Rustin, Bayard 1910–1987

views updated Jun 11 2018

Bayard Rustin 19101987

Political strategist, civil rights activist

At a Glance

American Gandhism

Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rustin the Elder Statesman

Selected writings

Sources

Bayard Rustin never stood directly in the media spotlight that shone upon other black activists, but his contributions as a strategist and tactician place him among the most influential of twentieth-century civil rights leaders. In a career spanning more than five decades, Rustin worked on behalf of equal rights with a variety of organizationsincluding the Communist party, labor unions, and pacifist groupsand exercised a leading role in the creation of two significant civil rights organizations: the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin was particularly instrumental in the development of the nonviolent protest movement that evolved from the Montgomery bus boycott associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. Although it was King who was catapulted into a position of national leadership by the boycott, it was Rustin, a man twenty years Kings senior, who provided much of the organizational know-how, political savvy, and theoretical underpinning for Kings civil rights victories.

The early years of Bayard Rustins life are not well chronicled. He grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in a family of nine children; the household was headed by a pair of caterers. At the age of eleven Rustin made a startling discovery: the woman he had always been told was his sister, Florence, was in fact his mother, and the couple whom he knew as his parents were actually his grandparents. His father was a West Indian man with whom Florence had a stable relationship but never married. Rustins grandmother was a Quaker who instilled in Rustin a sense of commitment to social justice.

Bayard Rustin was an intellectually gifted young man, but the beginning of his college career coincided with the onset of the Depression, and his familys inability to aid him financially cut short his formal education. In 1931 he left Pennsylvania to live with a relative in New York, where his vocal talent earned him irregular work as a cafe singer in Greenwich Village. At that time strict segregation was still the rule in places of public entertainment. The only integrated social clubs in New York were operated by Communist organizers who hoped to enlist the support of blacks, and during this period Rustin became affiliated with the Communist party. To Rustin, as to many other American intellectuals in the 1930s, the Communist party offered a coherent explanation and cure for the devastating problems of economic depression and racial tension in the United States. The party was especially appealing to black

At a Glance

Born March 17,1910, in West Chester, PA; died of a heart attack, August 24, 1987, in New York City. Education: Wilberforce University, 1930-31; Cheyney State Normal School (now Cheyney State College), 1931-33; City College of New York, 1933-35.

Organizer, Young Communist League, 1936-41 (resigned from party, 1941); Fellowship of Reconciliation, Chicago, IL, youth secretary, 1941, race relations director, 1942-53; Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), field secretary and co-founder, 1942; jailed as a conscientious objector, 1943-45; freedom rider participating in Journey of Reconciliation bus rides, 1947; special assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr., beginning in the mid-1950s; cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Atlanta, GA, 1957-60; co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington; A. Philip Randolph Institute, New York City, executive director, 1964-79, chairman, 1979-87; Ratner Lecturer, Columbia University, 1974; founder, Organization for Black Americans to Support Israel, 1975.

Awards: Man of the Year Award, NAACP Pittsburgh branch, 1965; Eleanor Roosevelt Award, Trade Union Leadership Council, 1966; Liberty Bell Award, Howard University Law School, 1967; John Dewey Award, United Federation of Teachers, 1968; Family of Man Award, National Council of Churches, 1969; John F. Kennedy Award, National Council of Jewish Women, 1971; Lyndon Johnson Award, Urban League, 1974; Murray Green Award, AFL-CIO, 1980; Stephen Wise Award, Jewish Committee, 1981; John La Farge Memorial Award, Catholic Interracial Council of New York, 1981; Defender of Jerusalem Award, 1987; honorary degrees from Clark College, Montclair State College, New School for Social Research, and Brown, Harvard, Columbia, New York, and Yale universities.

Americans for its affirmation of equality between the races, and Rustin was only one of many black intellectuals to embrace its philosophy for a period of time.

Rustin joined the Young Communist League, whose leaders recognized him as a good organizer who could appeal to other young blacks; they appointed him a youth recruiter for the party. Rustins recruitment work took him throughout the United States to colleges and union halls where he spoke out against racial segregation. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, however, the American Communist party shifted its emphasis from the domestic to the international front and essentially halted its agitation for racial reform in the United States. When the partys Central Committee insisted that Rustin stop his anti-segregation work, he resigned from the party.

