Civil Rights Movement organizer, Social Activist
Unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement

"My activism did not spring from being black...The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief in the oneness of the human family." - Bayard Rustin

The Civil Rights Movement was so full of memorable figures and poignant moments, we often fail to recognize the people who worked behind the scenes but were essential to its success. Bayard Rustin was one such man. He was an innovative organizer and a crucial factor in the success of the Civil Rights Movement who rarely gets the attention he deserves.

Every February, Americans across the country observe Black History Month, and the vast majority of recognition is paid to the most famous African American achievements. Everyone is familiar with Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous, "I Have A Dream" speech and knows how Rosa Parks helped ignite the Montgomery Bus Boycott by refusing to relinquish her seat on a bus to a white person.

Those legendary events, along with dozens of others, never would have occurred had it not been for the tireless efforts and diligent planning of one unheralded man. This month, we at DiversityCentral.com have decided to give credit where it is due and honor Bayard Rustin, the unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement.

Destined for social activism

By every measure, Bayard Rustin was an extraordinary man. An outspoken Civil Rights advocate in the nascent stages of the movement, he was a vocal African American and a relatively open homosexual in the days of virulent racism and fierce homophobia. He was a ferocious advocate of egalitarian values, and an adamant proponent of nonviolent protests. Everything about his character and his beliefs pointed to a life of social activism.

At an early age he knew influential NAACP leaders such as William Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson as houseguests. He counted men the likes of Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. as friends, while Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and J. Edgar Hoover considered him their mortal enemy. He butted heads with Thurgood Marshall, fought Jim Crow in the South and was jailed over 20 times for refusing to abide by unjust laws. He is an icon to those familiar with both the Civil Rights and Gay Rights Movements.

Working behind the scenes, he was as influential and instrumental as any other Civil Rights leader of his time. Not bad for a man most Americans have still never heard of.

Shaped by family values

Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912 and raised by Janifer and Julie Rustin. At the age of ten, young Bayard learned that Janifer and Julie were actually his grandparents, and that his "sister" Florence was actually his mother, having given birth to Bayard out of wedlock at the age of 17.

Julie Rustin was the most influential force in forming Bayard's belief system. She was a pacifist and a member of the NAACP, with so much standing that its leaders, including William Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson sometimes stayed in the household when their travels brought them to the area.

Though Julie Rustin attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church with her husband, she had been raised as a member of the Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. She raised her eight children to adhere to certain Quaker values, specifically the equality of all people in the eyes of God, the importance of treating everyone with love and respect and shunning all forms of violence. These egalitarian and pacifistic beliefs would shape Bayard Rustin's outlook on life, and later, help shape the Civil Rights Movement.

Communist beginnings

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Bayard Rustin entered Wilberforce University in 1932, but left the school for New York City in 1936 without completing his degree. In New York, Rustin enrolled at City College and became a member of the American Communist Party, which at the time took a very progressive stance on Civil Rights. There, he began to organize the Young Communist League, having been stirred to activism by the infamous "Scottsboro Case" in which nine African American "men" (one was as young as 13) were convicted of gang-raping two white girls, amidst rampant evidence of racism and false charges. However, Rustin eventually left the party in disappointment after they dropped the fight to desegregate the armed forces when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in World War II.

After leaving the Young Communist League, Rustin soon aligned himself with A. Philip Randolph who headed a powerful union known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and who was also one of the most outspoken advocates of equal rights for African Americans. Together they planned a march on Washington D.C. to demonstrate against racial discrimination in the defense industries. The event was called off at the last minute when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued the Fair Employment Act, barring racial discrimination in the defense industries and federal bureaus.

Though he never was able to carry out his first march, his zeal for social activism and talent for organizing large demonstrations became apparent. He became heavily involved in the peace movement, and joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).

"All freedom demands a price."

In 1944, He was jailed for the first time, receiving a three-year sentence in federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky for refusing to serve in World War II. Though as a Quaker he was eligible to do alternative service instead of serving in the military, he could not bring himself to hide behind his religion when other men were receiving harsh prison sentences for refusing to serve on moral grounds. Though he faced terrible racism from guards and white prisoners, he refused to meet their hate with anything but nonviolent resistance.

