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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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:

According to journalist Steve Hendrix, Rustin "faded from the shortlist of well-known civil rights lions" in part because he was active behind the scenes and also because of public discomfort with his sexual orientation and former communist affiliation. and the March 2012 centennial of Rustin's birth contributed to renewed recognition of his contributions.

Rustin served as chairman of Social Democrats, USA, which, The Washington Post wrote in 2013, "was a breeding ground for many neoconservatives". French historian Justin Vaïsse called Rustin a "right-wing socialist" and "second age neoconservative", citing his role as vice-chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was involved in the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger. Adam Gopnik writes that <blockquote>attempts to kidnap Rustin for neoconservatism run up against his equally dogged commitment to a social-democratic program of vast government initiatives and investments. His dream was always of a new New Deal that would go further than the original one had, lifting all boats not by some rising tide of affluence but by giving everyone the same ship and the same sail. He has been praised by Marxist historians for his refusal to reduce inequality to a matter of psychology, of what white people think about Black people, and by neoconservatives for his repudiation of the totalitarian left—though the Marxists dislike his anti-Communism and the neocons dislike his socialism.</blockquote>

According to Daniel Richman, former clerk for United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Marshall's friendship with Rustin, who was open about his homosexuality, played a significant role in Marshall's dissent from the court's 5–4 decision upholding the constitutionality of state sodomy laws in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick.

Several buildings have been named in honor of Rustin, including the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex in Chelsea, Manhattan, and the Bayard Rustin High School near his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Rustin is one of just two men to have participated in the Penn Relays and had a school named in their honor that participates in the relays. Other buildings include the Bayard Rustin Library at the Affirmations Gay/Lesbian Community Center in Ferndale, Michigan; the Bayard Rustin Social Justice Center in Conway, Arkansas; the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice in Princeton, New Jersey; and the Bayard Rustin Room at Friends House in London.

In 1968, two months after King's assassination, Montclair State University gave Rustin an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. In 1985, Haverford College awarded Rustin an honorary doctorate in law. Rustin received at least 15 honorary degrees from institutions including Harvard, Yale, and Brown.

1990s and 2000s

In 1995, a Pennsylvania State Historical Marker was placed on the grounds of Henderson High School, which Rustin attended.

The 1998 anthology movie Out of the Past features letters and archival footage of Rustin.

In 2002, the West Chester Area School District approved the creation of Bayard Rustin High School, which opened in 2006.

In 2003, a documentary about Rustin titled Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin would be released, and also serve as an episode of the PBS tv series POV.

In 2007, a group of San Francisco Bay Area Black LGBT community leaders formed the Bayard Rustin Coalition (BRC), which promotes greater Black participation in the electoral process, advances civil and human rights issues, and promotes Rustin's legacy.

2010s and beyond

thumb|[[Walter Naegle & Robt Seda-Schreiber with Medal of Freedom awarded posthumously by President Barack Obama to Bayard Rustin.]]

In 2011, Guilford College rededicated its Queer and Allied Resource Center as the Bayard Rustin Center for LGBTQA Activism, Awareness, and Reconciliation. In 2012, Rustin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display in Chicago celebrating LGBTQ history and people. In 2013, Rustin was selected as an honoree in the United States Department of Labor Hall of Honor.

On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States. The citation in the press release read:

<blockquote>Bayard Rustin was an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all. An advisor to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he promoted nonviolent resistance, participated in one of the first Freedom Rides, organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.</blockquote>

At the White House ceremony on November 20, 2013, Obama presented Rustin's award to Walter Naegle, his partner of ten years at the time of Rustin's death. In 2018, the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland voted to name the Bayard Rustin Elementary School after Rustin.

Canadian writer Steven Elliott Jackson's play The Seat Next to the King stages an imaginary meeting and one-night stand between Rustin and Walter Jenkins of the Johnson administration. It won the award for Best Play at the 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival. Steve H. Broadnax III's play with music Bayard Rustin Inside Ashland, dramatizing Rustin's World War II prison experience and its central role in his activism, premiered on May 22, 2022, at People's Light and Theatre Company in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

In 2018, the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice was established in Princeton, New Jersey, with Naegle acting as Board Member Emeritus, serving as a community activist center and safe space for LGBTQ kids, intersectional families, and marginalized people.