American Gandhism

Disillusioned but undaunted, Rustin appealed to the venerated black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph offered Rustin temporary work with his March on Washington Movement, a project targeting racial discrimination in defense industries, and he further helped Rustin by arranging a meeting with A. J. Muste, the radical reformer who headed an international pacifist organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). The principles and tactics of the Christian-based FOR were familiar to the Quaker-influenced Rustin, whose abilities were quickly recognized by Muste. Rustin was hired as FORs youth secretary and resumed traveling throughout the country promoting the cause of nonviolent struggle for social change.

FORs program encompassed a broad social agenda of which pacifism was but one component. In 1942 FOR established a Department of Race Relations, with Rustin and another young black activist, James Farmer, serving as directors. One of Rustins first jobs was to advise a fledgling group of activists called the Chicago Committee of Racial Equality, a subgroup of FOR from the University of Chicago. From this committee emerged the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a federation of civil rights organizations with nationwide affiliates, for whom Rustin also went to work. At the heart of COREs philosophy was the idea of nonviolent direct action, an American adaptation of the principle of Satyagraha, the soul force exercised by Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi and his followers in their struggle for independence from Britain. Interracial in its membership, COREs activities focused on challenging racial discrimination in public accommodations and transportation.

Rustins career as a nonviolent direct activist was interrupted in 1943, when, as a conscientious objector to World War II, he chose prison over hospital duties and spent the remainder of the war in the Lewisburg Penitentiary. Upon release, he resumed activist work with both CORE and FOR, in 1947 joining a group of other courageous Freedom Riders in the first of many protest rides throughout the South. Sponsored by CORE, this Journey of Reconciliation aimed to test a recent U.S. Supreme Court prohibition on segregation in interstate travel. Rustin and his fellow riders were beaten and arrested, and Rustin spent twenty-two days on a North Carolina chain gang as the result of a bungled defense by NAACP lawyers.

After the war Rustin participated in Indias movement for independence from Britain, gaining an international reputation as a political strategist that took him to India to work for Gandhis Congress party and to Africa to assist Kwame Nkrumah, an activist for African self-rule who became the first prime minister of the Gold Coast.

Despite his international success, aspects of Rustins personal life threatened to cripple his effectiveness in the United States by isolating him from his political colleagues. In the Greenwich Village social circles in which Rustin traveled, it was acknowledged and accepted that he was homosexual; outside this zone of tolerance Rustins personal life was considered a potential liability to the political organizations for which he worked. When Rustin began to run into trouble with laws against homosexual activity, FOR chairman Muste warned him that any further such violations would cause his dismissal from the organization. Early in 1953 Rustin was arrested and convicted on morals charges in Pasadena, California. He resigned from FOR, served a thirty-day jail sentence, and returned to New York.

Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr.

By the mid-1950s a grass-roots civil rights movement had begun to emerge in the South. In December of 1955, a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a bus boycott that would serve as a model for a decade of civil rights protests. The boycott soon attracted the attention of the national press and of northern civil rights activists; to Bayard Rustin, the Montgomery bus boycott represented a chance to regain his former influence by joining what appeared certain to become a national movement. In February of 1956, Rustin traveled to

Montgomery to get a firsthand look, but he did not stay long. Shortly after his arrival several local black organizers telephoned A. Philip Randolph to express their fear that Rustins presence in Montgomery would prove a liability to their cause. The boycotts success might be jeopardized by association with a man whose personal life and Communist connections were vulnerable to criticism. Randolph shared their concern, and, together with other northern civil rights leaders, prevailed upon Rustin to leave Montgomery.

Rustin did not withdraw from the boycott; he merely shifted his work behind the scenes. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the Montgomery movement, recognized the value of Rustins experience as a political organizer. King and Rustin maintained constant though long-distance contact, with Rustin ghostwriting some of Kings articles and speeches, raising money, and generally serving as liaison between the organization in Montgomery and northern activists.

The bus boycott ended successfully in December of 1956 with the arrival in Montgomery of desegregation orders from the Supreme Court. Civil rights organizers wasted no time in scheduling meetings and conferences to develop strategies for expanding the campaign to desegregate the South. Throughout 1957 Bayard Rustin was at the center of this activity, organizing conferences, writing essays for discussion, and helping found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization that would play a central role in coming civil rights victories. The SCLC distanced itself from older and more conservative bodies such as the NAACP by advocating direct action in the pursuit of civil liberties, though always in the Gandhian tradition of nonviolence. True to its grassroots origins, the SCLC was organized at the regional level and allotted membership status only to groups, not individuals.

