The Reverend Charles J. Stephens
September 22, 2013
Opening Words: “Continuous resistance in nonviolent form breaks through the paralyzing peace which is peace for the master and misery for the mastered. Paradoxically, as it breaks the unjust social peace, its weapon of goodwill and love builds the sacred base of real brotherhood, in which the dignity and equal opportunity of every person is sacred and guaranteed.” Bayard Rustin
Covenant: # 462 by Paul Robeson.
(prior to saying Covenant) In 1939, Bayard Rustin was in the chorus of a short-lived musical that starred Paul Robeson. Blues singer Josh White was also a cast member, and later invited Rustin to join his band, “Josh White and the Carolinians”. This gave Rustin the opportunity to become a regular performer at the Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village, widening his social and intellectual contacts.
First Reading: from Mohandas Gandhi quoted by Eknath Easwaran in “Gandhi The Man”
Second Reading: from Taylor Branch in “Parting The Waters”
SERMON: Why Bayard Rustin Is the Unknown Hero of the Civil Rights Movement
In the long and difficult African-American Civil Rights struggle, Bayard Rustin was a key organizer and significant leader whom the majority of people have never heard of.
Bayard was born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Even at birth he was unusual. His mother was Florence Rustin. But Bayard was born out of wedlock so Julia and Janifer, his grandparents, decided to raise young Bayard as their son, the youngest of eight children.
If there is any doubt about the importance of receiving a liberal religious education and having positive role models, please take note: Bayard’s mother, Julia Rustin, was raised as a Quaker. She impressed on her children certain Quaker principles: the equality of all human beings before God, the vital need for nonviolence, and the importance of dealing with everyone with love and respect. Julia Rustin was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson were frequent guests in the Rustin home.
As a result, at an early age, Bayard became dedicated to social causes. His original training as an activist came from the Quakers. After several years of college he moved to New York City and was attracted to the Communist Party because of its stated position on racial equality. He quit, however, in disgust when it did an about face on segregation.
Rustin sought out A. Philip Randolph, a black labor organizer, and the leading articulator of the rights of black Americans. Randolph became Rustin’s mentor. He worked for Randolph in the trade union movement. During World War II he became an active conscientious objector.
In 1942, Bayard was involved helping to organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a pacifist organization based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi’s non-violent resistance. He was sent to California by CORE and the American Friends Service Committee to try to protect the property of Japanese-Americans imprisoned in internment camps.
Something that few people are aware of and I find amazing is that in 1942 Rustin boarded a bus in Louisville, Kentucky, bound for Nashville. He sat in the second row and refused to move even when asked by several drivers to move to the back of the bus. Police stopped the bus north of Nashville and arrested Rustin. After he was beaten he was taken to the police station, but later released uncharged.
Then in 1947, long before the civil rights movement familiar to most of us, Bayard Rustin initiated one of the first freedom rides through the South. The Supreme Court had banned racial discrimination in interstate travel, but things hadn’t changed. Rustin and 27 others used Gandhian tactics and traveled by bus through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. He bravely confronted segregation through nonviolent means. Bayard ended up spending twenty-eight days at hard labor on a chain gang in North Carolina. When he was released he wrote a major article about his chain gang experience. It helped bring about the end of chain gangs in North Carolina.
After the Freedom Rides in the South, the Fellowship of Reconciliation sent Rustin to India and Africa to explore the nonviolent dimensions of the “Gandhian” independence movements. Gandhi had died months before he arrived, but Bayard deepened his understanding and commitment to nonviolent protest while there.
A personal connection for me is the fact that both Bayard and my father-in-law Bronson Clark worked for the peace organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) here in the Northeast.
Bayard Rustin, like my father-in-law and other dedicated believers in non-violence in the 1940’s, took their pacifism very seriously. They were convicted of violating the Selective Service Act and chose to go to a federal penitentiary rather than to a work camp which they felt only added to the overall war effort.
