Born March 17th 1912, Bayard Rustin was a key figure in the American civil rights movements, advocating for socialism, nonviolence and gay rights
He was born in West Chester in Pennsylvania, but was raised by his maternal grandparents, believing his biological mother to be his older sister. His grandparents were fairly well off local caterers who raised him in a large house, with his grandmother being a Quaker and his grandfather being an African Methodist Episcopalian. She was also a member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) and leaders of the NAACP such as James Weldon Johnson were often found in the Rustin home, and from an early age, Bayard campaigned against the Jim Crow laws, which forced racial segregation in the southern United States.
One of the earliest realisations he had of his sexuality was realising he preferred to spend time with males rather than females, and upon mentioning this to his grandmother she responded with “I suppose that’s what you need to do”.
In 1932, Rustin enrolled at Wilberforce University, a historically black college in Ohio that was operated by the African Methodist Episcopalian church. While he was a student there, he was active in a wide range of organisations, and was ultimately expelled from WIlberforce for organising a strike in 1936. He would go on to complete his education at Cheyney State Teachers College (now known as the Cheyney University of Pennsylvania), who honoured him with a posthumous “Doctor of Humane Letters” degree in 2013.
Upon moving to Harlem in 1937, he became involved in efforts to free the “Scottsboro Boys”, nine young black men in Alabama who had been (falsely) accused of sexually assaulting two white women in 1931.
Rustin, along with A. Philip Randolph of the Socialist Party and head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, along with A. J. Muste, leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who hired Rustin as a race relation secretary in 1941, proposed a march on Washington in 1941 to protest against racial segregation in the armed forces, as well as widespread discrimination in employment. They met with President Roosevelt and told him that there would be a march on the capital unless desegregation occurred. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, dubbed the “Fair Employment Act”, which banned discrimination in defence industries and federal agencies, and the march was cancelled, against Rustin’s advice however. Harry S. Truman finally ended segregation in the armed forces via an Executive Order in 1948.
Rustin would later travel to California to help protect the property of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans, many of whom were native-born, who had been imprisoned in internment camps during the war, and he was also a pioneer in the movement to desegregate the buses on interstate travel. On a bus from Louisville to Nashville in 1942, he sat in the second row, with a lot of the drivers asking him to move to the back because of the southern practice of Jim Crow. Rustin, however, refused and he was arrested 13 miles north of Nashville, beaten and taken to the police station. However he was ultimately released uncharged.
Also in 1942, he assisted two other FOR staffers and a fellow activist in forming the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and despite not being a direct founder he was labelled an “uncle of CORE” by the founders. CORE was set up as a pacifist organisation based on Gandhi’s writings and actions, using non-violent resistance against British rule in India.
Rustin was convicted of violating the Selective Service Act of 1940, the conscription act, as he was a declared pacifist. From 1944 to 1946 he was imprisoned in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, organising the FOR’s Free India Committee during incarceration and organised protests against segregated diners in prison. When he was released, he was frequently re-arrested for protesting against the colonial rule of Britain in India and Africa.
In 1947, Rustin helped to organise the Journey of Reconciliation, which was the first of the Freedom Rides to test the Supreme Court’s ruling in “Morgan v Commonwealth of Virginia”, which banned racial discrimination in interstate travel, deeming it as unconstitutional. Rustin would wind up being arrested with a Jewish activist in North Carolina and serving 22 days in a chain gang for violating the Jim Crow laws regarding segregated seating.
In 1948, Rustin would travel to India to learn about peaceful resistance directly from the leaders of Ghandi’s movement, the conference had been organised prior to Gandhi’s assassination earlier that year. Rustin would go on to meet with leaders of independence movements in Ghana and Nigeria between 1947 and 1952, and would form what later became the American Committee on Africa in 1951.
In 1953, Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California for engaging in sexual activity with another man in a parked car. He plead guilty to the charge of “sex perversion” and served 60 days in jail. This would mark the first time that his homosexuality had come to public attention, as he had been and would always remain candid in private about his sexuality despite the criminality of homosexual acts in the United States. Rustin would end up resigning from the FOR because of his convictions.
Rustin would go on to serve as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee and would helo write one of the most influential pacifist essays in the United States; “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence” which was published in 1955. Rustin wanted to keep his participation in the writing of the pamphlet quiet as he felt that his known sexual orientation would be used by critics of the paper to try and blacklist it.
He would later advise minister Dr Martin Luther King Jr of the Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama in 1956, who was organizing the public transportation boycott, following the arrest of Rosa Parks after she refused to give up her seat. Rustin would convince Dr King to abandon the armed protection he had placed around himself, including a personal handgun
The following year, in 1957, Rustin and Dr King would begin to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an African-American civil rights organization. Rustin’s sexual orientation and past ties to the Communist party lead many African-American leaders to be concerned that this would undermine support for the civil rights movement. Rustin and King, seemingly unpeturbed, planned a march, however, US Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr threatened to leak to the press fake rumours of an affair between Rustin and Dr King, the latter of whom would end up cancelling the march and Rustin would leave his position in the SCLC. Dr King did receive criticism for this action from Harper’s magazine, which said that he had “lost much moral credit” especially “in the eyes of the young”.
In 1963, he would help to organise the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but a few weeks before the march, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond labelled Rustin a “Communist, draft-dodger and homosexual” and released his Pasadena arrest file to the public, and produced an FBI photograph of Rustin talking to Dr King while the latter was bathing, again insinuating that the two of them were engaged in a same-sex relationship, both men again denied the allegation of an affair.
When the Civil Rights act was passed in 1964, Rustin called for closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party, especially the strong union affiliated white working class that made up a large swathe of the party’s base. He also believed that the African-American community would need to change its strategy, and that they would need to build and strengthen an alliance with the predominately white unions in order to pursue a common economic agenda, and he wrote that it was time to move on from protests and time to move forward to politics.
Despite claims that Rustin was a pioneering out gay man, the truth is perhaps more complex. He was invited to contribute to the book “In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology” in 1986, however he declined, saying that he “was not involved in the struggle for gay rights as a youth” and that he “did not ‘come out of the closet’ voluntarily—circumstances forced me out”. Rustin would not engage in any gay rights activism until the 1980s, upon being urged to by his partner Walter Naegle (pictured below with Rustin). Due to the lack of marriage equality at the time, Rustin adopted Naegle in 1982, perhaps the only way to legalise their relationship.
Rustin died on August 24, 1987 of a perforated appendix, being praised by President Ronald Reagan for his work on civil rights and for human rights around the world. Due to his more behind the scenes work, and public discomfort with his homosexuality, Rustin began to fade from the shortlist of well-known civil rights activists like Dr King. In 2012, Rustin was inducted into the Legacy Walk in Chicago, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBTQ history and people, and he was posthumously awarded membership into a fraternity for gay, bisexual and progressive men known as Delta Phi Upsilon, and in 2013 he was selected as an honoree in the United States Department of Labor Hall of Honor. Also in 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award in the United States, presenting the award to Walter Naegle. In June 2019, Rustin was one of the inaugural fifty American activists inducted onto the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall Inn, and in 2019, the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice opened its doors with the Rustin Estate, with Walter Naegle joining as a Community Liaison, the BRCSJ is a community activist centre and safe-space for intersectional families, marginalized people and importantly, LGBTQ kids.
Gavin Newsom, the California state governor would posthumously pardon Rustin on 5th February 2020 for his arrest in Pasadena, while also fast-tracking pardons for those convicted under historical laws that made homosexuality illegal.
In loving memory of Bayard Rustin, March 17 1912 - August 24 1987
By Jake Livingstone
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