Rustin felt that the organizational principles of CORE had been flawed, in that its interracial composition had opened the door to domination by well-meaning white members. The new organization, he felt, must be led by southern blacks, just as the boycott had beenwhich left Rustin himself in an awkward situation, as he was a northern black, an outsider even in the organization he helped create. However, Rustin remained in close touch with the man most responsible for the success or failure of the SCLC, Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin encouraged the cult of personality growing around King and helped the emerging leader by briefing him for meetings, drafting speeches and press releasesin short, by giving the younger man the benefit of his experience as a political tactician and of his connections with wealthy civil rights supporters.

Rustin the Elder Statesman

The potential for scandal loomed once again in the summer of 1960, when the powerful black congressman Adam Clayton Powell threatened to expose Rustins personal and political past. Rustin resigned from SCLC; he continued, however, to serve as a leading political adviser to King, and he remained influential in the SCLCs affairs until Kings death in 1968. Indeed, it was Rustin who was chiefly responsible for the organization of one of the most important nonviolent protests in American history, the 1963 March on Washington at which King delivered his electrifying I Have a Dream speech.

But by 1963 Rustin had grown disillusioned with nonviolent direct action as a means of effecting change on behalf of black people. He had come to believe that it was time to move on to the political arena. Here he parted with King, who still believed in the power of mass demonstrations. In 1964 Rustin was appointed executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a liberal think tank sponsored by the AFL-CIO labor organization in the hope of developing cures for social ills. From this vantage point Rustin surveyed the violent upheavals and factionalism that soon characterized the movement for racial equality.

Despite his continued allegiance to the radical principles at the heart of his thoughtwhich called for a total restructuring of political, economic, and social institutionsRustin always insisted on the importance of the vote, strong labor unions, and coalition politics. To those younger blacks who advocated racial separatism, Rustin replied that without equal rights for all Americans no separatist movement could hope to maintain its political power. By the time of Rustins death in 1987 the goals and tactics of his political activity had undergone many changes, but his fundamental vision remained that of equal rights for all citizens in a fully democratic society.

Selected writings

Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Quadrangle Books, 1971.

Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest, Columbia University Press, 1976.

Sources

Books

Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Fairclough, Adam, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Meier, August, and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968, Oxford University Press, 1973.

Periodicals

Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1987.

Commonweal, December 1, 1972.

Journal of Southern History, February 1977.

New Leader, November 29, 1971.

New Perspectives, Winter 1985.

New Yorker, June 21, 1976.

New York Herald Tribune, July 28, 1964; August 9, 1964.

New York Times, February 4, 1964.

Political Studies, June 1978.

Saturday Evening Post, July 11, 1964.

Washington Post, August 21, 1983.

Jonathan Martin

Rustin, Bayard

views updated May 29 2018

Rustin, Bayard 1912–1987

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) was a civil rights strategist and humanitarian who shaped the course of social protest in the twentieth century. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 17, 1912, Rustin served as Martin Luther King Jr.’s political adviser and as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Although he was best known for his influence on the course of the black protest agenda, Rustin’s political engagements extended to organized labor and world affairs. However, Rustin remained an outsider in black civil-rights circles because, unlike most of his peers, he was gay. Throughout much of his career, Rustin tried to control the potential negative impact his sexuality could have on the causes for which he worked.

After a youth grounded in his grandmother’s Quaker teachings, Rustin began college in 1932 at Wilberforce University, but he transferred to Cheney State Teachers’ College two years later. Finally, in 1937, Rustin moved to New York to enroll in City College. However, rather than immerse himself in academics, Rustin plunged into the cultural and political circles of New York and Harlem. He began his pursuit of social justice by joining the Young Communists League. Then, in 1941, he joined Abraham Johannes (A .J.) Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an organization guided by the Gandhian principles of nonviolent protest that would later be deployed by civil rights leaders. Rustin became Muste’s chief acolyte, but his rise to leadership left him politically vulnerable, and in 1943 he was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing to register for selective service. After leading several civil-disobedience campaigns, Rustin fell under the scrutiny of prison officials, and when inmates complained about Rustin’s sexual relationships with other men, he was placed in isolation. He worried that his actions would detract from FOR’s cause, and his conduct earned a swift reprimand from Muste.

