Rustin, Bayard

RUSTIN, BAYARD (1910–1987). A major African American civil rights leader who worked behind the scenes, primarily in managerial and counseling capacities, Bayard Rustin began his career as a radical exponent of nonviolent resistance to social injustice and war. From the mid-1960s onward, however, he moved to increasingly conservative views. At the time of his death, for example, he was chairman of the Social Democrats USA, an anticommunist group primarily supported by conservative labor leaders, and he was executive committee chairman of Freedom House, a neoconservative institution. Rustin’s major sinecure was as cochair of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a prestigious educational, civil rights, and labor organization.

Rustin was the son of West Indian immigrants and had close family members associated with the Quakers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After taking courses at universities but never receiving a degree, Rustin left his native Pennsylvania for New York City. Attracted by the antiracist activism of the Communist Party, he joined the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1936 and two years later he was a YCL organizer on the campus of City College of New York, where he took classes. His major concerns were racial segregation in the U.S. military and the anti-war movement. When the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union led the Communist Party to abandon its anti-war line and to desist agitating about segregation in the military, Rustin resigned from the YCL. He soon became a youth organizer for A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington.

Rustin’s relationship with Randolph would be decisive over the long term, but he severely criticized Randolph when the march was called off following President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order banning racial discrimination in war production. Rustin now joined the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), through which he was to engage in active civil disobedience for more than a decade. In 1942 he was arrested by Tennessee police for refusing to move to the rear of a segregated interstate bus, and in 1943 he received a two-and-a-half-year term for draft resistance. While in prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, he honed his singing talents and learned to play guitar and lute. While a member of the YCL, he had helped support himself by singing in nightclubs and in the years to come his melodious singing would become familiar to many civil rights activists.

In April 1947 Rustin organized the Journey of Reconciliation, a FOR project to test the Supreme Court ruling prohibiting segregation on interstate buses. This was the first “Freedom Ride” and set the precedent for the more famous Freedom Rides of 1961. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Rustin was arrested and sent to work on a chain gang. His articles about that experience were a catalyst in the eventual abolition of that state’s chain-gang system.

A year after the Freedom Ride, Rustin was working with A. Philip Randolph in the League of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience against Military Segregation. This addressed an old wound by attempting to pressure President Harry Truman to strictly enforce and then expand Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s earlier executive order. That same year Rustin traveled to India, where his pacifism was enhanced by a first hand experience of the accomplishments and nuances of the Gandhian doctrine of nonviolent resistance. Yet another achievement was his role in creating the Committee to Support South African resistance, later to become the influential American Committee on Africa.

Rustin was named executive director of the War Resisters League in 1953. Two years later with the Reverend Glen Smiley of the FOR staff, Rustin became an adviser to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., first during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and then in the launching of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Rustin also served as organizer of King’s successful legal defense when King was charged with income tax evasion. Their working relationship was temporarily suspended in 1960. The circumstances were that SCLC, in cooperation with A. Philip Randolph’s forces, planned to disrupt the national conventions of both political parties. King was informed that if the preparations continued, Rustin’s YCL membership and his homosexuality would be used to tar King’s movement. King himself would be accused of having a homosexual relationship with his aide. Rustin voluntarily resigned before King came to a decision on what to do. The demonstrations were abandoned.

As the concept for a new March on Washington began to take shape in 1962, King again turned to Rustin. This time King and Randolph had the courage to resist red-baiting and homophobia. Rustin’s organizational skills were instrumental in bringing more than a quarter-million people to the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. In a move that indicated future behavior, Rustin persuaded the administration to cooperate with a march it had originally opposed. Rustin considered this a triumph, but his critics felt he had allowed the protest to be co-opted.

In 1963 Rustin also became head of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, primarily funded by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and he used his position to advance the view that future African American progress was dependent on alliances with organized labor, churches, and liberals. He soon assailed the Black Power movement and other tendencies he felt fostered racial divisions. His search for coalitions led him to oppose nearly every tactic advanced by radicals, including King’s Poor People’s Campaign and affirmative action. In 1983, he would oppose the Jobless March on Washington.

Rustin’s foreign policy views were even more conservative and contradictory. He condemned most national liberation movements because of their Russian or Chinese support and their violent means, but he did not condemn the American war in Vietnam. He vociferously demanded human rights reforms in the Soviet Union, but was an avid supporter of Israel, despite Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, its invasion of Lebanon, and its military aid to the Union of South Africa. Detractors charged that Rustin had been consciously or unconsciously “bought off” by Cold War liberals. By the time of his death, his influence on activists concerned about American policies in Latin America and Asia and his influence on African American radicals was virtually nonexistent.

Judgment on his mixed political legacy was further complicated by sexual politics. Although his sexual orientation had been a political issue at a crucial time in his career, Rustin did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality until the last year of his life. Gay activists sympathized with his decision to avoid the issue prior to the gay liberation movement but were disappointed that he did not openly embrace and assist their movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

Boyd, Herb. “Bayard Rustin: A Mixed Legacy.” Guardian, September 9, 1987.

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: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004.

Rustin, Bayard. Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971.

Rustin, Bayard. Strategies for Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

Viorst, Milton. Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.