Reconsidering Rustin: His Trailblazing Legacy 60 Years After the March on Washington
Bayard Rustin and Dr. Eugene Reed at Freedom House. World Telegram & Sun photo by Al Ravenna
Considered a brilliant organizer with an aptitude for detail, he’s the exacting architect of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an unprecedented demand for civil rights which drew a quarter of a million people to the National Mall - and catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. into national prominence.
Those who knew him describe a tall, athletic, charismatic man with a restless intellect and a passion for social justice. He worked on a chain gang for protesting segregation in the 1940s, did jail time for refusing to fight in World War II and introduced King to Gandhi's teachings of nonviolent resistance during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955.
Yet despite his undeniable imprint on the civil rights struggle, hailed in a front-page obituary in The New York Times in 1987, Bayard Rustin’s life and work is often considered an historic footnote - a giant toiling in the shadow of a titan.
For generations, discussions of Rustin began and ended with his role in organizing the March On Washington in 1963, which placed the civil rights struggle at the top of the national agenda. Experts say that’s because Rustin’s complex legacy is largely diminished by his private life as an out gay man, in an era that was hostile to his sexuality as well as his race.
Now, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, scholars, biographers and gay-rights activists are leading a public reconsideration of Rustin’s place in history. They argue that Rustin was a singular figure in American history, a man ahead of his time who deserves elevation into the civil rights pantheon.
“His turn from protest to politics, his embrace of certain aspects of political conservatism, coupled with King’s martyrdom overshadowed his previous radicalism, causing some to forget/remove him from the legacy of the civil rights movement,” Dr. Lerone A. Martin, a Stanford University professor and director of the school’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, wrote in an email.
Thankfully, Martin said, “recent biographies and a wonderful 2003 documentary, ‘Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin’ has helped recover/reintroduce his wonderful legacy of civil rights activism.”
That reintroduction was elevated in 2012, when young activists dedicated a year of service in honor of what would have been Rustin’s 100th birthday. Then-President Barack Obama further elevated Rustin in 2013, awarding him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And “Rustin” - a biopic directed by Tony Award-winner George C. Wolfe, starring Coleman Domingo as Rustin and Glynn Turman as Randolph - is set for release later this year.
“His turn from protest to politics, his embrace of certain aspects of political conservatism, coupled with King’s martyrdom overshadowed his previous radicalism, causing some to forget/remove him from the legacy of the civil rights movement.”
John D’Emilio, a professor emeritus of history and of women's and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says widespread homophobia, and internal divisions within the civil rights movement, largely kept Rustin at the margins of history for generations.
“When he's talked about, he's pretty much talked about only as the organizer of the iconic 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” says D’Emilio, author of “Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin," a 2003 biography. “And almost immediately, you go from one sentence about Bayard Rustin, then to talking about Dr. King.”
Rustin’s work, “in terms of both racial justice and antiwar activism is really lost, that people do not know who he is,” D’Emilio says. “If you are somebody who has passion about the civil rights movement, you will know who he is. But otherwise, he rarely shows up in high school history courses, or even many college history courses.”
That absence “is partly because of the way he had to live his life in the context of the homophobia that was so intense and pervasive in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s,” D’Emilio says. “So on the one hand, he did all this work - he was the organizer of this and that and something else - and often is the font of ideas. But because of his gayness, and the way it had become public, he knew he had to stay out of the public spotlight.”
Martin agrees that Rustin was “hidden in plain sight,” particularly during the March on Washington. Though his skills were never questioned, Martin says, the civil rights movement was centered on showing the public the immorality of Jim Crow; having a gay man at the forefront of the movement could bring the morality of the movement into question.
“While his talents were readily recognized and utilized, his sexuality and arrest on ‘morals charges’ - specifically, what was then called ‘sex perversion’ - made him a public liability in terms of respectability,” Martin says.
In front of 170 W 130 St., March on Washington, L to R Bayard Rustin, Deputy Director, Cleveland Robinson, Chairman of Administrative Committee. World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez.
Despite the Backlash, Rustin Fearlessly Embraced His Sexuality
Rustin came to his identity as a civil rights warrior, and an out gay man, at an early age.
Born to a teenage mother in 1912 in West Chester, PA, a waystation on the Underground Railroad, Rustin was raised by his Quaker grandparents. He absorbed their values of nonviolence and social justice, and they did not judge his budding homosexuality.
