Background

Bayard Rustin was born on March 10, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, United States. He had been raised to believe that his parents were Julia Davis and Janifer Rustin, when in fact they were his grandparents. He discovered the truth before adolescence, that the woman he thought was his sibling, Florence, was in fact his mother, who'd had Rustin with West Indian immigrant Archie Hopkins. Rustin's grandparents were relatively wealthy local caterers who raised Rustin in a large house. Rustin was influenced by the religious and political beliefs of his grandmother, Julia Rustin. A pacifist, Julia was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), and some of its leaders, such as William Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, sometimes stayed with the family while on their tours of the country.

As a young man, Rustin campaigned against Jim Crow laws in West Chester. One of his school friends later said: "Some of us were ready to give up the fight and accept the status quo, but he never would. He had a strong inner spirit."

Education

Bayard Rustin graduated from B. Reed Henderson High School. In 1932, Rustin entered Wilberforce University. Founded by white Methodists in 1856 for the benefit of African Americans, the university was named after William Wilberforce, one of the British leaders of the campaign against the slave-trade. However, he left in 1936 without taking his final exams. He was tossed from Wilberforce University after organizing a strike to protest the poor quality of the cafeteria food. He later attended Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania). It honored Rustin with a posthumous "Doctor of Humane Letters" degree at its 2013 commencement. Rustin moved to Harlem and began studying at New York City College. Rustin never earned a degree.

Career

As Rustin moved to Harlem he soon became involved in the campaign to free the nine African Americans that had been falsely convicted for raping two white women on a train. Known as the Scottsboro Case, Rustin was radicalized by what he believed was an obvious case of white racism. It was at this time (1936) that Rustin joined the American Communist Party. As Rustin later pointed out, "the communists were passionately involved in the civil rights movement so they were ready-made for me."

Rustin had a fine voice and sung in local folk clubs with Josh White. In September 1939, Rustin was recruited by Leonard De Paur to appear with Paul Robeson in the Broadway musical, John Henry. However, the show was not a success and closed after a fortnight.

In 1941 Rustin met the African American trade union leader, Philip Randolph. A member of the Socialist Party, Randolph was a strong opponent of communism and as a result of his influence, Ruskin left the American Communist Party in June 1941.

Rustin helped Philip Randolph plan a proposed March on Washington in June 1941, in protest against racial discrimination in the armed forces. The march was called off when Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 barring discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus (the Fair Employment Act).

Abraham Muste, executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), who had also been involved in planning the March on Washington was impressed by Rustin's organizational abilities. In September 1941, Muste appointed Rustin as FOR's secretary for student and general affairs.

In 1942, three members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Rustin, George Houser, and James Farmer, founded the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Members of this group were pacifists who had been deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau and his theories on how to use nonviolent resistance to achieve social change. The group was also inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. The students became convinced that the same methods could be employed by blacks to obtain civil rights in America.

As a pacifist, Rustin refused to serve in the armed forces. On 12th January 1944, Rustin was arrested and charged with violating the Selective Service Act. At his trial on 17th February, he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Other members of Congress on Racial Equality, including George Houser, Igal Roodenko, and James Peck, were also imprisoned during the Second World War for refusing to join the United States Army.

While serving his sentence, Rustin organized protests against segregated seating in the dining hall. He explained his actions in a letter to E. G. Hagerman, the prison warden: "Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There are three ways in which one can deal with injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) On can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it."

Rustin was released from prison on 11th June 1946. He immediately joined with George Houser in planning a campaign against segregated transport. In early 1947, CORE announced plans to send eight white and eight black men into the Deep South to test the Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate travel unconstitutional. The Journey of Reconciliation, as it became known, was to be a two-week pilgrimage through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

Although Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) was against this kind of direct action, he volunteered the service of its southern attorneys during the campaign. Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP's legal department, was strongly against the Journey of Reconciliation and warned 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."

The Journey of Reconciliation began on 9th April 1947. The team included Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko, George Houser, James Peck, Joseph Felmet, Nathan Wright, Conrad Lynn, Wallace Nelson, Andrew Johnson, Eugene Stanley, Dennis Banks, William Worthy, Louis Adams, Worth Randle, and Homer Jack.

James Peck was arrested with Bayard Rustin and Andrew Johnson in Durham. After being released he was arrested once again in Asheville and charged with breaking local Jim Crow laws. In Chapel Hill Peck and four other members of the team were dragged off the bus and physically assaulted before being taken into custody by the local police.

Members of the Journey of Reconciliation team were arrested several times. In North Carolina, two of the African Americans, Bayard Rustin, and Andrew Johnson were found guilty of violating the state's Jim Crow bus statute and were sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang. However, Judge Henry Whitfield made it clear he found that the behavior of the white men were even more objectionable. He told Igal Roodenko and Joseph Felmet: "It's about time you Jews from New York learned that you can't come down here bringing your niggers with you to upset the customs of the South. Just to teach you a lesson, I gave your black boys thirty days, and I give you ninety."

The Journey of Reconciliation achieved a great deal of publicity and was the start of a long campaign of direct action by the Congress of Racial Equality. In February 1948 the Council Against Intolerance in America gave Rustin and George Houser the Thomas Jefferson Award for the Advancement of Democracy for their attempts to bring an end to segregation in interstate travel.

After the arrest of Rosa Parks in December 1955, after she had refused to give up her seat to a white man, Martin Luther King, a pastor at the local Baptist Church, decided to organize a protest against bus segregation. It was decided that from 5th December, black people in Montgomery would refuse to use the buses until passengers were completely integrated. Rustin was asked to go to Montgomery to help organize this campaign.

