Our unsung hero for today is Bayard
Rustin, who devoted his life to the fight for civil rights for African
Americans and to shine a light on the problem of poverty in America. He planned
and executed the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King delivered his ‘I have
a dream’ speech. But he didn’t get the credit for it,
because he was openly gay, and some of the movement’s leaders thought that it
would be a distraction.
Rustin was born into a Quaker family in
1912 and learned the Quaker values of nonviolence and peace at an early age. He
was a singer, which paid his way through college. In 1937 he joined the Young Communist League
because he agreed with their progressive views on racial issues, but at the start of WW II, when the group’s
focus moved to support for the Soviet Union, he left it. He was a conscientious
objector during that war, as we heard in the reading, citing his pacifism and
the military’s racial segregation for his refusal to register for the draft,
which he was sent to prison for. He continued his activism in prison, writing almost
daily letters to the warden and leading strikes to try to get some racial
equality for his fellow prisoners. He studied Gandhi’s non-violence and went to
India after Gandhi’s assassination to learn more from his disciples about how
to run non-violent resistance campaigns. He came home from there declaring that
America needed more “angelic trouble makers” who were willing to put their
bodies in places so that wheels could not turn, so that business as usual was
disrupted.
Like almost all black activists, then
and now, he was surveilled by the FBI for his entire life. He was convicted in North Carolina
for sitting with a white man on a bus, a crime for which he spent 22 days on a
chain gang. His writing and speaking
about how the chain gang reduces humans to things to be used helped get it
outlawed in North Carolina. At the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement,
Rustin was invited to advise Dr. King on non-violence, and he became like an
older brother to King, who was only 25, helping him think through the political
and social dilemmas he was facing. When Dr. King decided to protest at both
national presidential conventions, prominent democrats, who did not want
protests at their conventions, threatened to go to the press and say that King
and Rustin were having an affair. Rustin was pushed out of the inner circle, and
Dr. King distanced himself from him. When some tried to bring him back, as they needed him for his
organizational skills for the proposed March on Washington, Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of
the NAACP was adamantly opposed. He
said, “I know you are a Quaker, but that’s not what I’ll have to defend. I’ll
have to defend draft dodging. I’ll have
to defend promiscuity. The question is never going to be homosexuality. It’s
going to be promiscuity, and I can’t defend that. And the fact is that you were
a member of the Young Communist League.
I don’t care what you say, I can’t defend that.”
Dr. King and John Lewis came up with a plan.
They nominated A. Phillip Randolph, a respected member of the movement, as the
official director of the march, and he appointed Rustin as his deputy, and
Rustin organized and ran the March. Even though 3 weeks before the march, Senator
Strom Thurmond announced that it was being organized ‘by a communist, draft
dodging homosexual,’ it went on as planned, and it re-energized and inspired
people to continue to work for civil rights for all Americans. After Dr. King’s
assassination in 1968, the movement once again pushed Rustin
out. Rustin was also a target of Black Power leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely
Carmichael, who accused him of being a sellout because he believed in
nonviolence and working with white people to make progress for black people in
America. Some even resorted to calling him Fag
in their speeches. But he was always
willing to debate them, and he continued to call for cooperation and unity
among the races. Rustin kept up his non-violent resistance and work for human
rights until his death in 1987. To some, he was too radical. To others he was
not radical enough. But he always spoke the truth as he saw it, even when it
meant that he was unpopular. And he never wavered in his belief that we are one
human family, and that we are meant to be together rather than separate.
At the end of the documentary, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin,
was an interview with actress and human rights advocate Liv Ullman, who
traveled the world with Rustin in his later years. I think it illustrates
perfectly the kind of person that he was. She said, “We came to one refugee
camp. And they needed blood. A lot of us were really afraid to give blood. And the first one to say, ‘We will all give
Blood. Here’s my arm. Get going.” was
Bayard. And there was nobody who dared to say ‘No.’ And I who have been so
scared of that all my life, I’ve never done it in a hospital even, I was
lying there on the ground and I did what Bayard did. I gave blood. And I have never felt so good in
my life. It was the way he did it. It was normal. This is what we are supposed to do. It’s
normal to care about somebody at your side.” May each of us, with our different
backgrounds, gifts, personalities, and experiences, follow the example of
Bayard Rustin and find ways to work together as one family for the common good
of us all.
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Our first reading for
today is from the letter Bayard Rustin wrote to the draft board in 1943.
The Conscription Act
separates black from white—those supposedly struggling for a common freedom.
Such a separation also is based on the moral error that men virtually in
slavery can struggle for a freedom they are denied. This means that I must
protest racial discrimination in the armed forces. Segregation, separation, according to Jesus,
is the basis of continuous violence. That which separates us from one another
is evil and must be resisted. I admit my share of guilt for having participated
in the institutions and ways of life which helped bring fascism and war.
Nonetheless, guilty as I am, I now see, as did the Prodigal Son, that it is
never too late to refuse to remain in a non-creative situation. It is always
timely and virtuous to change—to take in all humility a new path. I appreciate
now as in the past your advice and consideration, and trust that I shall cause
you no anxiety in the future. I want you to know I deeply respect you for
executing your duty to God and country in these difficult times in the way you
feel you must.
Sincerely yours, Bayard
Rustin
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