Rustin was dual target key to civil rights movement
Being Black and gay still ain’t easy. It’s often hurtful within one’s own home. And too often within our community. Still. Imagine the pain endured more than half a century ago when being Black and gay made one a dual target. Of a society drenched with Jim Crow. And from within our community. Even at the highest echelons of the movement for racial equality that would change America. Inside a movement where to be Black and gay was to be embraced or shunned. Or worse.
Imagine how that pain threatened the movement — and affected the man.
Then you would know how it was to be Bayard Rustin.
His name is in many history chronicles, regularly listed among the less-sung crafters of the civil rights movement.
Raised from his earliest days in Pennsylvania on the Quaker values of peace and non-violence, he’s credited with influencing a young preacher to pursue a strategy of nonviolence in the pursuit of equality.
The young preacher was Dr. Martin Luther King.
Rustin is also widely credited as the architect of the historic 1963 March on Washington, weaving together from behind the curtain the tenuous organizational elements needed to create the movement’s most impactful moments and images.
“Rustin (organized) this march in an eight-week period, without cell phones, without email, without faxes. So he and his team (were) working the phones hard, they (were) typing letters constantly,” Michael Long, editor of “I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters” and co-author of “Bayard Rustin: The Invisible Activist,” told The History Channel. “From what I hear, the headquarters was in sheer chaos all the time.
And Rustin thrived in an environment like that.”
In Birmingham that same year, he thrived amid the tension and terror that hung over the city that was ground zero for the Ku Klux Klan. He was a quiet, but essential force, behind King and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the Children’s Crusade to end segregation in downtown stores.
Yet Rustin’s place in the pantheon of the movement is shrouded by his sexuality. He was gay. Defiantly and openly gay.
Rustin’s sexuality was honored by his family, particularly his grandmother, an unusual occurrence in that time. More expectantly, it was a source of consternation among Blacks, which made him a target for the kind of attacks and discrimination he was working to overcome.
King was aware of Rustin’s sexual orientation but chose to overlook it, according to Long, while other movement leaders considered him a hindrance to the movement.
In 1960, Black leaders planned to march at the Democratic convention to protest the party’s still-lackluster commitment to civil rights. In a horrific effort to stifle it, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, a Harlem congressman and a powerful, respected member of the House — a Black man — threatened to ignite a rumor that King was having an affair with Rustin if King and the other leaders did not cancel the protest.
Such a rumor would have likely been fatal not just to the march but also to the movement.
In response, Rustin was forced to resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, though Black leaders did not take the threat idly. Powell was told if he launched the rumor, Harlem would be papered with posters featuring the women the Congressman had slept with.
Yeah, it got that messy.
Powell was quiet and King marched. Subsequently, Rustin remained mostly in the background as the movement took the stage — particularly in Birmingham, where his organization skills were invaluable for an event that woke up the nation that watched Bull Connor turn fire hoses and police dogs on children protesters.
While remaining mostly in the shadows, Rustin’s voice rang strong.
In June of that summer of change, Rustin wrote The Meaning of Birmingham, a scintillantly powerful essay originally published in The Liberation, a pacifist magazine that was the first to publish King’s Letter from the Birmingham jail:
“For the black people of this nation, Birmingham became the moment of truth. The struggle from now on will be fought in a different context ...
“The great lesson of Birmingham is at once dangerous and creative; black people have moved to that level where they cannot be contained. They are not prepared to wait for courts, elections, votes, government officials, or even Negro leaders. As James Baldwin said in an interview published in the New York Times ... : ‘No man can claim to speak for the Negro people today. There is no one with whom the power structure can negotiate a deal that will bind Negro people. There is, therefore, no possibility of a bargain.’
“The black people themselves are united and determined to destroy unjust laws and discriminatory practices, and they want total freedom, including equal economic opportunity and the right to marry whom they damned well please.”
The triumph of Birmingham likely helped stem the effectiveness of targeting Rustin’s sexuality as a means of halting the movement. Leading up to the March on Washington, the avowed racist U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, bullhorned that the march was being organized by a “Communist, draft-dodger and homosexual.”
Rustin was all three, yet instead of shirking, movement leaders embraced Rustin as a valued member of the leadership team. In his essay, Rustin also wrote:
“If kids can revitalize the civil rights movement in Birmingham, the least we can do is to act like men and women and fight now to provide them with a decent future.”
Rustin continued to fight for civil equality for Blacks, as well as members of the gay community until he died on Aug. 24, 1987 at 75.