Rustin was one of 50 inaugural U.S. "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted in June 2019 to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor, within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM), the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and queer history, at New York City's Stonewall Inn.

In January 2020, California State Senator Scott Wiener, chair of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus, and Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, called for Governor Gavin Newsom to issue a pardon for Rustin's 1953 Pasadena arrest, citing Rustin's legacy as a civil rights icon. Newsom issued the pardon on February 5 while also announcing a new process for fast-tracking pardons for those convicted under laws criminalizing homosexuality. On June 5, 2023, the Pasadena City Council adopted a resolution declaring that the "City of Pasadena celebrates and concurs in the Governor's 2020 pardon of Bayard Rustin".

In 2021, Higher Ground Productions, founded by Michelle and Barack Obama, announced production of Rustin, a biographical film directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Colman Domingo. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on August 31, 2023, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, received a limited theatrical release on November 3, and was released on Netflix on November 17. Reviews were generally positive, with Domingo's performance garnering numerous accolades, including Best Actor nominations for the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award.

In 2022, a street in Nyack, New York, was renamed "Bayard Rustin Way".

{| class="wikitable"

|+Bayard Rustin Arrests

(Chronological)

!Year

!Location

!Reason for Arrest

!Bail

!Conviction / Outcome

|-

|1942

|Kentucky-Tennessee

(interstate bus)

|Refusal to move to the back of a segregated bus. Nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow laws.

|No official record of bail

|Arrested, battered, briefly jailed. Not prosecuted or convicted. Rustin would later describe the incident as formative to his philosophy of nonviolence.

|-

|1944

|Refused the draft in New York City. Served sentence at federal prisons in Ashland, KY and Lewisburg,PA

|Refused conscription as a conscientious objector during World War Two, rejecting both combatant and alternative service.

|Federal sentence

(No Bail)

|Convicted under the Selective Service Act. Sentenced to 3 years; served an estimated 26 months in federal prisons. While incarcerated, Rustin participated in resistance actions that eventually succeeded in desegregating the chapel services, dining and housing facilities for federal prisoners.

|-

|1947

|Chapel Hill, North Carolina

|Participated in the Journey of Reconciliation, the earliest freedom ride, challenging unlawful racial segregation in interstate public transportation.

|No official record of bail

|Convicted and sentenced to chain gang labor, Rustin served approximately 22 days. Rustin's later reports of the conditions helped end chain gangs in North Carolina.

|-

|1953

|Pasadena, California

|Arrested under local Vagrancy and morals laws, often used to penalize consensual same-sex relations.

|No bail documented

|Convicted. Rustin served 50 days in jail and was required to register as a sex offender. Posthumously pardoned in 2020.