While in the same Kentucky federal prison, they were involved in desegregating the prison. They were able to get the door between segregated floors open. But a white Kentucky judge who was in prison for IRS reasons became so outraged that he grabbed a mop and struck Bayard and the white conscientious objectors until it was broken in three pieces and Bayard had a broken wrist. Still, not all was serious, on a lighter side, one of Bayard and my father-in-law, Bronson’s mutual friends wrote a musical about a prison utopia. It was based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s music. They helped organize and perform the musical; Bayard was by far the best singer according to my father-in-law.
A revealing story that my father-in-law told me about Rustin that shows his universal concern for civil and human rights was an event that happened prior to their being imprisoned. Rustin was on a train going across Texas. On the train were 7seven German prisoners of war. The military police had the prisoners eat early to avoid the other passengers. A woman traveling on the train was so insulted by this that she slapped one of the German prisoners. Bayard asked permission to speak to the Germans and was told by the MP that it was against regulations. Well, Bayard said, there are no regulations against singing. So he sang Shubert’s “German Serenade” and then “Stranger in a Distant Land.” When the German prisoners left, the one who had been slapped put his hand on Bayard’s shoulder and in broken English said “I thank you.”
During the 1940s and 1950s racism was open and blatant in our country. It permeated every level of government, both north and south. Both national and state governments were anxious to silence protestors, especially black Americans who tried to change the historical power base. And, of course McCarthyism held the country in a rightwing grip of unrealistic fear.
Rustin was extremely unusual in his open and direct actions. He was a pacifist during a largely popular war. He was a labor organizer during the regressive McCarthy days. He organized and protested institutional racism long before most people accepted or even recognized it as a problem.
So why haven’t most people heard more about Bayard Rustin? The reason why he became so invisible as a civil rights leader and among other groups was because he was a proud and exuberant gay man. The title of the film “Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin” captures the fact that Rustin was frequently pushed aside because of his courageous honesty about his homosexuality. Even during his adolescence, Bayard was at ease with his sexual orientation. Long before most others, Bayard saw his struggle against oppression as a homosexual as part and parcel of his Civil Rights struggle against oppression as a black man in America.
At one point he was arrested on a “morals charge.” Remember, back then, all homosexual behavior was a criminal offense. His arrest embarrassed his allies. His arrest was brutally exploited by his opponents, especially Strom Thurmond. Because of the negative publicity, Bayard was released from his staff position with FOR. It was the low point in his life.
But Bayard soon became executive secretary of the War Resisters League. Then he wrote the monograph, “Speak Truth to Power,” for the American Friends Service Committee. Nevertheless Society’s homophobia hampered Bayard’s struggle for dignity as a black American. The American society in general had problems with homosexuality, but many of the important religious civil rights leaders had similar problems associating with Bayard Rustin as a gay man.
Lillian Smith, a well-known southern novelist, wrote Strange Fruit, a best-selling interracial love story, and Killers of the Dream, an autobiographical critique of southern race relations. She knew Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr. She urged Rustin to reach out to advise King, an emerging leader in the civil rights movement. Rustin became a critical catalyst for the movement and for the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. as its leader.
Rustin was a brilliant and skilled organizer. He had worked as a labor organizer, an American Friends Service Committee activist, a Fellowship of Reconciliation organizer and the Executive Secretary of the War Resister’s League. Equally important, Rustin was a dedicated believer in and brave activist for nonviolent protest. He had learned his nonviolent principles from his Quaker upbringing and from his visit to India. He experienced the consequences of nonviolent protest through beatings and serving time in prison. He said, “When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human, his very act of protest confers dignity on him”
Some of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s fellow black preachers didn’t approve of a gay man playing such an important part in the civil rights leadership. But, to his credit, King consistently refused to distance himself from Rustin as his friend and advisor even though Rustin was openly gay. Bayard provided King with the greatly needed practical guidance on the use of Gandhian nonviolence.
