His name has gained wider recognition in more recent decades, but civil rights activist and organizer Bayard Rustin has long deserved a much more respected place in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. The use of nonviolence, sit-ins, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington? Rustin is credited as the primary architect of a number of significant, effective methods and ideas used in the movement.
“Bayard Rustin was a civil rights organizer in the mass struggles for Black liberation, as well as an anti-war activist and even a labor organizer,” said Mychal Odom, an assistant professor of Black studies at San Diego Mesa College, whose work has focused on local and international Black freedom struggles, connecting the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. “Because of his advanced experience and understanding of socialism, of global people’s struggles, and lot of those sorts of issues…I think a lot of the focus on his entry into the Black freedom struggle comes from the role that he played in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the subsequent role that he played in the organizing of the March on Washington in 1963.”
Rustin, who was also openly gay, was discriminated against within the Civil Rights Movement at the time because of his sexuality, which is part of why he was excluded from the stories about the movement for so long. Martin Luther King Jr. was advised to cut ties with Rustin for that very reason, although he continued to call on Rustin to collaborate on civil rights work, according to an article on Rustin at Biography.com.
In the celebration of the life and work of King, Rustin could be considered an MVP from the team behind King. In that regard, Odom took some time to talk about Rustin, his ideology and influence, and how his organizing helped craft King’s dream. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: How would you describe the kind of influence you understand that he had on Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement?
A: He helped influence a lot of the embrace of the ideas of civil disobedience, the role of nonviolence in political organizing. I think he was a Quaker, a member of the American Friends Service Committee (an organization founded in 1917 to work toward ending violence, oppression, and inequality), and I know that he had previously worked with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, said to have pioneered the use nonviolent, direct action in the civil rights struggle), which was an important organization because they were one of the more militant, early civil rights organizations brought to San Diego, in 1960, 1961. So, he brought that organizing experience into it, having read the writings of everyone from Gandhi out of India, as well as Henry David Thoreau from the 19th century, to the U.S.-Mexico war and abolitionism and things like that. He plays an important role in bringing that stuff into the Civil Rights Movement, to Dr. King, and also internationalizing it because Rustin had known people who were currently leading anti-colonial struggles in Ghana around that time. So, I think all of these perspectives are perspectives that play a role in influencing Dr. King in the 1950s.
There are some people who, of course, would push back against that and don’t necessarily like the fact that such a pacifist position had been taken. People like Robert F. Williams, another civil rights organizer in the South who went the other way, and of course, Malcolm X. Nevertheless, objectively speaking, those are the influences that he had, really helping Dr. King to fully embrace the role of nonviolence and pacifism as a part of a civil rights struggle, but also even a moral struggle.
Q: Rustin was born and raised in West Chester, Penn. Can you talk about the connection between that community, the Quakers, and the social justice work that Rustin would spend his life focused on?
A: I think Pennsylvania is an important place, especially when you talk about the Quakers and things like that. One thing I think we always have to remind ourselves of is that, to a person like him, born in 1912, he’s closer to the time of the abolitionist struggle than to the time in which he was born. Less than 50 years since the abolition of the enslavement of African people in the United States in 1860s to the early 20th century, is when he was born. To be honest, he was closer to that time than we are, even now, to the 1950s and 1960s. So, I think when you talk about Pennsylvania, you’ve got to talk about people like Harriet Tubman, William Steele, and the organization that put forth the Underground Railroad was something called the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. This was an anti-slavery organization. We know that the Quakers have played a long role in allying with African people for the abolition of slavery and, in many ways, had been understood as being historically on the right side, and even in much better position than other people. They had started some early schools and there was a guy back in the 1850s named Anthony Benezet who was a Quaker out of Philadelphia who started some schools and argued for, not just the equality of African people, but in his own historical , was arguing for the ways in which African society had superseded European society in its modern form. So, I think that all of those things, in a certain context, would have drawn a person like Bayard Rustin to the Quakers because a person like him is seeking to understand a future of harmony between people of all races.
Q: He’s been called an architect of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Can you talk about his role in the march, what he did in the organizing and execution of it that’s been considered pivotal in the movement, and the circumstances he was working within that added to the importance of his contributions?
A: One thing, I think, is historically important is that the March on Washington really represents a sort of reemergence of him in civil rights organizing because we know that his past hip in the Communist Party, as well as some of the ministers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference opposition to his sexuality, and getting tangled in the web of anti-gay laws, forced him to the outskirts. That really ostracized him for many years amongst the mainstream, however, he was a mentee to A. Philip Randolph, who was a lead organizer of the March on Washington, which is important to note that it’s a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In that sense, it’s historically caused people to see it as the “I Have a Dream” speech and to try to use it as a way to promote Dr. King as some sort of proponent for colorblindness or something like that. As they work against things that Dr. King stood for, they’ll say things like, ‘Isn’t this what Dr. King’s dream was?’ No, it wasn’t because the main part of the speech he expected to get the biggest response was him talking about the blank check being given to Black people in America. I say that because of the focus on freedom, the focus on labor rights; these are all important introductions that Bayard Rustin had brought to the lead organizing for the March on Washington. He was vital in bridging the gap between Southern civil rights and Northern labor interests, and really helping to bring the mass character of the March on Washington forward.
