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October 4, 2012

Bayard  Rustin
Bayard Rustin

Yale University Launches Celebration of Bayard Rustin

The Yale University Law School will show the 2003 film Brother Outsider:The Life of Bayard Rustin to kick off the school’s centennial celebration honoring Rustin, a black gay man who organized the 1963 March on Washington, one of the most successful civil-rights demonstrations in  U.S.history.

Yale will show the film on October 9, and Walter Naegle, Rustin’s companion, will attend the event to answer questions, said Margaret Chisholm, the event’s organizer and reference librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale. The showing is open to Yale students and New Haven, Conn., residents.

The law school also will unveil in its reading room an exhibit entitled “Pacifism and the American Civil Rights Movement: A Celebration of the Centennial of Bayard Rustin’s Birth.” Visitors will be able to use a listening station to hear Bayard Rustin, a pacifist, speak on four different topics, including Mahatma Ghandi.

Yale also is launching a website that will include seven working papers. They will include a report by Rustin and George Houser, a Methodist minister and civil-rights activist, to the Fellowship of Reconciliation on the first Freedom Rides that occurred in 1947. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest and oldest interfaith peace organization in the United States, and the Congress of Racial Equality organized the 1947 rides, long before the more well-known Freedom Rides that took place in 1961.

The website also will include Rustin’s 47-page typewritten papers about his 47 days on a chain gang. In February 1944, he was sentenced to three years in a segregated federal prison in Ashland, Ky., for resisting the draft. He was later transferred to Lewisburg Federal Prison in Lewisburg, Pa.

“We will gradually keep adding documents that show Rustin’s contribution,” Chisholm said.

Rustin was born March 17, 1912, and he died Aug. 24, 1987. His admirers are determined to honor him because the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington is approaching. An  estimated 200,000 to 300,000 individuals attended the event, which was held on Aug. 28,1963.

Long before the Internet or Facebook, Rustin organized the event on 3x5 cards in seven weeks, said John D’Emilio, author of the 2003 book, Lost Prophet--The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

Rustin’s admirers believe he was first ignored and later forgotten because of his homosexuality.

“Rustin became a threat to some of the black clergy who surrounded King, and they have sought to erase his name from the record,” said Adam Green, associate professor of American history at 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.”

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