It is important to note that prior to Rustin’s influence, Martin Luther King, Jr. was not dedicated to non-violence. He kept guns in his home and posted armed guards outside his house. It was Bayard Rustin who influenced King to adopt the nonviolent principles and methods that distinguished the Civil Rights movement. Starting in 1956, the forty-four year-old long time organizer, Rustin, became a senior advisor to the twenty-seven year-old still uncertain civil rights leader. Rustin’s background in theory, strategy and practical tactics of nonviolent protest helped give birth to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He organized the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, and the two National Youth Marches for Integrated Schools.
Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X debated on the radio concerning their different approaches to fighting racism. Rustin was willing to meet Malcolm and publicly debate him, something few others would attempt. One of the major points Rustin stressed about the process of integration was the importance of persistent movement even if slow and grinding. Rustin said, “I have spent twenty-five years of my life on the race question, and I have been (sent) twenty-two times to jail. Americans can say that until 1954, Negroes could not go to school with whites. Now they can. Negroes could not join trade unions, but now they can.” Rustin never claim things were perfect, only that the nonviolent process worked and would work better than using violence.
Rustin’s greatest triumph came a few years later. He was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. This was the march when King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. This was that hopeful time just before the Vietnam War totally distracted our country’s attention from the civil rights movement. Being at war dampened the fire of social reform. It sucked all the oxygen out of the larger Civil Rights movement.
Unfortunately, something that happened frequently was that Rustin was attacked from within Martin Luther King’s inner circle. Some in the civil rights movement warned King that Rustin, a former communist and an open homosexual, would give politicians additional reasons to oppose civil rights progress. J. Edgar Hoover was working overtime to find ways to embarrass King and the entire civil rights movement. King, exasperated by all this, complained to one advisor, “You’re doing the same thing to Bayard that Hoover did to us.” Rustin remained King’s advisor.
Through it all, Rustin continued to advocate for integration and nonviolence. Even after King’s assassination, Rustin was a courageous voice against violence. He believed that a nonviolent civil rights movement was the way for all Americans to live up to our best principles. Rustin’s commitment to nonviolence and coalition building never wavered. He could have easily given in to hatred and anger toward the white establishment. It frequently attacked and imprisoned him. But, he continued to struggle and reached out his hand in love. He could have given up on his black allies when they tried to push him out of the leadership of the civil rights movement because he was gay. But Rustin continued to struggle and reached out his hand in love. He stood firm on the religious principles taught to him by his mother, the equality of all human beings before God, the vital need for nonviolence, and the importance of dealing with everyone with love and respect.
Bayard’s dream was of a fully integrated future, where black and white, gay and straight, female and male, poor and rich could all live, love and work together for a better America and a better world. After the passage of the civil-rights legislation of 1964–65, Rustin worked on the economic problems of working-class and unemployed African Americans. He felt that the civil-rights movement had left its period of “protest” and had entered an era of “politics”, in which the Black community had to ally with the labor movement.
Today, here in America, we continue to struggle for the dream toward which Bayard Ruskin dedicated his life. His life was and continues to be a profound inspiration. His concerns: peace, human rights, justice, especially economic justice and the dignity of all people are as crucial today as they were during his lifetime.
Clearly Bayard Rustin was before his time in many ways. And he never gave up the struggle for civil rights, workers rights and basic human rights. He kept on keeping on. He died in 1987 while on a humanitarian mission in Haiti.
May we hold on to Bayard Rustin’s dream, a dream of seeing full legal and human rights granted to all African-Americans, to all lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual Americans, to women as well as to men, to the poor as well as to the well off and to all other Americans and all citizens of the world. And let us not lose sight of the inspiring fact that though Bayard Rustin didn’t win that many individual battles, nevertheless the inspirational life he lived did change the course of our society for the better.
CLOSING WORDS:
Pope Francis sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic Church on Thursday with his remarks that the church had grown “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he had chosen not to talk about those issues despite recriminations from critics.
He criticized the church for putting dogma before love, and for prioritizing moral doctrines over serving the poor and marginalized. He articulated his vision of an inclusive church, a “home for all” …
Francis told an interviewer: “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”