Rustin began the most productive period of his career upon his release from prison in March 1947. Working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Rustin orchestrated the Journey of Reconciliation, which involved sixteen CORE members traveling by bus between southern cities in order to test a recent Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel. In the late 1940s, Rustin also traveled abroad as a representative of the pacifist movement. These travels brought him to Africa, where he discovered a sense of kinship that kept him committed to African politics and decolonization efforts. To finance a return trip to Africa, Rustin commenced a speaking tour of the United States. However, in 1953, following one of his speaking engagements in Pasadena, Rustin was charged with lewd conduct for engaging in gay sex. Outraged by actions that he believed jeopardized FOR’s mission, Muste asked Rustin to leave the organization.

After resigning from FOR, Rustin became a key player in the civil rights movement. On the recommendation of A. Philip Randolph, a leader in both the trade union and civil rights movements, Rustin went to Montgomery in 1956 to advise King during the bus boycott. Rustin intentionally remained in the background, advising colleagues that his presence in Montgomery should remain clandestine. However, when Montgomery commissioners charged civil rights leaders for illegal organizing, it was Rustin who proposed that the accused turn themselves in to authorities before arrest warrants were issued. Later, on Rustin’s advice, King banished firearms from his household, marking a turn in the moral temper of the civil rights movement. However, Rustin’s presence eventually drew attention, and he was extracted from Montgomery after a local newspaper alleged that he was wanted for inciting a riot.

Unable to participate directly in the boycott, Rustin did so by proxy from New York. He formed an organization called In Friendship in March 1956, and he publishing King’s writings in the journal Liberation. In January 1957, Rustin and other In Friendship cofounders Ella Baker and Stanley Levison presented King with a series of working papers that served as the basis for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The papers, authored by Rustin and Levison, situated the events and provided a political and structural framework for the organization, emphasizing the need for a federation of southern civil rights leaders that would coordinate mass direct action, voter education, and outreach against racial oppression. In the late 1950s, Rustin helped draft King’speeches and articles, and he coordinated his public appearances. Nonetheless, Rustin was again forced to leave his work because of his sexuality. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., an African-American congressman, threatened to announce to the press a fabricated gay coupling between Rustin and King unless they halted plans for a march at the Democratic National Convention. Rustin again put the interests of the movement before his own, voluntarily stepping down from the SCLC.

This did not end Rustin’s civil rights career, however. He was once again tapped by Randolph, this time to help orchestrate the 1963 March on Washington. Originally conceived as a militant demonstration against employment discrimination, the march assumed greater breadth with the participation of major civil rights leaders. But with this participation came a number of political conflicts that Rustin and Randolph compelled to deal with. King advised the march organizers that the SCLC’s primary concern was civil rights, not unemployment. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the National Urban League sought to de-emphasize civil disobedience and militancy in fear that such action would threaten President Kennedy’proposed civil rights legislation. As a result, Rustin’s conception of the march was moderated. Because of focal changes effected by Randolph’efforts to cement the participation of King and other leaders, President Kennedy publicly endorsed the March in July. Still, some leaders questioned whether Rustin, a known gay man, was an appropriate choice as the march’s director. As a compromise, Randolph was named director, and, in a show of unqualified support, he named Rustin his deputy.

Randolph’s support was well founded. Under Rustin’s direction, the March on Washington proved to be a turning point in American history. For the first time, civil rights leaders peacefully coalesced to articulate demands for economic empowerment and civil rights. Again, Rustin’s diplomatic ability to smooth over conflicts among march leaders was key. At Rustin’s urging, John Lewis of the SNCC modified his speech to eliminate what Wilkins perceived as inflammatory comments. Further, when the SCLC complained that Rustin had purposely marginalized King by placing him last in the program, he explained that each of the other speakers had asked not to follow King. Rustin’s instinct was correct: King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was the pinnacle of the march, if not a symbolic culmination of the entire movement.

The march was equally a personal triumph for Rustin, who in seven weeks had orchestrated the largest public protest in American history. In addition to providing behind-the-scenes diplomacy, Rustin drafted multiple manuals to guide march organizers, engaged in group training sessions, and recruited a troop of plain-clothes black police officers to ensure peace during the march. This work required Rustin to engage in multiple negotiations not only with the march organizers, but also with federal and municipal agencies.

