Bayard Rustin ( ; March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American political activist and prominent leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. Rustin was the principal organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
In 1941, Rustin worked with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement to press for an end to racial discrimination in the military and defense industry. Rustin later organized Freedom Rides and helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to mentor Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolent resistance. In 1954, Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship. Before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group called "In Friendship" to provide material and legal assistance to people threatened with eviction from their tenant farms and homes. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and the unionization of African Americans. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia.
Rustin was a gay man and, due to criticism of his sexuality, usually advised other civil rights leaders from behind the scenes. During the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights.
Later in life, Rustin shifted toward neoconservative views.Vaïsse, Justin, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 71–75. "Table: The Three Ages of Neoconservatism", Neoconservatism: Biography of Movement by Justin Vaisse, official website. . As leader of Social Democrats USA, he opposed racial quotas and Black studies programs. He occasionally wrote for Commentary magazine, aligning closely with its publisher, Norman Podhoretz.Goodman, Walter, "Podhoretz on 25 Years at Commentary", The New York Times, January 31, 1985. Upon Rustin's death, President Ronald Reagan paid tribute to his work.
On November 20, 2013, Rustin was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
In 2018, the nonprofit Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice was created in Rustin's honor in collaboration with his surviving partner Walter Naegle, who serves as BRCSJ Board Member Emeritus. Located in Princeton, New Jersey, the organization hosts programming and events geared toward public health, gender and sexual advocacy, and civil rights for marginalized people, particularly LGBTQIA+ youth, and houses the Queer History Archive, dedicated to preserving Rustin's life and legacy.
Early life and education Rustin was born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Florence Rustin and Archie Hopkins, who were unmarried. As Florence was a single mother, Rustin was raised by his maternal grandparents, Julia (Davis) and Janifer Rustin, wealthy local caterers, as the ninth of their 12 children; growing up he believed his biological mother was his older sister. Though she attended her husband's African Methodist Episcopal Church, Julia Rustin was a Quaker. She was also a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NAACP leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson were frequent guests in the Rustin home. With these influences in his early life, in his youth Rustin campaigned against Jim Crow laws.
One of the first documented realizations Rustin had of his sexuality was when he mentioned to his grandmother that he preferred to spend time with boys rather than girls. She responded, "I suppose that's what you need to do".
In 1932, Rustin entered Wilberforce University, a historically Black college in Ohio operated by the AME Church. He was active in a number of campus organizations, including the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. He was expelled from Wilberforce in 1936 after organizing a strike, and later attended Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania). In 2013, Cheyney awarded Rustin a posthumous Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
After completing an activist training program conducted by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Rustin moved to Harlem in 1937 and began studying at City College of New York. There he became involved in efforts to defend and free the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black Alabama men accused of raping two white women. He was part of the Young Communist League from 1936 to 1941, leaving after the Communist Party USA rescinded its antiwar policy in response to Nazi Germany's invasion of the USSR. This conflicted with Rustin's antiwar stance. Soon after arriving in New York City, he became a member of Fifteenth Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
Rustin was an accomplished tenor vocalist, an asset that earned him admission to both Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College with music scholarships.D'Emilio 2003, pp. 21, 24. In 1939, he was in the chorus of short-lived Broadway musical John Henry. Fellow cast member and blues singer Josh White later invited Rustin to join his gospel and vocal harmony group Josh White and the Carolinians, with which he made several recordings. With this opportunity, Rustin became a regular performer at the Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village.D'Emilio 2003, pp. 31–32. A few albums on Fellowship Records featuring his singing, such as Bayard Rustin Sings a Program of Spirituals, were produced from the 1950s through the 1970s.
World War II During the 1930s, at the direction of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its members, including Rustin, were active in the early civil rights movement. Following Joseph Stalin's "theory of nationalism", they favored creating a separate nation for African Americans in the Southeastern United States.August Meier and Elliot Rudwick. Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW. But in 1941, after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Communist International ordered the CPUSA to abandon its civil rights work and focus instead on supporting U.S. entry into World War II.
