Sunday, July 21, 2019

Unsung Hero Bayard Rustin - Sermon from July 21, 2019


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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