Q: Rustin was also openly gay, having been arrested and punished for his sexuality during a time of even greater discrimination against LGBTQ folks. Can you talk about how the discrimination and bigotry against the LGBTQ community was used against Rustin during that time? What do you think the impact of that was?
A: I think that it’s important to note that he wasn’t just gay, but Black and gay. He was also, at one time, a socialist, a communist, and those things placed a person on the outskirts of society. I think, being all three had an effect, especially in the 1950s at the time of the bus boycott, of isolating people in the struggle. One thing is that, at the moment in which he emerged on the scene, the civil rights struggle and the leadership of the Black freedom struggle had really been under the control of the Black middle class, in many ways, especially with a lot of ministers. Now, there were some ministers who were deeply grounded in the working-class tradition, but I think what served as a detriment to him was, for lack of a better term, what people call “respectability politics.” The NAA and other leaders of civil rights organizations and leaders of that time, had opposed him and basically pushed him out of the limelight for a while. I think we even see the sort of limiting of his story.
I do think that, to some extent, there were also very real political differences that had emerged between Rustin and others, especially as time went on from when Black Power emerged. He largely had opposed Black Power and much more radical measures around that. In the late 1960s when the Black Power Movement, and even the civil rights activists, had become much more knowing of the Israel-Palestine conflict, he had sided with Israel and the Black Power Movement and many civil rights leaders had begun to side with Palestine. There were a lot of other things that, internally in Black politics, had begun to cause some dissonance between Rustin and others. Of course, the ugliest of that stuff is the homophobia that existed. People like Adam Clayton Powell and others had come out in opposition to him and really forced Dr. King to distance himself from Bayard Rustin, with people even trying to suggest that he was sleeping with Bayard Rustin and things like that. So, that was a very real, nasty thing.
I think it also sort of shows the willingness of certain civil rights elite at that time to bend toward the dominant political will in the United States because you’ve got to that the 1940s and 1960s are a different period. For some people, they’re excited about this period in civil rights history, but then it’s also sort of a lot of contradictions that emerged. For the very first time, you have people pushing a civil rights agenda and they feel that they’re pushing against a United States government that’s not in complete opposition to civil rights demands. This is the first time ever that they’ve experienced that in any major way since the Reconstruction period. Because the struggle is in the hands of the elite sector of the Black community, it sort of shapes itself to the will and to the objectives of the political elite, who basically see the ability to gain federal legislation around civil rights as the end all-be all. It’s really not until the emergence of the SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, that we begin to see a much more mass, grassroots, bottom-up strategy emerge. To be clear, it’s that bottom-up strategy that emerges first and foremost with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I would argue. Then, we sort of see it in the sit-ins and all of those things, and Rustin had been a vital architect of many of those sit-ins that had been taking place since the 1940s. So, he played an important role in the first wave of sit-ins, which was in the 1940s and up to the early 1950s. Then, when you see it reemerging, I think that’s when you begin to see him reemerge because of his importance in grassroots-style mobilizing.
I think that you don’t hear it articulated as such, but I do think that the homophobia that you see emerge in the movement at that time was an echoing of the middle-class integration sentiment of much of the elite because there were a lot of other stories in of the freedom struggle that show how, in our day-to-day lives, everyday Black folks saw the question of gender and sexuality in a far more progressive way than many of the people who had been tasked with leading the struggle at that time. To be honest, people used their organizations and their pulpits and other things to police Black folks in a way that, I think, many of us can clearly see wasn’t in our best interest.
Q: What are ways that Rustin helped realize elements of King’s “dream”?
A: Right now, I think that his global vision is important. So, I think that the connection of our struggle here, within the United States, to a much more expanded, global vision of what freedom looks like, understanding that the struggle in the United States was connected to a larger anti-colonial struggle of oppressed people around the world—I think that’s important.
I think labor, understanding that there was an economic base to the oppression of Black people within the United States. It’s not simply just one that is for approval or an ideological struggle for something like ‘They don’t like us, we need to make them like us,’ but I think when the struggles have an economic base, then we know that the struggle, inherently then, is about power.
I think, whether you agree with him or not on everything, that he brought the tactical importance of understanding mass mobilization. In many ways, I think that is another way that he differed, functionally, from the other parts of SCLC leadership, who seemed a little less interested in mass mobilization. He was a person who, above all, I think believed in the role of organizing the masses behind political struggles. I think those are just some of the ways in which I can see him playing an important role.
You can’t tell the story of Dr. King without telling the stories of Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Kwame Nkrumah, Coretta Scott King, Ella Baker, and so many other people. I think the same methodology that allows for us to say, ‘Hey, we need to expand the story of Bayard Rustin beyond what we’ve been told’ is the same methodology that has allowed for us to expand the stories that have historically been told about Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, and so many other people. Understanding that, as we tell these stories in their full context, I just struggle with bringing up some of the contentions people had with Rustin because I’m not trying to slander, but I’m thinking, ‘OK, well, as we continue to tell these stories in their fuller context, we gain a much broader appreciation on the complexities and the seriousness of our struggles for freedom.’