Upon his release, Rustin picked up again on his work with the FOR. The organization staged a journey through four states in 1947 to see if the Supreme Court's ruling barring discrimination in seating in interstate travel was being enforced. The plan was for eight white men and eight black men to travel through Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina, purposely sitting in the wrong segregated areas.

Thurgood Marshall, who was head of the NAACP's legal department at the time, was highly concerned by the possible consequences of the journey. He believed that a "disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved."

Rustin argued that, "Unjust social laws and patterns do not change because supreme courts deliver just decisions. One needs merely to observe the continued practice of Jim Crow in interstate travel, six months after the Supreme Court's decision, to see the necessity of resistance. Social progress comes from struggle; all freedom demands a price."

Just as Marshall thought, the men were harassed, beaten and jailed, with Rustin himself sentenced to several weeks of hard labor on a North Carolina chain gang. There was no "wholesale slaughter" that Marshall had predicted, but the demonstration did cause a stir. During his sentence, Rustin recorded the cruel, malicious treatment he received, and his stories were chronicled in the New York Post. The depictions of brutality helped lead the abolishment of chain gangs in the state.

Learning and teaching nonviolence

From 1947 until 1952, Rustin's work with the FOR took him to India and Ghana, where he studied nonviolent resistance methods in other independence movements. There he became an admirer of Mohandas Gandhi's teachings, and began formulating ways to adapt those teachings to the American Civil Rights Movement.

In 1956, Rustin was approached by the celebrated Southern novelist Lillian Smith, and asked to provide Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with advice in the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Dr. King had not yet bought into the entire concept of nonviolent protest, but Rustin's organizational expertise and extensive knowledge of nonviolent strategies made the boycott a huge success. He soon became one of Dr. King's closest and most valuable advisors. Together they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and began assembling the massive protests that would become their trademark.

The architect of change

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The year 1963 marked the grandest achievement of Rustin's career. By all accounts, he was the architect behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Here, before at least 250,000 people, Dr. King delivered his legendary "I Have a Dream" speech, which would go down as arguably the most poignant and significant moment of the Civil Rights Movement. Rustin had managed to coordinate civil rights groups from all over the nation in what is to this day perhaps the greatest feat of peaceful mobilization of our time.

By 1965, Rustin believed that the legal basis for segregation had been destroyed, and that the need for massive protests had passed. He also believed the next step was to unite the disparate groups in American society into a larger, progressive force. These groups were to include racial minorities, trade unions, liberals and religious groups. However, the Vietnam War distracted from this movement, and it soon lost all its momentum. Rustin himself began losing credibility with members of the strengthening Black Power movement, with his opposition to affirmative action programs, black studies curricula at American universities, and his consistent support of Israel.

Untiring effort for change

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Rustin spent the later years of his life working as a delegate from Freedom House, an organization that monitors elections and human rights status in other countries. He monitored elections in Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland and Zimbabwe during this time.

Rustin spent his last years actively protesting the Vietnam War and working in the gay rights movement. In 1986 he remarked that, "The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated." He died a year later in New York on August 24, 1987.

Though Bayard Rustin may likely never receive the accolades of his more famous contemporaries, he was undoubtedly an indispensable part of the Civil Rights Movement. This February, remember to honor him and the thousands of other people of all colors and creeds who risked everything for their undying belief in fairness, freedom and democracy.

Sources:

1/31/07, "Bayard Rustin," http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USArustin.htm

2002, Walter Naegle, "Bayard Rustin Biography," Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, http://www.rustin.org/biography.html

2/1/99, Buzz Haughton, "Bayard Rustin Civil Rights Leader," QuakerInfo.com, http://www.quakerinfo.com/quak_br.shtml

1/31/07, "Remember...Bayard Rustin," www.Lambda.net, http://www.lambda.net/~maximum/rustin.html

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