Following the march, Rustin spent the last twenty years of his career with the A. Philip Randolph Institute, engaged in a broad campaign to end discrimination in labor and employment. Increasingly, this work led Rustin away from a strict focus on civil rights and toward international human rights issues. During this period of active outreach, Rustin also became publicly vocal about his gay identity, challenging the civil rights establishment to adopt an agenda more inclusive of black gay men and lesbians and urging community leaders to respond to the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Following a humanitarian trip to Haiti, Rustin died from cardiac arrest on August 24, 1987, at the age of seventy-five.

SEE ALSO Civil Rights Movement; Heterosexism and Homophobia; Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Jervis, and Bayard Rustin. 1997. Troubles I’ve Seen, a Biography. New York: Harper Collins.

Carbado, Devon W., and Donald Weise, eds. 2003. Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. San Francisco: Cleis Press.

D’emilio, John. 2003. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. New York: Free Press.

Levine, Daniel. 2000. Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Rustin, Bayard. 2006. Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest. New York: Columbia University Press.

_____, Ed Edwin, and Walter Neagle. 1988. The Reminiscences of Bayard Rustin. New York: Columbia University Oral History Research Office.

Woodward, C. Vann, ed. 1971. Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

Devon W. Carbado

Rustin, Bayard

views updated May 18 2018

Rustin, Bayard

March 17, 1910
August 24, 1987


Bayard Rustin was a civil rights leader, pacifist, political organizer, and controversial public figure. He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1910, the youngest of nine children. He accumulated a colorful personal history, beginning with his youthful discovery that the woman he had assumed was his older sister was actually his mother. Reared by his mother and grandparents, who were local caterers, he grew up in the relatively privileged setting of a large mansion in town. Like the rest of his family, Rustin became a Quaker, maintaining an enduring commitment to personal pacifism as a way of life. Tall, thin, usually bushy-haired, and with an acquired West Indian accent, Rustin was noticed wherever he appeared.

He attended college at West Chester State College, then moved to Harlem during the 1930s, where he cultivated a bohemian lifestyle, attending classes at City College, singing with jazz groups and at night clubs, and gaining a reputation as a chef. His most notable activity, however, was aligning with the Communist Party through the Young Communist League, a decision based on the party's position on race issues. In 1941, when asked by the party to abandon his program to gain young black recruits in favor of a singular emphasis on the European war effort, Rustin quit the party.

His public personality and organizing skills subsequently brought him to the attention of A. Philip Randolph, who recruited him to help develop his plans for a massive March on Washington to secure equal access to defense jobs. The two men, despite brief skirmishes, remained lifelong friends. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt capitulated to Randolph's threat to hold the marchthough Rustin believed that Randolph should not have canceled the marchRandolph arranged for Rustin to meet with A. J. Muste, the head of the radical pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Muste came to regard the younger man almost as a son, naming him in 1941 as a field staff member for FOR, while Rustin also continued as a youth organizer for the March on Washington movement.

Now possessed of a reputation as an activist in the politics of race, Rustin was able to offer advice to the members of the FOR cell who became the nucleus for a new nonviolent action organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Until 1955 Rustin remained a vital figure in the FOR/CORE alliance, holding a variety of offices within both groups, conducting weekend and summer institutes on nonviolent direct action in race relations, and serving as a conduit to the March on Washington movement for ideas and techniques on nonviolence. In 1947 he worked closely with Randolph again in a movement opposing universal military training and a segregated military, and he once again believed Randolph wrong in abandoning his strategies when met with a presidential executive order intended to correct the injustice. They argued briefly and publicly, then reconciled. Rustin is sometimes credited with persuading Randolph to accept nonviolence as a strategy.

Rustin's dual commitment to nonviolence and racial equality cost him dearly. In the summer of 1942, refusing to sit in the black section of a bus going from Louisville, Kentucky, to Nashville, Tennessee, he was beaten and arrested. The following year, unwilling to accept either the validity of the draft or conscientious-objector statusthough his Quaker affiliation made that option possiblehe was jailed as a draft resister and spent twenty-eight months in prison. Following his release, in 1947, he proposed that a racially integrated group of sixteen FOR/CORE activists undertake a bus trip through the Upper South to test a recent Supreme Court decision on interstate travel.

