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Forty-eight years after the March
on Washington became the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is finally being remembered with a memorial on
the National Mall. This is a major accomplishment for his legacy and a
testament to his living spirit. I am very proud and honored to have live long
enough to see the first man of color to receive such distinction and to have a
president of color unveil the monument to this great man. GOD BLESS AMERICA!
Dr. King now has reached his
place of immortality and as marvelous as this is I wondered if anyone knows the
man whose shoulders he stood. One person in particular would be the chief
organizer of the March on Washington, who some have called the man behind the
dream. I thought it would be fitting to give props to the man responsible for
making the historic March on Washington a reality - Bayard Rustin. He was one
of the most important leaders of the civil rights movement from the advent of
its modern period in the 1950s until well into the 1980s.
Although his name is seldom
mentioned or received comparatively little press or media attention, while
others' were usually much more readily associated with the movement. Mr.
Rustin’s role was a behind-the-scenes role that, for all its importance, never
garnered him the public acclaim he deserved. Rustin's homosexuality and early
communist affiliation probably meant that the importance of his contribution to
the civil rights and peace movements would never be acknowledged.
Rustin was a gifted and
successful student in the schools of West Chester, both academically and on his
high school track and football teams. It was during this period of his life
that Bayard began to demonstrate his gift for singing with a beautiful tenor
voice. He attended Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College.
In 1937 he moved to New York City, where he was to live the rest of his life.
It was at this time that Rustin
began to organize for the Young Communist League of City College. The
communists' progressive stance on the issue of racial injustice appealed to
him. He broke with the Young Communist League and soon found himself seeking
out A. Philip Randolph head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and at
that time the leading articulator of the rights of Afro-Americans.
He soon headed the youth wing of
a march on Washington that Randolph envisioned. Randolph called off the
demonstration when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No.
8802, forbidding racial discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
industries. Randolph's calling off of the projected march caused a temporary
breach between him and Bayard Rustin, and Rustin transferred his organizing
efforts to the peace movement, first in the Fellowship of Reconciliation and
later in the American Friends Service Committee, the Socialist Party, and the
War Resisters League.
In 1944, Rustin was found guilty
of violating the Selective Service Act and was sentenced to three years in a
federal prison. In March 1944 Rustin was sent to the federal penitentiary in
Ashland, Kentucky. He then set about to resist the pervasive segregation then
the norm in prisons in the United States, although faced with vicious racism
from some of the prison guards and white prisoners, Rustin faced frequent
cruelty with courage and completely nonviolent resistance.
On release from prison, Rustin
got involved again with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which staged a
journey of reconciliation through four Southern and border states in 1947 to
test the application of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that discrimination
in seating in interstate transportation was illegal. Rustin's resistance to
North Carolina's Jim Crow law against integration in transportation earned him
twenty-eight days hard labor on a chain gang, where he met with the usual
racist taunts and tortures on the part of his imprisoners.
Between 1947 and 1952, Rustin
traveled first to India and then to Africa under the sponsorship of the
Fellowship of Reconciliation, exploring the nonviolent dimensions of the Indian
and Ghanaian independence movements. In 1953 Rustin was arrested for public
indecency in Pasadena, California, while lecturing under the auspices of the
American Association of University Women. It was the first time that Rustin's
homosexuality had come into public attention, and at that time homosexual
behavior in all states was a criminal offense.
In 1956 Rustin was approached by
Lillian Smith, the celebrated Southern novelist who authored Strange Fruit, to
provide Dr. Martin Luther King with some practical advice on how to apply
Gandhian principles of nonviolence to the boycott of public transportation then
taking shape in Montgomery, Alabama. Rustin spent time in Montgomery and
Birmingham advising King, who had not yet completely embraced principles of
nonviolence in his struggle. By 1957, Rustin was busy playing a large role in
the birth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in the Prayer
Pilgrimage to Washington that took place on May 17, 1957 to urge A. Philip
Randolph to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that the nation's
schools be desegregated.
Arguably the high point of Bayard
Rustin's political career was the A. Philip Randolph for Jobs and Freedom
which took place on August 28, 1963, the place of Dr. Martin Luther King's
stirring "I Have a Dream" speech. Rustin was by all accounts the
March's chief architect. To devise a march of at least one-quarter of a million
participants and to coordinate the various sometimes fractious civil rights
organizations that played a part in it was a herculean feat of mobilization.
By 1965 Rustin had come to
believe that the period for militant street action had come to an end; the
legal foundation for segregation had been irrevocably shattered. Rustin's
steadfast opposition to identity politics also came under criticism by
exponents of the developing Black Power movement. His critical stance toward
affirmative action programs and black studies departments in American
universities was not a popular viewpoint among many of his fellow
Afro-Americans, and as at various other times of his life Rustin found himself
to a certain extent isolated.
Although Bayard Rustin lived in
the shadow of more charismatic civil rights leaders, he can lay real claim to
have been an indispensable unsung force behind the movement toward equality for
America's black citizens, and more largely for the rights of humans around the
globe, in the twentieth century. Throughout his life his personal philosophy,
incorporating beliefs that were of central importance to him: that there is
that of God in every person, that all are entitled to a decent life, and that a
life of service to others is the way to happiness and true fulfillment.
Purchase “Just a Season” today !!!
Legacy – A New Season the sequel is coming!
July 4, 2012
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