Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen. - book reviews

When civil rights leader Bayard Rustin dared to question affirmative action, the black establishment erased him from history

One decade after his death, Bayard Rustin, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement, is all but forgotten. A long-time aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Rustin helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s, suggested to King the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was the principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington showcasing King's "I Have A Dream" speech. In a book ranking the 100 most influential African Americans, past and present, Rustin weighs in above many of today's better known figures, including Andrew Young, Shirley Chisholm, Toni Morrison, Kenneth B. Clark, Louis Farrakhan, Maya Angelou, Marian Wright Edelman, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, and Rosa Parks.

Why is Rustin, one of the great strategists and intellectuals of the civil rights movement, so obscure a figure among the broader public today? The unpleasant answer is that in the last 20 years of his life, Rustin became a thorn in the side of the civil rights establishment, questioning Black Studies and the adherence to preferential affirmative action. Rustin served as a haunting reminder, in the years following King's 1968 assassination, of what the old universalist civil rights movement had been, and what the contemporary movement's skirmish on behalf of narrow interests had become. For serving in that role, Rustin paid an awful price. Before his death in 1987, Rustin's sometime rival, James Farmer, would declare, "Bayard has no credibility in the black community," and since then Rustin has been largely written out of the history of the civil rights movement.

Jervis Anderson, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, has helped to set the record straight, at least in part. Having devoted eight years to producing Rustin's biography, Anderson provides a vivid, if surprisingly incomplete, account of Rustin's life. The author is at his best describing Rustin's early years. Born in 1912 to a teenage mother in West Chester, Pa., Rustin was reared by his grandparents. His grandmother was a Quaker and raised young Bayard with an abiding social conscience and a commitment to nonviolence and pacifism. Years later, Rustin would say, "My activism did not spring from being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing [which emphasized] the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal"

Like many who came of age in the 1930s, Rustin joined the Youth Communist League while a student at City College of New York. He was particularly attracted to the Communists' apparent dedication to racial justice. But when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the Communists abandoned their civil rights agenda to ally with the U.S. against Germany. Rustin was bitterly disappointed and the Communist Party earned itself a lifelong opponent.

During World War II, Rustin could have been excused from the military given his Quaker beliefs. But he thought secular conscientious objectors should receive a similar exemption, and served a jail sentence in protest of the policy. Having rejected the Communists, Rustin began his professional career with the field staff of the Christian pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, where he studied Gandhi, and provided aid to the fledgling civil rights movement, emphasizing nonviolent resistance to segregation. In 1941, he helped A. Philip Randolph organize what would have been the first March on Washington. (The march was called off when Franklin Roosevelt agreed to ban racial discrimination in defense industries.) Organizing local protests to segregation, Rustin was beaten and jailed repeatedly. But even while incarcerated, he protested racially-segregated prison facilities.

In 1953, Rustin's association with the Fellowship of Reconciliation was abruptly terminated after he was found guilty of engaging in sexual acts with two young men in a parked car outside his hotel in California. It was not the first or last time that Rustin's homosexuality would set back his career. A fellow peace activist said that at the time of his conviction, Rustin was being groomed "to become an American Gandhi," but all that was "destroyed" by the incident in California. Rustin moved on to the more secular pacifist War Resisters League, where he would remain active in nonviolent civil rights protest, aiding King first with the Montgomery bus boycott, and then with the 1963 March on Washington. The March's success, which is today widely celebrated, was anything but inevitable. The effort faced pressure to oust Rustin when Strom Thurmond attacked him as a Communist, draft dodger, and homosexual. Rustin had just seven weeks to organize the March, and in the early morning of the event, he feared the worst as just 200 marchers had assembled by 6:30 a.m. But then, according to The New York Times, a "great crush of humanity spilled over into Constitution Avenue" and by the afternoon more than 250,000 people had congregated, one-fourth of them white. Rustin's colleague Charles Bloomstein noted the significance of Rustin's feat: