Centennial Project Aims to Give Bayard Rustin His Due

by Frederick H. Lowe
On the 100th anniversary of Bayard Rustin’s birthday and a year before the 50th anniversary of one of the most-successful civil-rights demonstrations in history, a national movement is building to honor the event's organizer.

Many believe the force behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom has been overlooked for a number of reasons, but primarily because he was a gay black man.

“Every year, we hear about the ‘I have a Dream Speech,’” that [Martin Luther] King gave during the March on Washington, but we never hear about who organized the event," said Mandy Carter, national coordinator of the Bayard Rustin Centennial 2012 Project and the National Black Justice Coalition, which are based in Washington, D.C.

Rustin organized the march that attracted 200,000 to 300,000 people on Aug. 28, 1963, in Washington D.C. , long before the Internet or Facebook, laying out plans on 3x5 index cards in seven weeks, said John D'Emilio, author of the 2003 book, Lost Prophet-The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. D'Emilio is a professor of history and of gender and women studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC).

Rustin oversaw every detail of the March on Washington. His staff, which included future U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, encouraged attendees to bring peanut butter sandwiches instead of sandwiches made with mayonnaise because peanut butter would not spoil in Washington's August heat. He also supervised training of the U.S. Park Service in nonviolent methods of handling the huge crowd that was expected, and he scheduled the speakers for the day.

Rustin also directed his staff to contact bus companies to transport the marchers. His assistants arranged for 1,000 beds to be made available to those arriving the night before the event. In addition, the staff enlisted hundreds of volunteers to prepare bag lunches for those who didn't bring their own food.

“It means he was a badass organizer,” Adam Green, associate professor of American history at the University of Chicago, said during the Bayard Rustin Centennial Conference at UIC that was held on March 30 and 31.

The conference, along with an initiative by Yale University, is part of a national and an international effort to spotlight Rustin's contributions to the Civil Rights Movement as a valued advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin had a genius for organizing. He also was a strategic thinker and a Quaker pacifist.  Rustin also spoke out on gay and lesbian issues. He was committed to his beliefs, having served nearly three years in a federal prison in Ashland, Ky., during World War II as a conscientious objector.

Margaret Chisholm, reference librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University, gave a talk about Rustin in a video conference call to U.S. Consulate's Canadian offices in Vancouver, Halifax, and Quebec during Black History Month. The University of Calgary also participated in the video conference.

Rustin was born March 17, 1912, in West Chester, Pa. He was 75 years old when he died on Aug. 24, 1987, after completing 14 oral interviews about his life for Columbia University. In addition to being activist in the civil rights movement, he was musician who sang and played, built and repaired harpsichords.

The project includes making people aware of Rustin during Black History Month, organizing events to honor him at historically black colleges and universities and among the gay and lesbian community. In addition, organizers plan to mail a DVD of the 2008 film, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin to 11,000 school districts.

Moving King to nonviolence
When Rustin began working with King during the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, King wore a pistol and he kept an arsenal in his home. Armed guards protected the home where King lived.
 
Rustin persuaded King to use passive resistance. Rustin was influenced by the book, War Without Violence: A Study of Ghandi's Method and its Accomplishments. He studied passive resistance in India. Rustin also saw an end to demonstrations, and he urged civil rights leaders to work with unions to influence them to hire African Americans. He also wanted blacks to began rewriting laws to advance their cause.

Despite his accomplishments, most people ask, “Bayard who”?

In the introduction to Lost Prophet, D'Emilio asks, “Who is Bayard Rustin?”

“I have been asked this question enough times to know that Bayard Rustin is not a household name in America,” D'Emilio wrote. “Less than two decades after Rustin's death, his enormous contributions to American life—in the struggle  for racial equality, a peaceful international order, and a democratic economic system—have been covered over, his name mostly forgotten, his contribution to a world worth living in mostly obscured. Except for the briefest walk-on part as a man-behind-the-scenes of the historic 1963 March on Washington, Rustin hardly appears at all in the voluminous literature produced about the 1960s. Instead, he has become a man without a home in history.”

Why is that?

Concern about Rustin's homosexuality
Reri Barrett, career training specialist for the Center on Halsted, a Chicago-based Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual  and Transgender organization that works with homeless gay teenagers, believes it was because Rustin was gay.

“Martin Luther King denied him,” he said. “It is no wonder that so many black preachers are homophobic.” 

Rustin convinced King to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as a  permanent organization in 1957 to fight for civil rights, following the successful Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Boycott that began in 1955 and ended in 1956. Some African-American leaders, however, were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation, which was widely known, and his past Communist membership would undermine support for the civil rights movement.

In 1960, King and Rustin planned a demonstration in Los Angeles at the Democratic National Convention. U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., disagreed with Rustin on a number of issues. Powell threatened to say that King and Rustin were homosexual lovers if they did not call off the demonstration, Chisholm said.

"It wasn't true, and A. Phillip Randolph, the labor leader and Rustin’s mentor, urged King to stand his ground and not let Powell push him around," she said.  Rustin submitted his resignation as head of the convention project and much to his surprise, King accepted it, Chisholm said. Police had arrested Rustin in 1953 on a morals charge for engaging in sexual acts with two men in a car. King and Rustin did not speak to each other for several years. 

“Rustin became a threat to some of the black clergy that surrounded King, and they have to erase his name from the record,” said Green of the University of Chicago. “The Movement did not just spring from King's head. Bayard stands at the door of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He wasn't afraid to take risks.”

News media focuses only on leaders
Carter believes, however, that Rustin's contributions have been ignored because the news media tends to focus only on  leaders, not the people work behind the scenes to make things happen. “I hate to think they ignored Bayard because he was homosexual,” she said.

When Randolph was involved in the initial planning stages for the March on Washington, he asked Rustin to organize the event.

Last-ditch effort to stop the March on Washington
Sen. Strom Thurmond, from South Carolina, gave a speech on the Senate floor, calling Rustin, a 'Communist, draft-dodger and a homosexual.' Randolph and King, however, came to Rustin's defense and attested to his integrity. 

Rustin said, "The senator does not care about my morality. He cares about stopping this march."
Thurmond's attempt to stop the March on Washington fizzled.

NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins did not want Rustin to be the organizer of the March on Washington.  Nevertheless, he did take that position. On Sept. 6, 1963, Rustin and Randolph appeared on the cover of Life magazine as the leaders of the March on Washington.