Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin 1910-87, African-American civil-rights leader, b. West Chester, Pa. He attended three colleges but did not obtain a degree. A Quaker, he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector for more than two years during World War II. Devoting much of his early career to pacifist activities, he was (1941-53) on the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and headed (1953-55) the War Resisters League. In the early 1940s, Rustin also founded the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality , and he soon became a key figure in the struggle for African-American civil rights. As special assistant (1955-60) to Martin Luther King , Jr., he helped set up the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and, more generally, played an influential role in infusing King's movement with the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence (see Gandhi, Mohandas . Later, working in association with A. Philip Randolph , Rustin was the chief organizer of the massive 1963 March on Washington. From 1964 to 1987 he served as president of the Randolph Institute, a trade-union, educational, and civil-rights group. An openly gay man in a largely homophobic era, Rustin was usually obliged to employ his superb organizational and strategic skills behind the scenes.

Bibliography: See his collected writings in Down the Line (1971) and Time on Two Crosses (2003), ed. by D. W. Carbado and D. Weise; biographies by J. Anderson (1997) and J. D'Emilio (2003); studies by N. Dobrosky (1988), J. Haskins (1997), and D. Levine (1999); N. D. Kates and B. Singer, dir., Brother Outsider (documentary film, 2003).

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