An unsung hero of the civil rights movement Christina Greer
On August 28th, 1963,
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered
his “I Have a Dream” speech
at the March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom.
That day,
nearly a quarter million people
gathered on the national mall
to demand an end to the discrimination,
segregation, violence,
and economic exclusion
black people still faced
across the United States.
None of it would have been possible
without the march’s chief organizer
– a man named Bayard Rustin.
Rustin grew up in a Quaker household,
and began peacefully protesting
racial segregation in high school.
He remained committed to
pacifism throughout his life,
and was jailed in 1944 as a conscientious
objector to World War II.
During his two-year imprisonment,
he protested the segregated
facilities from within.
Wherever Rustin went,
he organized and advocated,
and was constantly attuned to the
methods, groups, and people
who could help further
messages of equality.
He joined the Communist Party
when black American’s civil rights
were one of its priorities,
but soon became disillusioned by the
party’s authoritarian leanings
and left.
In 1948,
he traveled to India to learn the
peaceful resistance strategies
of the recently assassinated
Mahatma Gandhi.
He returned to the United States
armed with strategies
for peaceful protest,
including civil disobedience.
He began to work with
Martin Luther King Jr in 1955,
and shared these ideas with him.
As King’s prominence increased,
Rustin became his main advisor,
as well as a key strategist in the
broader civil rights movement.
He brought his organizing expertise
to the 1956 bus boycotts
in Montgomery, Alabama
—in fact,
he had organized and participated
in a transportation protest
that helped inspire the boycotts
almost a decade before.
His largest-scale organizing project
came in 1963,
when he led the planning for the
national march on Washington.
The possibility of riots that could
injure marchers
and undermine their message of peaceful
protest was a huge concern.
Rustin not only worked with the DC
police and hospitals to prepare,
but organized and trained a volunteer
force of 2,000 security marshals.
In spite of his deft management,
some of the other organizers did
not want Rustin to march in front
with other leaders from the south,
because of his homosexuality.
Despite these slights,
Rustin maintained his focus,
and on the day of the march
he delivered the
marchers' demands
in a speech directed at
President John F. Kennedy.
The march itself proceeded smoothly,
without any violence.
It has been credited with helping pass
the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
which ended segregation in public places
and banned employment discrimination,
and the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
which outlawed discriminatory
voting practices.
In spite of his decades of service,
Rustin’s positions on certain political
issues were unpopular among his peers.
Some thought he wasn’t critical enough
of the Vietnam War,
or that he was too eager to collaborate
with the political establishment
including the president and congress.
Others were uncomfortable with his
former communist affiliation.
But ultimately,
both his belief
in collaboration
with the government
and his membership
to the communist party
had been driven by his desire
to maximize tangible gains
in liberties for black Americans,
and to do so as quickly as possible.
Rustin was passed over for several
influential roles in the 1960s and 70s,
but he never stopped his activism.
In the 1980s,
he publicly came out as gay,
and was instrumental
in drawing attention to the AIDS crisis
until his death in 1987.
In 2013,
fifty years after the March On Washington,
President Barack Obama posthumously
awarded him
the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
praising Rustin’s
“march towards true equality,
no matter who we are
or who we love.”