Disillusioned, Rustin began working instead with members of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party of America, particularly A. Philip Randolph and pacifist A. J. Muste, leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), who hired Rustin as a race relations secretary in the summer of 1941, considering him a man of oratorical ability and intelligence who would sacrifice himself repeatedly for a good cause.
Muste, Randolph, and Rustin proposed a march on Washington, D.C., in 1941 to protest racial segregation in the armed forces and widespread employment discrimination. In an Oval Office meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Randolph told Roosevelt that African Americans would march in the capital unless desegregation occurred. To prove their good faith, the organizers canceled the planned march after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (the Fair Employment Act), which banned discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies.
According to Daniel Levinson, Rustin had an "infinite capacity for compassion". In 1944, while imprisoned in North Carolina, Rustin displayed nonviolent tactics, allowing himself to get beaten repeatedly by a white inmate until he gave up. Rustin defied segregation during that time and practiced his tactic while incarcerated.
Randolph's decision as leader of the organizers to cancel the march was made against Rustin's advice. The armed forces, in which Black troops typically had white commanding officers,BUILDING THE ALASKA HIGHWAY Race and the Army During World War II, WGBH-TV. Retrieved July 26, 2022. remained racially segregated until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman desegregated them by executive order.
Randolph felt that FOR had achieved its goal and wanted to dissolve the committee. Again, Rustin disagreed, and voiced his opinion in a national press conference, which he later said he regretted.
Rustin traveled to California to help protect the property of the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans (most of them U.S.-born citizens) imprisoned in internment camps. In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the forcible internment. Impressed by Rustin's organizational skills, Muste appointed him as FOR's secretary for student and general affairs.
Rustin was also a pioneer in the movement to desegregate interstate bus travel. In 1942, he boarded a bus in Louisville, bound for Nashville, and sat in the second row. A number of drivers asked him to move to the back, according to Southern practice, but Rustin refused. The bus was stopped by police 13 miles north of Nashville and Rustin was arrested. He was beaten and taken to a police station, but released uncharged. reprinted in
In an interview with the Washington Blade in the 1980s, Rustin spoke about his decision to be arrested and how that moment also clarified his witness as a gay man:
In 1942, Rustin helped FOR staffers George Houser and James Farmer and activist Bernice Fisher form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was conceived as a pacifist organization based on the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, who used nonviolent resistance against British rule in India.
As conscientious objectors who refused induction into the military, Rustin, Houser, and other members of FOR and CORE were convicted of violating the Selective Service Act. From 1944 to 1946, Rustin was imprisoned in Ashland Federal Prison in Kentucky and Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. At both, he organized protests against racially segregated housing and dining facilities. During his incarceration, he also organized FOR's Free India Committee. After his release from prison, he was frequently arrested for protesting against British colonial rule in both India and Africa.
Just before a trip to Africa while college secretary of the FOR, Rustin recorded a 10-inch LP, Elizabethan Songs and Negro Spirituals, for the Fellowship Records label. He sang spirituals and Elizabethan songs, accompanied on the harpsichord by Margaret Davison.From liner notes, Fellowship Records 102.
Influence on the civil rights movement
In 1947, Rustin and Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation. This was the first of the Freedom Rides to test the 1946 Supreme Court ruling Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, which banned racial discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin and Houser recruited seven white men and seven Black men to ride in pairs through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.Podair 2009, pp. 27. The NAACP opposed CORE's Gandhian tactics as too meek. Participants in the Journey of Reconciliation were arrested several times. Arrested with Igal Roodenko and Joe Felmet, Rustin served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina for violating state Jim Crow laws segregating public transportation. reprinted in On June 17, 2022, Chapel Hill Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour, with full consent of the state, dismissed the 1947 North Carolina charges against the four Freedom Riders.
In 1948, Rustin traveled to India to learn techniques of nonviolent civil resistance directly from the leaders of the Gandhian movement. The conference had been organized before Gandhi's assassination earlier that year. Between 1947 and 1952, Rustin also met with leaders of independence movements in Ghana and Nigeria. In 1951, he formed the Committee to Support South African Resistance, which later became the American Committee on Africa.