We celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. JJ Vincent has the story a key leader you’ve probably never heard of.
Have you ever heard of Bayard Rustin? Don’t be surprised. Until 2013, when he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom (accepted by his former partner Walter Naegle) most people never had.
Rustin was part of Dr. Martin Luther King’s inner circle, a teacher and proponent of non-violent activism, and organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. a key architect of the March on Washington, and a man largely forgotten by or excluded from the story of the Civil Rights movement. Why?
He was gay. Openly gay. With an arrest record because of laws against homosexual acts. A record that many in the Civil Rights movement feared could have hurt their cause. And after pressure from inside and outside of the movement, for the greater good of the movement, Ruskin stepped back from the limelight.
It can be debated endlessly whether or not this was the right thing to do.
He didn’t have a low profile before meeting Dr. King and joining his movement. In 1942, he boarded a bus in Kentucky, heading to Tennessee. He refused to give up his second row seat, leading to a beating and a arrest, but no formal charges. He also spent two years in prison as a pacifist, for violating the Selective Service Act during WWII, organized the first Freedom Ride in 1947 and protests in the UK and , and helped Dr. King in the early organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Unfortunately for himself and many others, he had been arrested in California as a “suspected sexual pervert” in a highly publicized case in California after being caught in a car with two men. This was 1953, not an era with a high tolerance for homosexual activity. This arrest would haunt him, overshadowing his work, his writing, his mentorship of Dr. King, and his place in history. Many years later, Strom Thurmond and Adam Clayton Powell, a powerful African-American politician, would bring it up in an attempt to discredit not only Ruskin but those around him. While civil rights leaders turned out to defend him, he nevertheless remained on the outside. His former ties to the communist party played a role, but not to the degree that his homosexuality did.
It seems strange now that a gay man fighting for the rights of others would be marginalized by them, but they did not want him, and he did not want to distract from the larger cause. He went on to be vocal and active in the union movement, gay rights movement, and anti-war protests, but his greatest works are largely forgotten.
A documentary film, Brother Outsider, was released in 2003 and sought to change this. Featuring archival footage and interviews with people who knew him, including civil rights leaders, it paints a portrait of a deeply complex man who was both ahead of his time and a victim of it.
Bayard Rustin died in 1987, a footnote to history. But his legacy resonates in our lives every single day, and the question of where we would be today without him and his mentorship, organizing, and sense of community is worth considering.
More in the documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin
I’m a white woman, living in the Pacific Northwest. But I lived through the 60s and I did know of Bayard Rustin as a freedom fighter, so he wasn’t completely forgotten by the public! Thanks for writing the memorial. To step aside in favor of the larger cause shows an uncommon level of dedication and humility.
I would love to have met him. It must have cost him dearly in pride and pain, and it’s clear he did not go happily. But that he did speaks volumes of the “content of his character”.