Martin Luther King was arrested and his house was fire-bombed. Others involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott also suffered from harassment and intimidation, but the protest continued. For thirteen months the 17,000 black people in Montgomery walked to work or obtained lifts from the small car-owning black population of the city. Eventually, the loss of revenue and a decision by the Supreme Court forced the Montgomery Bus Company to accept integration and the boycott came to an end on 20th December 1956.

Rustin was now King's main adviser and together they formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The new organization was committed to using nonviolence in the struggle for civil rights, and SCLC adopted the motto: "Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed." Rustin was offered the job as director of SCLC but he declined as he preferred a more flexible role in the civil rights movement.

In 1963 Rustin began organizing what became known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Rustin was able to persuade the leaders of all the various civil rights groups to participate in the planned protest meeting at the Lincoln Memorial on 28th August.

The decision to appoint Rustin as a chief organizer was controversial. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP was one of those who was against the appointment. He argued that being a former member of the American Communist Party made him an easy target for the right-wing press. Although Rustin had left the party in 1941, he still retained his contacts with its leaders such as Benjamin Davis.

Wilkins also feared that the fact that Rustin had been imprisoned several times for both refusing to fight in the armed forces and for acts of homosexuality, would be used against him in the days leading up to the march. However, Martin Luther King and Philip Randolph insisted that he was the best person for the job.

Wilkins was right to be concerned about a possible smear campaign against Rustin. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, had been keeping a file on Rustin for many years. An FBI undercover agent managed to take a photograph of Rustin talking to King while he was having a bath. This photograph was then used to support false stories being circulated that Rustin was having a homosexual relationship with King.

This information was now passed on to white politicians in the Deep South who feared that a successful march on Washington would persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to sponsor a proposed new civil rights act. Storm Thurmond led the campaign against Rustin making several speeches where he described him as a "communist, draft dodger, and homosexual."

Most newspapers condemned the idea of a mass march on Washington. An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune warned that: "If Negro leaders persist in their announced plans to march 100,000-strong on the capital they will be jeopardizing their cause. The ugly part of this particular mass protest is its implication of unconstrained violence if Congress doesn't deliver."

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28th August 1963, was a great success. Estimates on the size of the crowd varied from between 250,000 to 400,000. Speakers included Philip Randolph (AFL-CIO), Martin Luther King (SCLC), Floyd McKissick (CORE), John Lewis (SNCC), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), Witney Young (National Urban League), and Walter Reuther (AFL-CIO). King was the final speaker and made his famous I Have a Dream speech.

Rustin was highly valued by the trade union movement, and when the AFL-CIO decided in 1965 to fund a new civil rights organization, the Philip Randolph Institute, he was asked to be its leader. Names after his close friend, Philip Randolph, Rustin worked for the organization until 1979.

In his final years, Rustin was active in the protests against the Vietnam War and in the gay rights movement. Bayard Rustin died in New York on 24th August 1987.

Achievements

• 

  Bayard Rustin is best known as an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights and an influential adviser behind the scenes to civil-rights leaders. President Ronald Reagan issued a statement on Rustin's death in 1987, praising his work for civil rights and his shift towards neoconservative politics over the years. On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Works

More photos

• book

  • I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters

    (A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin ...)

    2012

Religion

Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and was brought up by his grandmother, who had been raised as a Quaker. He himself became a Quaker in 1936, shortly before moving to New York where he lived most of his adult life.

Politics

In the mid-1930s, seeking an organization that shared his opposition to war and racism, he joined the Young Communist League (YCL).

Rustin became an honorary chairperson of the Socialist Party of America in 1972 before it changed its name to Social Democrats United States of America (SDUSA); Rustin acted as national chairman of SDUSA during the 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Communist Vietnam and Cambodia.

Views

In his personal philosophy, Rustin combined the pacifism of the Quaker religion, the non-violent resistance taught by Mahatma Gandhi, and the socialism espoused by African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph. During the Second World War, he worked for Randolph, fighting against racial discrimination in war-related hiring. After meeting A. J. Muste, a minister and labor organizer, he also participated in several pacifist groups, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Rustin was punished several times for his beliefs. In 1953, he was arrested on a morals charge for publicly engaging in homosexual activity and was sent to jail for 60 days; however, he continued to live as an openly gay man.

Quotations: "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."

Membership

Rustin was posthumously awarded honorary membership into Delta Phi Upsilon, a fraternity for gay, bisexual and progressive men.

• 

  Delta Phi Upsilon , United States

Personality

Rustin was a gay man who had been arrested throughout his early career for engaging in public sex with white male prostitutes. Rustin's sexuality, or at least his public criminal charge, was criticized by some fellow pacifists and civil-rights leaders because it detracted from his effectiveness. Rustin was attacked as a "pervert" or "immoral influence" by political opponents from segregationists to conservative black leaders from the 1950s through the 1970s. In addition, his pre-1941 Communist Party affiliation when he was a young man was controversial, having caused scrutiny by the FBI. To avoid such attacks, Rustin rarely served as a public spokesperson.

Interests

• Politicians

  Mahatma Gandhi

Connections

Rustin was a homosexual and never married or had children.

Father:

Archie Hopkins

Mother:

Florence Rustin

grandmother:

Julia Davis Rustin

Grandfather:

Janifer Rustin

associate:

Asa Randolph

Partner:

Davis Platt

Partner:

Walter Naegle

associate:

Martin King

References

• Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
  2004
• Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
  2015
• Bayard Rustin: The Invisible Activist
  2014
• We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin
  2007
• Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen: A Biography
  1997