's focus to "Jobs and Freedom". At the march's headquarters, he looked forward to leading the planning coalition of the "Big Six" civil rights organizations: SNCC, CORE, SCLC, the National Urban League, the NAACP, and Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Sadly, his past reared its ugly head and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP refused to allow Rustin to be in charge, so Randolph was put in charge with Rustin as his deputy.
They had many problems facing them. Uniting feuding civil rights leaders, fending off opposition from Southern segregationists who opposed civil rights, fend off opposition from Northern liberals who wanted a more cautious approach and figure out the practicalities of the demonstration itself. On that last point, Rustin later said, "We planned out precisely the number of toilets that would be needed for a quarter of a million people... how many doctors, how many first aid stations, what people should bring with them to eat in their lunches," according to D'Emilio.
But the marchers had to know how to get there. The bus captains helped out there. Rustin wrote manuals that they distributed from New York that covered all the bases from "Who is sponsoring the March; Why we March; Our Demands' How Our Demands Will be Presented in Congress; Who will March; What Are Our Immediate Tasks; How Do I get to Washington; The Schedule in Washington; How Do We Leave Washington; Signs and Banners; Food, Health and Sanitation Facilities; Children and Overnight Accommodation; Captains; Marshals; Transportation Report Form."
The march was a huge success and included a tremendous number of people (They announced at the March 200,000 but Life magazine would put it at 300,000) Beautiful moments would come when Marian and Mahalia sang and Mrs. Medgar Evers spoke to "Negro Women Freedom Fighters", when John Lewis and Dr. King spoke and when Baynard Rustin read the march's demands. And there were only four arrests and these were all white people.
While launching the A. Philip Randolph Institute in 1964, Rustin got himself into hot water when he cautioned delegates at the Democratic Convention to back down when Johnson made a deal to seat the state's conservative wing. He made an attempt to argue his opinion in a 1965 essay in Harper's magazine called "From Protest to Politics" but the damage was done. "You're a traitor, Baynard!" Mandy Samstein of the SNCC shouted at the convention, according to Taylor Branch in The King Years.
As time passed from the march, things in the movement began to become more militant and Rustin's closeness with the Democratic Party movers and shakers pissed off those for black power. He also got on the bad side of the antiwar movement by not coming out against the war and the withdrawal of the troops from Vietnam. He even warned King against coming out against the war. He was now at odds with a movement that he had helped to start.
Even though there were tensions with other black activists, that didn't stop Rustin from fighting for justice. He participated in the demand for economic justice for sanitation workers. His focus also went international as he sought to support Israel, promote free elections in Central America and Africa, and aiding refugees as vice chairman of the International Rescue Committee.
During the 1980s he opened up about his homosexuality that he had been "sublimating" since the 1950s. This was in large part to falling in love with Walter Naegle who serves as executor and archivist of his estate. He worked to bring the AIDS crisis to the attention of the NAACP, since predicting, "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 character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian."
Baynard Rustin died on August 24, 1987, of appendicitis. In 2013 President Barak Obama awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Sadly so much of his good work is not known by people because he had to work from the shadows due to his homosexuality and communists ties. But for while he was on this earth he worked for justice and freedom across the globe for every man, woman, and child.