|}

Publications

  • Interracial Primer, New York: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1943
  • Interracial Workshop: Progress Report, New York: Sponsored by Congress of Racial Equality and Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1947
  • Journey of Reconciliation: Report, New York: Fellowship of Reconciliation, Congress of Racial Equality, 1947
  • We challenged Jim Crow! a report on the journey of reconciliation, April 9–23, 1947, New York: Fellowship of Reconciliation, Congress of Racial Equality, 1947
  • "In apprehension how like a god!", Philadelphia: Young Friends Movement 1948
  • The Revolution in the South, Cambridge, Massachusetts.: Peace Education Section, American Friends Service Committee, 1950s
  • Report on Montgomery, Alabama, New York: War Resisters League, 1956
  • A report and action suggestions on non-violence in the South, New York: War Resisters League, 1957
  • Civil Rights: The True Frontier, New York: Donald Press, 1963
  • From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement, New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1965
  • The City in Crisis (introduction), New York: A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1965
  • "Black Power" and Coalition Politics, New York, American Jewish Committee, 1966
  • Which way? (with Daniel Patrick Moynihan), New York: American Press, 1966
  • The Watts "Manifesto" & the McCone report., New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1966
  • Fear, frustration, backlash: the new crisis in civil rights, New York: Jewish Labor Committee, 1966
  • The Lessons of the Long Hot Summer, New York: American Jewish Committee, 1967
  • The Negro Community: frustration politics, sociology and economics, Detroit: UAW Citizenship-Legislative Department, 1967
  • A Way Out of the Exploding Ghetto, New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1967
  • The alienated: the young rebels today and why they're different, Washington, D.C.: International Labor Press Association, 1967
  • "Right to work" laws: a trap for America's minorities, New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1967
  • Civil rights: the movement re-examined (contributor), New York: A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1967
  • Separatism or integration, which way for America?: a dialogue (with Robert Browne), New York: A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1968
  • The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, an analysis, New York: American Jewish Committee, 1968
  • The labor-Negro Coalition, a new beginning, Washington, D.C.: American Federationist?, 1968
  • The anatomy of frustration, New York: Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1968
  • Morals Concerning Minorities, Mental Health and Identity, New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1969
  • Black Studies: Myths & Realities (contributor), New York: A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1969
  • Conflict or Coalition?: the civil rights struggle and the trade union movement today, New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1969
  • Three Essays, New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1969
  • Black Rage, White Fear: The Full Employment Answer: An Address, Washington, D.C.: Bricklayers, Masons & Plasterers International Union, 1970
  • A Word to Black Students, New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1970
  • The Failure of Black Separatism, New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1970
  • The Blacks and the Unions (contributor), New York: A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1971
  • Down the line; the collected writings of Bayard Rustin, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971
  • Affirmative action in an economy of scarcity (with Norman Hill), New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1974
  • Seniority and racial progress (with Norman Hill), New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1975
  • Have we reached the end of the second reconstruction?, Bloomington, Indiana: The Poynter Center, 1976
  • Strategies for freedom: the changing patterns of Black protest, New York: Columbia University Press, 1976
  • Africa, Soviet imperialism and the retreat of American power, New York: Social Democrats, USA (reprint), 1978
  • South Africa: is peaceful change possible? a report (contributor), New York: New York Friends Group, 1984
  • Time on two crosses: the collected writings of Bayard Rustin, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003
  • I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters: City Lights, 2012

See also

  • List of civil rights leaders
  • Timeline of the civil rights movement
  • Rustin, a 2023 American biographical drama film directed by George C. Wolfe about Bayard Rustin.

References

Bibliography

  • Anderson, Jervis. Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997).
  • Bennett, Scott H. Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963 (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2003). .
  • Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Touchstone, 1989).
  • Carbado, Devon W. and Donald Weise, editors. Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003).
  • D'Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: Bayard Rustin and the Quest for Peace and Justice in America (New York: The Free Press, 2003).
  • D'Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
  • Frazier, Nishani (2017). Harambee City: Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism. University of Arkansas Press. .
  • Haskins, James. Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Hyperion, 1997).
  • Hirschfelder, Nicole. Oppression as Process: The Case of Bayard Rustin (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014).
  • Kates, Nancy and Bennett Singer (dirs.) Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003)
  • King, Martin Luther Jr.; Carson, Clayborne; Luker, Ralph & Penny A. Russell The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957&nbsp;– December 1958. University of California Press, 2000.
  • Le Blanc, Paul and Michael Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).
  • Podair, Jerald E. "Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer" (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2009).
  • Lewis, David L. King: A Biography. (University of Illinois Press, 1978). .
  • Rustin, Bayard. Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971).
  • SNCC Digital Gateway: Bayard Rustin, Documentary website created by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, telling the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee & grassroots organizing from the inside-out
  • Bayard Rustin&nbsp;– Who Is This Man?
  • FBI file on Bayard Rustin
  • Buzz Haughton, "Bayard Rustin, Civil Rights Leader", from Quakerinfo.org, February 1, 1999
  • Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a documentary on Rustin

<!--already in refs* Randall Kennedy, "From Protest to Patronage", The Nation, September 11, 2004 -->

  • Guide to the Papers of Bayard Rustin at the American Jewish Historical Society.
  • Bayard Rustin Collected Papers finding aid at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection
  • https://www.netflix.com/title/81111528