civil rights activist; political strategist
Personal Information
Born March 17, 1910, in West Chester, PA; died of a heart attack, August 24, 1987, in New York City.
Education: Wilberforce University, 1930-31; Cheyney State Normal School (now Cheyney State College), 1931-33; City College of New York, 1933-35.
Career
Organizer, Young Communist League, 1936-41 (resigned from party, 1941); Fellowship of Reconciliation, Chicago, IL, youth secretary, 1941, race relations director, 1942-53; Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), field secretary and co-founder, 1942; jailed as a conscientious objector, 1943-45; freedom rider participating in "Journey of Reconciliation" bus rides, 1947; special assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr., beginning in the mid-1950s; cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Atlanta, GA, 1957-60; co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington; A. Philip Randolph Institute, New York City, executive director, 1964-79, chairman, 1979-87; Ratner Lecturer, Columbia University, 1974; founder, Organization for Black Americans to Support Israel, 1975.
Life's Work
Bayard Rustin never stood directly in the media spotlight that shone upon other black activists, but his contributions as a strategist and tactician place him among the most influential of twentieth-century civil rights leaders. In a career spanning more than five decades, Rustin worked on behalf of equal rights with a variety of organizations--including the Communist party, labor unions, and pacifist groups--and exercised a leading role in the creation of two significant civil rights organizations: the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin was particularly instrumental in the development of the nonviolent protest movement that evolved from the Montgomery bus boycott associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. Although it was King who was catapulted into a position of national leadership by the boycott, it was Rustin, a man twenty years King's senior, who provided much of the organizational know-how, political savvy, and theoretical underpinning for King's civil rights victories.
The early years of Bayard Rustin's life are not well chronicled. He grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in a family of nine children; the household was headed by a pair of caterers. At the age of eleven Rustin made a startling discovery: the woman he had always been told was his sister, Florence, was in fact his mother, and the couple whom he knew as his parents were actually his grandparents. His father was a West Indian man with whom Florence had a stable relationship but never married. Rustin's grandmother was a Quaker who instilled in Rustin a sense of commitment to social justice.
Bayard Rustin was an intellectually gifted young man, but the beginning of his college career coincided with the onset of the Depression, and his family's inability to aid him financially cut short his formal education. In 1931 he left Pennsylvania to live with a relative in New York, where his vocal talent earned him irregular work as a cafe singer in Greenwich Village. At that time strict segregation was still the rule in places of public entertainment. The only integrated social clubs in New York were operated by Communist organizers who hoped to enlist the support of blacks, and during this period Rustin became affiliated with the Communist party. To Rustin, as to many other American intellectuals in the 1930s, the Communist party offered a coherent explanation and cure for the devastating problems of economic depression and racial tension in the United States. The party was especially appealing to black Americans for its affirmation of equality between the races, and Rustin was only one of many black intellectuals to embrace its philosophy for a period of time.
Rustin joined the Young Communist League, whose leaders recognized him as a good organizer who could appeal to other young blacks; they appointed him a youth recruiter for the party. Rustin's recruitment work took him throughout the United States to colleges and union halls where he spoke out against racial segregation. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, however, the American Communist party shifted its emphasis from the domestic to the international front and essentially halted its agitation for racial reform in the United States. When the party's Central Committee insisted that Rustin stop his anti-segregation work, he resigned from the party.
Disillusioned but undaunted, Rustin appealed to the venerated black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph offered Rustin temporary work with his March on Washington Movement, a project targeting racial discrimination in defense industries, and he further helped Rustin by arranging a meeting with A. J. Muste, the radical reformer who headed an international pacifist organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). The principles and tactics of the Christian-based FOR were familiar to the Quaker-influenced Rustin, whose abilities were quickly recognized by Muste. Rustin was hired as FOR's youth secretary and resumed traveling throughout the country promoting the cause of nonviolent struggle for social change.
FOR's program encompassed a broad social agenda of which pacifism was but one component. In 1942 FOR established a Department of Race Relations, with Rustin and another young black activist, James Farmer, serving as directors. One of Rustin's first jobs was to advise a fledgling group of activists called the Chicago Committee of Racial Equality, a subgroup of FOR from the University of Chicago. From this committee emerged the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a federation of civil rights organizations with nationwide affiliates, for whom Rustin also went to work. At the heart of CORE's philosophy was the idea of "nonviolent direct action," an American adaptation of the principle of Satyagraha, the "soul force" exercised by Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi and his followers in their struggle for independence from Britain. Interracial in its membership, CORE's activities focused on challenging racial discrimination in public accommodations and transportation.
Rustin's career as a nonviolent direct activist was interrupted in 1943, when, as a conscientious objector to World War II, he chose prison over hospital duties and spent the remainder of the war in the Lewisburg Penitentiary. Upon release, he resumed activist work with both CORE and FOR, in 1947 joining a group of other courageous Freedom Riders in the first of many protest rides throughout the South. Sponsored by CORE, this "Journey of Reconciliation" aimed to test a recent U.S. Supreme Court prohibition on segregation in interstate travel. Rustin and his fellow riders were beaten and arrested, and Rustin spent twenty-two days on a North Carolina chain gang as the result of a bungled defense by NAACP lawyers.
After the war Rustin participated in India's movement for independence from Britain, gaining an international reputation as a political strategist that took him to India to work for Gandhi's Congress party and to Africa to assist Kwame Nkrumah, an activist for African self-rule who became the first prime minister of the Gold Coast.