Termed the Journey of Reconciliation, the trip was essentially peaceful, although participants encountered violence outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Rustin and three others were charged with violating the segregation laws. In a sham trial, Rustin and the others were convicted and sentenced to thirty days hard labor on a chain gang. His continuing visible role in racial policies brought him additional arrests and beatings.

After his release from the chain gang, Rustin traveled to India, where he was received by Mohandas K. Gandhi's sons. He had earlier blended strands of Gandhian nonviolence into his conception of pacifism. When the bus boycott developed in Montgomery, Alabama, Rustin appeared on the scene to offer support, advice, and information on nonviolence. Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the boycott, accepted his help. But when word leaked of Rustin's former ties to the Communist Party and his 1953 conviction on a morals chargeallegedly for homosexual activityhe was rushed out of town. The gossip led to Rustin's resignation from both CORE and FOR in 1955, although he continued the pacifist struggle in the War Resisters League.

A 1952 visit to countries in North and West Africa convinced him of the need to assist Africans in their independence struggle. And he continued to be an active, though less visible, force in the effort to achieve racial justice, invited by King to assist in the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to serve as a publicist for the group. Conservative members, however, eventually sought his ouster, and from 1960 until 1963 Rustin had little contact with King.

In 1963, as Randolph renewed his plans for a massive March on Washington, he proposed Rustin as the coordinator for the national event. Though initially opposed by some major civil rights leaders and under surveillance by the FBI, Rustin successfully managed the complex planning for the event and avoided violence. He was named executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in 1964, while continuing to lead protests against militarism and segregation.

After the mid-1960s, Rustin's calls for blacks to work within the political system and his close ties with Jewish groups and labor unions made him the target of attacks by younger radicals, while his support for American investment and educational efforts in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s outraged opponents of the Apartheid regime. Toward the end of his life, he also became increasingly open about his homosexuality and spoke out in favor of equal rights for gays and lesbians. Following his death, the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities in New York City was named in his honor.

See also Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Montgomery, Ala., Bus Boycott; Randolph, Asa Philip; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

Bibliography

Anderson, Jervis. Bayard Rustin: The Troubles I've Seen. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Levine, Daniel. Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Rustin, Bayard. Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971.

Rustin, Bayard. "On the Economic Condition of Blacks." Crisis (March 1985): 2429, 32.

carol v. r. george (1996)
Updated bibliography

Bayard Rustin

views updated May 14 2018

Bayard Rustin

The pacifist Bayard Rustin (1910-1987) was committed to nonviolent strategies for working toward racial equality and economic justice. He worked through a variety of groups organizing demonstrations for civil rights and for peace.

One of 12 children, Bayard Rustin was born on March 17, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a small town near Philadelphia where the Quakers had established a colony of Black freedmen before the Civil War. Raised by his grandparents, he acquired a gourmet appreciation of fine food from his grandfather, a caterer, and a lifelong commitment to nonviolence and racial equality from his grandmother, a dedicated member of the Society of Friends and local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After graduating from West Chester High School as an honor student and three-letter star athlete, he drifted about the United States doing odd jobs and periodically studying history and literature at Cheney State Teachers College and Wilberforce University. In the mid-1930s, seeking an organization that shared his opposition to war and racism, he joined the Young Communist League (YCL). In 1938 he moved to Harlem as an organizer for the league, enrolling in the City College of New York and earning his livelihood by singing in nightclubs with Josh White and Huddie Ledbetter ("Leadbelly").

In 1941 Rustin left the YCL and began a 12-year association with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist, religious organization devoted to solving world problems through nonviolent means. As the FOR youth secretary, and then as director of its Department of Race Relations, Rustin served as an organizer for A. Philip Randolph's 1941 March on Washington. The demonstration convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which stipulated that all employers and unions with government defense contracts must cease racial discrimination and established a Committee on Fair Employment Practices to enforce the order. The following year, with James Farmer, he helped to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge Jim Crow by nonviolent direct action. A conscientious objector to military service, Rustin was imprisoned for resisting the draft in 1943 and served nearly two and a half years in the Ashland Correction Institute and Lewisburg Penitentiary.

