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| A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin |
"What Rustin took away from A. Philip Randolph, especially, is the recognition that economic issues and racial justice issues are completely intertwined," says his biographer, John D'Emilio. Despite his extensive involvement in the civil rights movement, Rustin was content to remain behind the scenes, D'Emilio says. "I think of it as part of the Quaker heritage that he internalized. You don't push yourself forward," D'Emilio says. "It doesn't matter if you don't get the credit for it. What is important is this notion of speaking truth to power."
Rustin had a long involvement with refugee affairs. As a Vice Chairman of the International Rescue Committee, he traveled the world working to secure food, medical care, education, and proper resettlement for refugees. His visits to Southeast Asia helped to bring the plight of the Vietnamese “boat people” to the attention of the American public. In 1980 he took part in the international March for Survival on the Thai-Cambodian border. In 1982, he also helped found the National Emergency Coalition for Haitian Refugees.As Chairman of the Executive Committee of Freedom House, an agency which monitored international freedom and human rights, Rustin observed elections in Zimbabwe, El Salvador, and Grenada. His last mission abroad, coordinated by Freedom House, was a delegation to Haiti to help create democratic reform in that country.
In 1983, Rustin and two colleagues made a fact-finding visit to South Africa. Their report, South Africa: Is Peaceful Change Possible? led to the formation of Project South Africa, a program that sought to broaden Americans’ support of groups within South Africa working for democracy through peaceful means.
Late in life, Bayard Rustin gave numerous interviews discussing how anti-gay prejudice had affected his life’s work. He was invited to address gay and lesbian groups and testified on behalf of New York City’s gay rights bill. In 1986, he gave a speech "The New Niggers Are Gays," in which he asserted,
Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new "niggers" are gays. . . . It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. . . . The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.
In 1987, after his visit to Haiti to study prospects for democratic elections in that country, Rustin began to feel unwell. His symptoms were initially misdiagnosed as intestinal parasites. On August 21, 1987, Rustin was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital and diagnosed with a perforated appendix.
Rustin died in New York City on August 24, 1987. His obituary in the New York Times reported:
Bayard Rustin, the pacifist and civil rights activist who was a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and the 1964 New York school boycott, died early yesterday at Lenox Hill Hospital. He was 75 years old and was a longtime resident of the Chelsea section of Manhattan.
A spokesman for the hospital, Jean Brett, said Mr. Rustin was admitted to its emergency room Friday morning ''complaining of abdominal pain'' and later that morning he ''underwent surgery for a perforated appendix and peritonitis.'' At 11:20 P.M. Sunday, the statement added, ''Mr. Rustin went into cardiac arrest and died at 12:02 A.M.'' yesterday. Mr. Rustin's administrative assistant and adopted son, Walter Naegle, said, ''He seemed to be bouncing back and doing O.K., but he had a history of heart problems, and it appears that the strain of the operation caused the cardiac arrest.''
At his death, Mr. Rustin was co-chairman, with Leon Lynch, of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an educational, civil rights and labor organization based in New York, and president of its education fund.
Commenting on Mr. Rustin's death, Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, said: ''Bayard Rustin was a planner, a coordinator, a thinker. He influenced all of the young leaders in the civil rights movement, even those of us who did not agree with him ideologically.''
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, said: ''We first met on the march for jobs and freedom. It was an event that changed the nation. From that moment forward, the great civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965 were not only possible but near accomplished. He taught us love and gave us peace.''
Mr. Rustin's career ranged from such activities as having organized the first Freedom Ride, which was then called a Journey of Reconciliation, in 1947, to a role in the Free India movement before the subcontinent gained its independence from Britain, to involvement in antinuclear demonstrations in England and North Africa and to serving as an aide to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Rustin once described his militant activity this way: ''I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble.''
''Mr. March'' was what A. Philip Randolph, the labor leader, called Mr. Rustin in tribute to his tireless efforts in planning and arranging the 1963 demonstration, called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in which 200,000 people took part.
That success was repeated when Mr. Rustin directed the one-day school boycott, on Feb. 3, 1964, which was called by groups that were dissatisfied with the New York City Board of Education's integration efforts. All told, 464,000 pupils stayed away from school, 360,000 more than the daily average.
Mr. Rustin was a complex, intense man with a flair for advocacy and a passion for detail. He built an international reputation as an organizer because of his skill at planning every aspect of protest demonstrations and his imaginativeness as a tactician. He also won admirers as a political philosopher and analyst. But he never had a big power base among blacks, and late in life he was criticized by some who felt he was more an advocate of Jewish, labor and white liberal causes than of black causes.
Mr. Rustin's effectiveness as an advocate and organizer was enhanced by his striking appearance: He was a 200-pound six-footer with high cheekbones, intense eyes and, late in life, a shock of white hair.
. . . Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: ''The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.''
Mr. Rustin had repeated run-ins with the law over the years. As an ardent pacifist, he spent 28 months in prison for refusing military service in World War II. He spent weeks on a North Carolina road gang after being convicted of violating bus seating laws in a civil rights demonstration in 1947. And, as the years passed, he was imprisoned or arrested more than 20 times, in cases including numerous charges in connection with his civil rights and pacifist activity. Early in life he was a radical: he belonged to the Young Communist League for several years, then embraced Socialism and for decades was associated with Mr. Randolph, who was a founder of the modern-day civil rights movement.