Despite his international success, aspects of Rustin's personal life threatened to cripple his effectiveness in the United States by isolating him from his political colleagues. In the Greenwich Village social circles in which Rustin traveled, it was acknowledged and accepted that he was homosexual; outside this zone of tolerance Rustin's personal life was considered a potential liability to the political organizations for which he worked. When Rustin began to run into trouble with laws against homosexual activity, FOR chairman Muste warned him that any further such violations would cause his dismissal from the organization. Early in 1953 Rustin was arrested and convicted on morals charges in Pasadena, California. He resigned from FOR, served a thirty-day jail sentence, and returned to New York.
By the mid-1950s a grass-roots civil rights movement had begun to emerge in the South. In December of 1955, a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a bus boycott that would serve as a model for a decade of civil rights protests. The boycott soon attracted the attention of the national press and of northern civil rights activists; to Bayard Rustin, the Montgomery bus boycott represented a chance to regain his former influence by joining what appeared certain to become a national movement. In February of 1956, Rustin traveled to Montgomery to get a firsthand look, but he did not stay long. Shortly after his arrival several local black organizers telephoned A. Philip Randolph to express their fear that Rustin's presence in Montgomery would prove a liability to their cause. The boycott's success might be jeopardized by association with a man whose personal life and Communist connections were vulnerable to criticism. Randolph shared their concern, and, together with other northern civil rights leaders, prevailed upon Rustin to leave Montgomery.
Rustin did not withdraw from the boycott; he merely shifted his work behind the scenes. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the Montgomery movement, recognized the value of Rustin's experience as a political organizer. King and Rustin maintained constant though long-distance contact, with Rustin ghostwriting some of King's articles and speeches, raising money, and generally serving as liaison between the organization in Montgomery and northern activists.
The bus boycott ended successfully in December of 1956 with the arrival in Montgomery of desegregation orders from the Supreme Court. Civil rights organizers wasted no time in scheduling meetings and conferences to develop strategies for expanding the campaign to desegregate the South. Throughout 1957 Bayard Rustin was at the center of this activity, organizing conferences, writing essays for discussion, and helping found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization that would play a central role in coming civil rights victories. The SCLC distanced itself from older and more conservative bodies such as the NAACP by advocating direct action in the pursuit of civil liberties, though always in the Gandhian tradition of nonviolence. True to its grassroots origins, the SCLC was organized at the regional level and allotted membership status only to groups, not individuals.
Rustin felt that the organizational principles of CORE had been flawed, in that its interracial composition had opened the door to domination by well-meaning white members. The new organization, he felt, must be led by southern blacks, just as the boycott had been--which left Rustin himself in an awkward situation, as he was a northern black, an outsider even in the organization he helped create. However, Rustin remained in close touch with the man most responsible for the success or failure of the SCLC, Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin encouraged the cult of personality growing around King and helped the emerging leader by briefing him for meetings, drafting speeches and press releases--in short, by giving the younger man the benefit of his experience as a political tactician and of his connections with wealthy civil rights supporters.
The potential for scandal loomed once again in the summer of 1960, when the powerful black congressman Adam Clayton Powell threatened to expose Rustin's personal and political past. Rustin resigned from SCLC; he continued, however, to serve as a leading political adviser to King, and he remained influential in the SCLC's affairs until King's death in 1968. Indeed, it was Rustin who was chiefly responsible for the organization of one of the most important nonviolent protests in American history, the 1963 March on Washington at which King delivered his electrifying "I Have a Dream" speech.
But by 1963 Rustin had grown disillusioned with nonviolent direct action as a means of effecting change on behalf of black people. He had come to believe that it was time to move on to the political arena. Here he parted with King, who still believed in the power of mass demonstrations. In 1964 Rustin was appointed executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a liberal "think tank" sponsored by the AFL-CIO labor organization in the hope of developing cures for social ills. From this vantage point Rustin surveyed the violent upheavals and factionalism that soon characterized the movement for racial equality.
Despite his continued allegiance to the radical principles at the heart of his thought--which called for a total restructuring of political, economic, and social institutions--Rustin always insisted on the importance of the vote, strong labor unions, and coalition politics. To those younger blacks who advocated racial separatism, Rustin replied that without equal rights for all Americans no separatist movement could hope to maintain its political power. By the time of Rustin's death in 1987 the goals and tactics of his political activity had undergone many changes, but his fundamental vision remained that of equal rights for all citizens in a fully democratic society.
Awards
Man of the Year Award, NAACP Pittsburgh branch, 1965; Eleanor Roosevelt Award, Trade Union Leadership Council, 1966; Liberty Bell Award, Howard University Law School, 1967; John Dewey Award, United Federation of Teachers, 1968; Family of Man Award, National Council of Churches, 1969; John F. Kennedy Award, National Council of Jewish Women, 1971; Lyndon Johnson Award, Urban League, 1974; Murray Green Award, AFL-CIO, 1980; Stephen Wise Award, Jewish Committee, 1981; John La Farge Memorial Award, Catholic Interracial Council of New York, 1981; Defender of Jerusalem Award, 1987; honorary degrees from Clark College, Montclair State College, New School for Social Research, and Brown, Harvard, Columbia, New York, and Yale universities.
Works
Writings
- Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Quadrangle Books, 1971.
- Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest, Columbia University Press, 1976.
Further Reading
Books
- Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, Simon & Schuster, 1988.
- Fairclough, Adam, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., University of Georgia Press, 1987.
- Meier, August, and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968, Oxford University Press, 1973.
Periodicals- Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1987.
- Commonweal, December 1, 1972.
- Journal of Southern History, February 1977.
- New Leader, November 29, 1971.
- New Perspectives, Winter 1985.
- New Yorker, June 21, 1976.
- New York Herald Tribune, July 28, 1964; August 9, 1964.
- New York Times, February 4, 1964.
- Political Studies, June 1978.
- Saturday Evening Post, July 11, 1964.
- Washington Post, August 21, 1983.
— Jonathan Martin