King adviser struggled with parallel injustices
Footage of the Memphis march held four days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed captures, for just seconds, its organizer, Bayard Rustin.
Under a more salt-than-pepper Afro, Rustin walks briskly, with the deportment of a man comfortable with his clout. The openly gay black activist waves his arms before him to help clear a path for the thousands of silent witnesses behind.
His demeanor was the product of a decade spent i n relative obscurity, practicing the strategy of nonviolent resistance that would be a model for the civil rights movement.
History muted Rustin’s role as King’s trusted adviser, in part because he would not shade his sexual orientation during a time when “LGBT” was little more than letters out of
order.
Fifty years after Rustin organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, President Barack Obama awarded Rustin the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
On Saturday, as stalwarts like the NAACP and National Urban League stand with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) advocates at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the 1963 march, at least four gay advocates will address the crowd.
Rustin, who died in 1987, is finally getting his due. At the same time, the nation gets another chance to reimagine the intersection of race and sexual orientation and the parallel injustices against those who claim either identity or both.
RUSTIN’S HISTORY BEGETS WHAT-IFS
This belated nod to the shared struggles feels like an overdue reunion, but it also unleashes the whatifs.
What if Rustin’s story were told with the same diligence and repetition as that of the Little Rock Nine or James Meredith braving the campus of Ole Miss?
What if schoolchildren were taught that in 1941, 22 years before King thundered “I have a dream!” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Rustin planned the first march on Washington, which was postponed only after President Franklin Roosevelt threw the movement a bone and authorized what became the Fair Employment Act?
What if America knew that in 1947, 16 years before King’s schedule was cleared to pen a letter from a Birmingham jail, Rustin was sentenced to a chain gang for sitting in the whites-only section on a bus in North Carolina?
What if we could boast that this gay man got a crowd of 250,000 at the 1963 march to verbally co-sign a list of demands that King and other leaders took to President John F. Kennedy, even though none championed people like Rustin?
What if Christians of the “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” variety knew that King, a Baptist minister, refused to stiffarm Rustin, even after Rustin served time on a “morals” charge in 1953?
Or that three weeks before King seemed to foretell his death, telling an audience at Mason Temple that he’d seen the mountaintop, Rustin rallied the troops with a rousing speech from the same pulpit?
If that narrative had included Rustin, several people told me, the intersection of race and sexual orientation would be sharper, the relationship less damaged by religious bias and the mission of two marginalized groups more integrated.
Lorna Oglesby, who is black and a lesbian, didn’t know who Rustin was until she moved to Memphis three years ago.
If she’d had that connection, “I probably would have been more politically active early on,” said Oglesby, a board member at the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center
“I would have to think that his motive was not just for the heterosexual person but something deeper that wasn’t expressed and for all persons,” she said.
A common knowledge of Rustin’s contributions would make Martavious Hampton’s job easier.
As the center’s HIV services manager and volunteer coordinator, Hampton works to convince other black LGBT people to stand on the front lines for equality.
For the most part, they don’t know about Rustin. They tell Hampton they can’t relate to 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, considered the start of the gay rights movement.
“People don’t feel like it’s their fight,” Hampton said.
Said Jonathan Cole, a gay white man and a board member of the Tennessee Equality Project: “The struggles suffered by LGBT and African-American people are different, but they share a struggle for equal treatment under the law.”
“Had Rustin’s story been shared more frequently, perhaps the common struggle would have been more apparent.”
Regardless of race or sexual orientation, people can’t take pride in the influence of a man they don’t know.
If we needed permission for sexual identity and race to be a both-and, not an either- or, Rustin grants it. Oglesby, for one, is grateful.
“I can’t consciously choose one over the other, and I don’t think that I should,” she said.
“They are both equally important to me.”