. . . In his later years, Mr. Rustin's support of the unions and Israel, and his role as a prime interpreter of the black movement to the unions, to liberals and to various religious groups, won him both widespread praise and strong criticism; some blacks considered him to be an Uncle Tom, subservient to whites. In 1978 the American Jewish Congress gave Mr. Rustin one of its annual Stephen Wise awards for ''illustrious leadership in the cause of racial justice, world peace and human understanding.'' But Mr. Rustin was also criticized by blacks who were more militant than he on a variety of issues. ''Bayard has no credibility in the black community,'' James Farmer, the veteran official of the Congress of Racial Equality, once contended. ''Bayard's commitment is to labor, not to the black man. His belief that the black man's problem is economic, not racist, runs counter to black community thinking.''
Mr. Rustin's insistence on nonviolence was also controversial. He believed in it so strongly that during rioting in Harlem in 1964 he went into the streets and tried to persuade the participants to stop. But bottles were thrown at him, and his efforts were criticized by some blacks.
Mr. Rustin's advocacy of black-Jewish harmony and of support for Israel, a major theme of his later years, also became controversial among blacks. In the late 1960's, commenting on what was widely regarded as a rise in anti-Semitism among blacks, he urged restraint as well as good will. ''I request the understanding, the cooperation and the aid of Jews,'' he said in addressing a conference of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. ''I do so knowing that there is Negro anti-Semitism and knowing how Jews must feel when they hear some Negro extremists talk.'' He urged his audience to ''remember that the issue never can be simply a problem of Jew and gentile or black and white. The problem is man's inhumanity to man.''
. . . In his later years, Mr. Rustin continued to be active and outspoken on a wide variety of fronts. He was chairman of Social Democrats U.S.A., a descendant of the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas; chairman of the executive committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; and the first black trustee of the University of Notre Dame.
In an interview published in The Village Voice on June 30, Mr. Rustin was quoted as saying he was homosexual. Asked in the interview how this and his 1953 arrest and subsequent sentence of 60 days in Pasadena, Calif., on a morals charge had affected his civil rights work, he said that ''there was considerable prejudice amongst a number of people I worked with,'' although they would not admit it. He added, ''The fact of the matter is, it was already known, it was nothing to hide. You can't hurt the movement unless you have something to reveal.'' He contended that the arrest was the result of entrapment which, he suggested, was for political reasons.
Mr. Rustin was unmarried. He is survived by an uncle, Earl Rustin, of West Chester, Pa.; an aunt, Anna Luff of Queens; three half-sisters, and his adopted son, Mr. Naegle, of Manhattan, who was his administrative assistant at the Institute for the last three years.
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| Walter Naegle and Bayard Rustin |
Rustin was survived by Walter Naegle, his partner of ten years. Rustin was cremated and his ashes are buried in an unmarked spot on an estate in New York.
Despite the fact that he played an important role in the civil rights movement, Rustin "faded from the shortlist of well-known civil rights lions," in large part because of public discomfort with his sexual orientation. However, the 2003 documentary film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize nominee, and the March 2012 centennial of Rustin's birth have contributed to some renewed recognition.
On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation in the press release stated:
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.Throughout his life, Rustin's Quakerism was a unifying force in his life and a strong plank in his personal philosophy, incorporating beliefs that were of central importance to him: that there is that of God in every person, that all are entitled to a decent life, and that a life of service to others is the way to happiness and true fulfillment.
As big and as looming and as destructive as racism has been and continues to be in society, we must remember it is only a branch.
The root of the problem, the reason why we continue to struggle with equality, is our pathological intolerance, an intolerance no collective group of people has proven to be immune to.
"I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today, and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"
Dr. King's dream has not been fulfilled because we began betraying the integrity of his dream the moment we started scrubbing Rustin's life out of Black History Month lessons and civil rights movies.
We betray that dream each time a black person claims offense to the notion that gay rights are civil rights, as if the black community is the only community capable of being oppressed.
We betray King's dream each time a white elected official is allowed to say things about the gay community in ways that would never be tolerated if directed at the black community.
I don't say these things because I view the history and plight of these two minority groups as being exactly the same -- they are not.
I say these things because racism and homophobia -- like anti-Semitism, sexism and xenophobia -- all have the same mother. And as long as concessions are made for one, we will never be free from the clutches of the others.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation's highest civilian award. It was established by President Kennedy 50 years ago. Considering the anniversary of the march, it is fitting that Rustin is among the 16 being honored with it in November.
But like King, he was more than August 28, 1963.
He was a giant.
And so while the medal is special, the best way to honor him is to talk about him, all of him, both now and in the many years to come. Bayard Rustin spent his life fighting for peace and equality and he did so unashamed of who he was. It's about time history, and the people he helped most, stop being ashamed of him.
“Every indifference to prejudice is suicide because, if I don’t fight all bigotry, bigotry itself will be strengthened and, sooner or later, it will return on me.”
~ Bayard Rustin
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