THE MAN BEHIND MLK
BAYARD RUSTIN
Rediscover the gay, ‘communist’, pacifist mastermind behind the 1963 March on Washington who was Dr King’s right-hand man
Written by Luther Adams – Free Man of Color, PhD
Bayard Rustin was an outsider, recognised as a brilliant organiser, strategist, and thinker whose vision and activism was the foundation for modern movements for Peace, Civil Rights and Gay Liberation. Rustin opposed nuclear arms testing in Africa and Asia, and offered strategic support to independence movements in Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia. His association with communism and socialism, his homosexuality, and later his turn towards the right, led contemporaries and historians to push him out of the limelight and into the shadows.
Bayard, his name pronounced like ‘fired’, was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1912. He was raised by his grandparents. Julia “Ma” Rustin was a strong influence, introducing Quaker values of non-violence, recognition of the equality of all people, and the importance of aligning words with deeds. Bayard Rustin was attractive, athletic, artistic, academically inclined and an aspiring activist. According to Rustin, this activism “did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being Black… it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing… Those values are based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal.”
Rustin working as a spokesman for the Citywide Committee for Integration in 1964
© Getty Images
EXPERT BIO
LUTHER ADAMS-FREE MAN OF COLOR
Luther Adams-Free Man of Color, is Associate Professor of Ethnic, Gender and Labor Studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. He publishes research on Black history and culture and is the author of Way Up North In Louisville: African American Migration In The Urban South, 1930-1970.
TOP-RIGHT The mugshots from Rustin’s arrest for failing to register for the draft, 1945
RIGHT Rustin and his team only had eight weeks to organise the historic march
As a high school student, he challenged segregation at the local Warner Theater. He was arrested, and jailed – the first of many arrests. He attended college at Wilberforce and later Cheyney State on musical scholarships and trained at the American Friends Service Committee peace camp. But he was dismissed from both schools, either for refusing to join the Reserve Officer Training Corps, organising student protests on campus, or reasons not yet known. Rustin shared his growing awareness of his homosexuality with Ma Rustin, who in turn encouraged and affirmed him.
Like many during the Great Depression Rustin was out of work. He moved to Harlem, making his living singing at Café Society in Greenwich Village, and performing with folk singer Josh White and the Carolinas. Around this time Rustin joined the Young Communist League, impressed by their defence of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ (nine African American teens accused of rape in Alabama), opposition to racial inequality, fascism and war. His membership was brief. Appalled by new directives from Moscow that ended protest against white supremacy and began support for war, Rustin left disillusioned and fiercely anti-communist.