After the end of World War II Rustin became chairman of the Free India Committee and later went to India to study the Gandhi movement's nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1947 he organized a Journey of Reconciliation to 15 cities in the South to publicize segregation in interstate transportation and to encourage African Americans to insist on the rights they had won in the courts. Arrested in North Carolina, Rustin served 22 days on a chain gang. (Two years later North Carolina abolished chain gangs.) In 1948 he directed A. Philip Randolph's Committee Against Discrimination in the Armed Forces, which helped to persuade President Harry S. Truman to issue an executive order banning racial segregation in the military.

Early in the 1950s Rustin became active in the movement of African nationalists seeking independence from European colonialism and also headed the pacifist War Resisters League. As a peace activist he mobilized the first Aldermaston march for nuclear disarmament in England and joined a ban-la-bombe march in the Sahara to protest the first French nuclear-test explosion.

Joining Martin Luther King, Jr. first in the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, Rustin served for a half dozen years as a special assistant to King and played a major role in planning the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). A master logistician, Rustin organized many of the key civil rights demonstrations of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and A. Philip Randolph again turned to him to orchestrate the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963, which brought nearly a quarter of a million Americans to the Lincoln Memorial to petition for African American rights. In 1964, in the largest civil rights demonstration ever, he mobilized a boycott of the New York City public schools to protest racial imbalance. The eruption of violent race riots in the African American ghettoes of the nation and the emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s, however, forced Rustin from the forefront of African American protest and demonstrations.

After 1966 Rustin used his presidency of the A. Philip Randolph Institute to promote his Democratic-Socialist politics, particularly his belief that African American progress depends on a political coalition of African Americans and progressive whites united in their support of "A Freedom Budget for All Americans." This was designed to cure the basic economic ills of the nation through federal programs for full employment, the abolition of slums, and the reconstruction of the educational system. Elegant in diction and dress, with the poise and manners of an aristocrat, Rustin was a connoisseur of African art and European antiques. He was the author of Down the Line (1971), Strategies for Freedom (1976), and Which Way Out? A Way Out of the Exploding Ghetto (1967). Rustin received numerous honors, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Award, Liberty Bell Award, Eugene V. Debs Award, Howard University Law School J.F.K. Award, and Man of the Year Award from the Pittsburgh chapter of the NAACP. He also chaired such notable organizations as the Social Democrats, U.S.A.; the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; and the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee.

In his nearly half a century struggle for peace, civil rights, and economic justice, Rustin was arrested more than 20 times. He never softened his principles. As late as 1980 he said, "You cannot give respectability to one terrorist group [meaning the Palestine Liberation Organization] without other groups benefiting from that respectability." Rustin died in New York City of a heart attack August 24, 1987.

Further Reading

Although Bayard Rustin has not yet been the subject of a full biography, many of his protest activities are chronicled in Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph (1972); August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (1973); David L. Lewis, King (1970); and Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980 (1981). His own views are best expressed in his books Which Way Out? A Way Out of the Exploding Ghetto (1967); Down the Line (1971); and Strategies for Freedom (1976). □

Rustin, Bayard

views updated May 29 2018

Rustin, Bayard (1910–1987), pacifist and civil rights activist.Born in Westchester, Pennsylvania, Rustin was raised by his grandparents as a Quaker. As an African American of developing political consciousness, Rustin joined the Young Communist League in New York City in the early 1930s, but quit in 1941. He then joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and in 1942, helped form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rustin spent two years in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II. Afterwards, he joined various anticolonial organizations, including the Free India movement and the Committee to Support South African Resistance. In 1947, he participated in CORE's Journey of Reconciliation, precursor to the 1960s Freedom Rides. Rustin also served as executive director of the War Resisters League (1953–55).

Best known for his work in the civil rights movement, Rustin joined the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helped conceive the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Although one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, closest advisers on nonviolence and political strategy, Rustin remained on the periphery because of his homosexuality and his ties to the Left. In the mid‐1960s, he was among few who urged King to take a political stand against the Vietnam War. Subsequently, he sought to minimize King's stance to preserve the fragile civil rights coalition.

In six decades of political activism, Rustin shifted from a racially conscious leftist to a more humanist‐oriented pacifist and advocate of coalition politics.
[See also Conscientious Objection; Pacifism; Quakers.]

Bibliography

Taylor Branch , Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988).
Jervis Anderson , Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen, 1997.

Martin A. Summers