We’ve all heard about the 1962 March on Washington where Martin Luther King famously
delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech, but we don’t know about the gay man who
organized it all, Bayard Rustin.
Rustin was born on March 17th 1912.
He was raised by his grandparents Julia and Janifer whom he believed to be his birth parents
until he was an early teen.
Rustin’s Grandmother, Julia Rustin was a Quaker and she instilled in Bayard the tenants
of the Quaker faith- most importantly non-violence.
She along with her husband were part of the early NAACP.
Great black leaders such as W.E.B.
Dubois would often spend the night in the Rustin home.
Rustin came out as gay to his grandmother at a very young age and she was mostly indifferent
to his sexual orientation.
Rustin was a talented and creative child who was a gifted poet, tenor and athlete.
He organized his first protest in a segregated restaurant where his white teammates were
able to be served, but him and other black teammates had to sit on a balcony nicknamed
“Nigger Heaven”.
His black teammates held a sit in and this eventually got him arrested.
According to Rustin, he appealed to both black and white members of the community to help
him fund his bail and he was able to be released.
He allowed himself to be arrested as a way of drawing attention to segregation, which
would be one of the causes he’d fight for through most of his life.
When the Great Depression hit in the 30s, it made pursuing a higher education a bit
of a challenge for Rustin.
He had two short stints at two black colleges, Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers
College.
He return to Cheyney college as a peace volunteer for a two week course sponsored by the American
Friends Committee in the spring of 1937.
The AFC trained volunteers in peaceful war opposition tactics and dispatched their trainees
to cities across the United States.
By the winter, he was ready to go to New York City and settle in Harlem with his aunt who
was a school teacher.
It was here where the Communist party had begun to gain momentum and had a large presence.
Rustin would flourish in New York and would enroll in New York City College where he would
take up singing again.
He joined the Josh White Quartet and was involved in a revival of John Henry on Broadway with
Paul Robeson.
He also began singing at Cafe Society in the Greenwich Village to help pay for college.
He also joined the Young Communist League who, at the time had dedicated themselves
to fighting against racial segregation in the US armed forces.
Congress passed the Selective Service Act in 1940 during peacetime and Rustin, who was
a strong pacifist and was staunchly anti-war had to register for the draft.
He was able to get an exception at a draft board as a conscientious objector, which meant
that he had to do alternative service.
When World War II began, the Young Communist party shifted its focus and this angered Rustin
to the point that he left the organization.
Rustin put all of his energy into supporting a March on Washington being organized by A.
Philip Randolph, who was the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
The March was to protest racial discrimination in the Defense Contracting Industry and in
the military.
However, before the march happened, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which
banned discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color or nationality in the National
Defense Industry.
This didn’t, however, reach Rustin’s goal of fully desegregating the military or all
industries, for that matter.
Randolph decided not to move forward with the march and this left Rustin disappointed
yet again.
He moved forward, but this wouldn’t be the last time he’d see Randolph.
From there he would join the Fellowship of Reconciliation where he would meet one of
his biggest mentors, Rev. AJ Muste.
FOR was an interfaith pacifist organization that believed in nonviolence, fellowship and
fought for economic justice.
Muste was heavily influenced by the teachings of Gandhi and his ways of nonviolent protest.
FOR formed CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942 and Rustin would travel across the
country speaking and organizing nonviolent protests against Racial inequality.
This would get him a lot of unwanted attention and eventually the draft board took notice.
He was arrested on February 17th 1944 for failing to appear for alternative service,
as required as a conscientious objector.
He went to a segregated prison in Ashland, Kentucky where he was beaten by white inmates
for his pacifism and his open homosexuality.
He was eventually transferred to a maximum security prison in Lewisburg where he’d
serve the rest of his sentence.
While in prison, he wrote letters back and forth with one of his lovers who had to disguise
himself as a woman in their exchanges.
When he was released in 1946, World War II was over and the Civil Right Era was in its
infancy.
At this point, he had a wealth of experience with non violent protest.
He rejoined CORE and began planning the Journey of Reconciliation; a precursor to the Freedom
Rides that protested the lack of enforcement of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Morgan
v. Virginia that desegregated the interstate buses in the south.
The protest failed and he was arrested again and ended up working on a chain gang in North
Carolina.
Rustin’s activism pulled him in many directions and in 1948, he was invited to travel to India
and meet one of his idols, Gandhi.
However, Gandhi would be assassinated before he had the opportunity to meet him.
Still, he traveled to India to help fight for India’s Independence from Britain.
Years later he would also travel to Africa to assist Kwame Nkrumah in the similar goal
of African Self rule.
Through all of his work, Rustin was an openly gay man.
This, however, wasn’t something that the public was aware of.
That was until in 1953, when he was arrested in Pasadena California for having sex with
two men in a parked car.
Homosexuality was illegal in all states at the time.
At this point, Rustin’s homosexuality started to become a bit of a liability for the organizations
he worked for.
FOR terminated their relationship with Rustin when news of his arrest reached them.
They felt that his actions would cast a negative shadow on the organization.
He reconnected with Randolph who was then able to give him a position at The War Resistence
League, a pacifist organization where Rustin would work for the next 12 years.
The next few years, Rustin would keep somewhat of a low profile, but Rosa Parks' act of defiance
in 1955 would result in the rise of Martin Luther King’s profile as a leader of the
Civil Rights Movement.
King had been organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott in response to Park’s arrest.
Randolph suggested that Rustin travel to Alabama to support King’s actions.
