Bayard Rustin
2012
Civil Rights Activist · Social Worker · Pacifist
Bayard Rustin was an American political activist – a leader for civil rights, nonviolence, and gay rights.
He joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) as a race relations secretary in the summer of 1941, and a year later, in his essay The Negro and Nonviolence, he emphasized nonviolence and the moral responsibility of acting in accordance with one’s beliefs.
“To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true... The proof that one truly believes is in action.”
A declared conscientious objector, Rustin, and other members of FOR were convicted of violating the Selective Service Act. He was imprisoned, but he organized protests against racially segregated housing and dining facilities.
In 1947, Rustin organized the Journey of Reconciliation, the first of the Freedom Rides to test the 1946 ruling of the Supreme Court in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel.
Rustin traveled to India in 1948 to learn techniques of nonviolent civil resistance directly from the leaders of the Gandhian movement.
A few years later, in Pasadena, California, Rustin was arrested for illegal sexual activity and pleaded guilty to a single charge of "lewd vagrancy" – a crime for which he served sixty days in jail. The Pasadena arrest was the first time Rustin's sexual orientation became public. Rustin resigned from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) because of his conviction.
Rustin served as an anonymous member of the American Friends Service Committee's task force to write "Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence", published in 1955. In it, he wrote:
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers...The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”
His was one of the most influential pacifist essays in America, leading to advising Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956 on Gandhian tactics. At the time, King was organizing the public transportation boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which became known as the Montgomery bus boycott.
Starting in 1962, Rustin was instrumental in planning the march on Washington. The march commemorated the Emancipation Proclamation of one hundred years earlier. He declared that the event "made Americans feel for the first time that we were capable of being truly a nation, that we were capable of moving beyond division and bigotry".
Rustin did not participate in gay rights activism until the 1980s, when he testified in favor of the New York City Gay Rights Bill. In a speech given in 1986, he said:
“Today, blacks are no longer the ...barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination...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.”
When Rustin died in 1987, an obituary in The New York Times reported, "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.’”