By the time he entered City College of New York in the late 1930s, Rustin’s activism included affiliation with a Communist youth group, but he left over their support of the Soviet Union in World War II. In the early 1940s, Rustin came in contact with Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a fellow Socialist.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation fired Rustin in 1953 when police in Pasadena, Calif., found him after hours having sex with a man in a parked car. After spending 60 days in jail, Rustin struggled to find work; Randolph, by then his mentor, sent Rustin to Montgomery to advise King during the ongoing bus boycott, which crippled the city’s mass transit system.
The boycott’s success launched King and Rustin’s partnership and elevated the stature of both men within the growing civil rights movement. But despite Rustin’s charisma, good looks and strategic prowess, only King could credibly represent the movement in public.
“Rustin in the latter half of the 1950s, because of his gayness, does not have a formal public role with Dr. King,” D’Emilio says. “But he recognized King's value. And he basically strategized how to help this little-known minister from Montgomery, AL become a national leader and in the national spotlight.”
“So on the one hand, he did all this work — he was the organizer of this and that and something else — and often is the font of ideas. But because of his gayness, and the way it had become public, he knew he had to stay out of the public spotlight.”
At the same time, Rustin fearlessly embraced his sexuality despite his arrest and the abject homophobia of the day. Although they did not renounce him, King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights movement’s umbrella organization, often marginalized Rustin to protect the movement’s image.
“Too close of an association could open the door to allegations,” says Martin, the Stanford professor. For example, he said, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell - a powerful Black congressman who wanted to sidetrack King - threatened to leak word to reporters that King and Rustin were lovers if King went ahead with a plan to disrupt the 1960 Democratic National Convention.
King “proceeded with the demonstration, but without Rustin!” Martin said.
Though it was hypocritical for leaders of a freedom struggle to accept Rustin’s oppression, “It's not as if there was another view of homosexuality available” at the time, says D’Emilio. “So, number one, they shared the view. And number two, they cared about, ‘Will this hurt us if the word gets out that a convicted sex criminal is working with our organization? Is it gonna set back the movement?’”
Sen. Strom Thurmond, an ardent segregationist, thought so: In August 1963, on the eve of the March, he read Rustin’s arrest record on the Senate floor to discredit the March. Publicly, King and others stood with Rustin; privately, King set up an internal committee to decide if Rustin was a drag on the movement.
Ultimately, Martin said, they decided Rustin was more of an asset than a liability, but it was also clear he could not have a public role in the March. But Rustin’s behind-the-scenes work in assembling what was then the largest protest in American history still garnered media attention.
Bayard Rustin, half-length portrait, listens to unidentified man. World Telegram & Sun photo by Stanley Wolfson
Rustin Was Ahead of His Time
“Throughout the 1960s, Rustin remained a committed and recognized civil rights activist, gay activist and openly gay man,” said Martin. “So much so that it is Rustin, along with (March organizer) A. Philip Randolph, that graced the cover of Life Magazine following the 1963 March on Washington - not Martin Luther King.”
“Given the times, Rustin is ahead of his times, not in the sense that he's a gay activist or making homosexuality and sexual orientation a political issue,” D’Emilio says. “But in this era, the overwhelming majority of gay men kept their identity secret. Although Rustin did not openly go around saying, ‘I am a homosexual,’ he did not pretend to be straight.”
Over time, Rustin’s politics drifted away from King and the SCLC and towards labor rights, India’s liberation struggle from England and an end to nuclear proliferation. By the time he died in 1987, Rustin’s activism had swept in the fight for gay rights, according to his obituary in The New York Times.
“It would be kind of liberating to realize that here’s this gay man who is making such a difference in the world. But he was ahead of his times, in that he simply accepted that this is who I am. He did not pretend to be someone else.”
Rustin, the paper wrote, “won admirers as a political philosopher and analyst” but “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.”
But D’Emilio, the Rustin biographer, says that assessment gives short shrift to Rustin’s broad portfolio of activist work, his commitment to freedom for Black people and his devotion to his core principles. Perhaps most remarkably, he says, Rustin lived without compromise as a Black gay man in an era where that identity put him at risk.
“For other gay people who might have known about Rustin, it would be kind of liberating to realize that here's this gay man who is making such a difference in the world,” D’Emilio says. “But he was ahead of his times, in that he simply accepted that this is who I am. He did not pretend to be someone else.”
Joseph Williams is The Reckoning’s Race & Health Editor. A seasoned journalist, political analyst and essayist, Williams has been published in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and US News & World Report.
A California native, Williams is a graduate of the University Of Richmond and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives and works in metro Washington, D.C.