I found myself moved to tears when I visited the home of one brilliant and celebrated icon and touched the back of a chair in which another brilliant--but nearly forgotten--icon had sat years before. I felt even more moved as I realized that the relatively obscure man had mentored the more celebrated one.
A number of years ago, I was a visitor to a parsonage that had been occupied by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was a pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Our guide was an older Black woman who had worked with Dr. King. She was a font not only of personal memories of the civil rights leader but also of the role of non-violent philosophy in his life and work.Â
I was fascinated and moved to hear such a personal remembrance of Dr. King in the very place where he and his family had lived. My tears came when our guide described a meeting between Dr. King and a group of movement leaders that had taken place around the dining room table. She pointed out who had sat where, producing a photograph of this esteemed gathering. I was more than a bit awestruck to consider the people in attendance and the importance of their work. It was when I touched the back of the chair where Bayard Rustin had sat during that meeting that my tears came.Â
Bayard Rustin. The person who mentored Dr. King and introduced him to the philosophy of Gandhian non-violence. The person who first applied that philosophy to racial injustice in the United States. The man who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the most important and famous events of the mid-twentieth century. The man who had spent 27 months in prison for refusing to take up arms for this, or any, country. The man who, without the benefit of a significant gay movement, had to figure out how to live as a gay, Black man in the middle of the McCarthy era.Â
I stood in the King home wondering how Bayard Rustin had managed to do the world-changing work he had done. How had he survived a conviction for sodomy and served his time in the Los Angeles County jail in the early 1950s? How had he lived as a devotee to nonviolence in general and to the civil rights movement in particular under the constant threat of having his private personal history used against him and the causes to which he was devoted—something that did happen on the floor of Congress on the eve of the March on Washington? Â
Here was a man who committed to the cause of justice through peaceful means, a strategic genius, a respected teacher, and a charismatic organizer. His work took him all over the world. He even made an organizing stop at the University of Colorado Boulder in the early 1950s, leaving behind a new Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter when he left.Â
As I stood in King's home, I couldn't help being moved to recall the importance of Bayard Rustin's contributions to Black liberation. I couldn't help feeling saddened by the long periods of his great loneliness as he was abandoned by friends and colleagues after his conviction in LA. I couldn't shake the knowledge of the fear he felt as he labored under the threat that his past would continue to be used to undermine his credibility and that of the movement he loved. I couldn't help but be buoyed by Rustin's courage, shown in his refusal to renounce his principles or to go into hiding or even to deny his sexual orientation. I couldn't escape the fact of my own privilege in being able to learn more about and be inspired by this Black, gay man.Â
And I couldn't help but think of how easily we can try to erase people from our history because they are not who we want them to be. Here was a committed soul who did amazing work and who kept being pushed into the shadows because some people hated him for his race, some people hated him for his sexual orientation, and some people hated him for both. Despite that, Bayard Rustin never gave up. He never withdrew from his ideals. He kept doing movement work. He continued to live his truth until the end of his life in 1987.
It is our honor and our duty to know as much as we can about Bayard Rustin. He is part of our history, though he has been denied his rightful place in history because he was gay. President Barack Obama acknowledged that reality when presenting Rustin a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.Â
You can learn more about Bayard Rustin by reading John D'Emilio's biography, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, or be seeing the documentary, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, or through the feature film, Rustin, a biopic starring Colman Domingo.
Glenda Russell is a psychologist, researcher, teacher, community historian, and psycho-activist. You can follow her on her blog, Tools for Troubled Times at:Â ToolsForTroubledTimes.wordpress.com
This blog post represents the views and opinions of a guest author and may not be fully representative of Rocky Mountain Equality’s position.