At this point, Rustin was a 44 year old seasoned activist and Martin Luther King was 25 years
old and inexperienced with non violent protest.
That didn’t prevent some people from being skeptical of his involvement with the Boycott.
Afterall, he was a gay man, which was extremely taboo at the time and a draft dodger.
When it came to respectability, he stood in stark contrast to Martin Luther King, who
embodied, in the eyes of many white people, a respectable negro.
However, King took Rustin on and his pacifism influenced King who disposed of is armed guards
under his advisement.
The boycott ended with success in 1956 when the Supreme Court desegregated the bus system.
Civil Right organizers quickly began to mobilizing to fight for the full desegregation of the
South.
Rustin used his connections with radicals and and pacifists in the North to help fund
much of King’s speeches and journalism.
He helped fund and organize The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which would be central
to the Civil Rights Movement.
Rustin began to loathe white leadership in Civil Rights organizations.
He believed that the people at the helm of these movements should be the Black southerners
who were the subject of the movement.
However, Rustin himself was from the North, and in some situations this placed him at
odds with certain black southern organizers.
Rustin and King’s relationship would be challenged when Adam Clayton Powell Jr threatened
to tell the press that King and Rustin were in a gay relationship.
This was in protest to King’s 1960 plans to march outside of the Democratic National
Convention.
King would distance himself from Rustin and cancel the march.
In retaliation, Rustin then left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Into the 60s, Rustin divided his time between international pacifist activism and racial
justice efforts in the south.
Though he’d been an advocate of nonviolent direct action, Rustin began to question whether
or not non violent direct action alone was the best way of accomplishing his goals of
racial equality and democracy.
In 1963, Randolph and Rustin were planning a March on Washington for economic justice,
but in May police in Birmingham Alabama turned fire hoses and attack dogs on black children
and this shook America.
King hadn’t shown much interest in the march until this point.
The focus of the March shifted when King decided to jump in and insist that the march be for
civil rights.
So the March became the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Rustin began to petition the 6 big civil rights organizations, SNCC, CORE, SCLC, The National
Urban League and the NAACP.
He would meet resistance with the last one when Roy Wilkins, once again brought up Rustin’s
past as a gay communist draft dodger.
Wilkins didn’t want Rustin to be the front man for the march as, once again, he was considered
a liability.
The resistance lead to Randolph having to serve as the March’s director and Rustin,
as his deputy.
Planning moved forward: They began to plan the exact amount of bathrooms, doctors and
accommodations for an expected 250,000 people.
However, they’d hit a bump in the road once again when Strom Thurmond,a South Carolina
Senator and segregationist, got ahold of Rustin’s FBI file.
The FBI had been tracking Rustins activity since college.
Thurmond took to the Senate floor to attack Rustin personally for his connection to communism
and his sexuality.
This still didn’t make Rustin back down
The March on Washington was seething with respectability.
Speeches had to be approved and several more radical speeches were cut entirely from programming.
Some speeches had to be edited down to be less aggressive.
Most notably, John Lewis’ militaristic speech was a topic of debate up to the day of the
March.
Rustin put together a list of ten demands for the march and distributed pamphlets to
bus drivers coming from all around the country to Washington.
At first it seemed like the march would be a bust, but as people piled into the mall,
it became clear that the march was going to be a success.
Everything went off without a hitch and after King’s speech, he took to the stage to make
the goals of the march known.
Ladies and gentlemen! The first demand is that we have effective civil rights legislation, no compromise, no filibuster,
and that it include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FAPC, and the right to vote. What do you say?
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed and it outlawed discrimination on the basis of
race, color, religion, sex or nationality It also ended racial segregation in schools
and public accommodations.
The March on washington was a landmark for the civil rights era, but it would also put
an end to Rustin’s personal belief in protesting alone being successful.
He started to feel that the way to move forward was with the combination of protest and policy.
After the March he and Randolph formed the Phillip A Randolph Institute in 1964 which
married civil rights issues to the issues of trade unions.
Rustin would collaborate more and more with the democratic party and as he got closer
to them, members of the black power movement started to come out against him.
Anti War advocates started to become disappointed with him when he didn’t immediately come
out against the Vietnam war and even for discouraging King from speaking about about it as well.
The movement that he was so instrumental in, started to become disenchanted with him.
King was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee on April 5th 1968 and Rustin held a memorial
march for his long term friend.
Rustin was a man who ultimately believed in negotiation.
He was, afterall, a man of numerous identities and experiences and didn’t feel his activism
was confined to him simply being a black man.
In the 1980s, he opened up publicly about his sexuality and began focusing on the rights
of gays and lesbians.
He would meet Walter Naegle in Times Square one day and he would be his partner for the
next 10 years.
Rustin died on August 24, 1987, of a perforated appendix a few days before the 24th anniversary
of the March on Washington.
He is survived by his partner Walter Naegle.
If you had asked me if gay people had been involved in the fight for black freedom when
I was learning about black history in school, I would have scoffed at you and told you that
never happened.
The narratives of LGBT people are often erased from our education and sometimes that has
the unintended impact of making people of certain intersections feel like they simply
didn’t exist.
Bayard Rustin was a gay man who understood that there are more things worth fighting
for than just your own battles.
He traveled the world and fought for the liberation of all peoples and surrounded himself with
diversity.
He was imperfect, as most of us, but he didn’t let his imperfections prevent him from fighting
for what’s right.
Proving that non violence can create change.