This essay was written by historian Daniel Hurewitz and describes the important contributions of Bayard Rustin to the civil rights movement.
While you read, consider:
How did Bayard Rustin come to embrace non-violence as a tactic?
How did Rustin act upon his pacifist convictions?
How did Rustin influence Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement?
In New York, Rustin made two important friendships. One was with socialist leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the sleeping-car porters union and a visionary who understood the potential power of organized African American protest. Randolph also introduced Rustin to A. J. Muste, who had recently taken control of a pacifist antiwar group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Muste hired Rustin to be a youth organizer, and he became Muste’s “hands and feet and eyes,” traveling the country, recruiting for a movement to resist the war. Drawing on his singing voice and eloquence, Rustin was an inspiring orator. Rustin and James Farmer, another FOR activist, also convinced Muste to expand FOR’s mission and establish a part of the group to focus on racial discrimination: this became the organization CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. As the work began in earnest, however, Rustin was convicted as a draft evader and sent for more than two years to federal prison, from the spring of 1944 to the summer of 1946. Following his release, he again began organizing with CORE and FOR, continuing the idea of challenging racism through nonviolence in the South. In the spring of 1947, they launched a series of “freedom rides” across the south, to draw attention to segregated interstate travel. For his efforts, Rustin served 30 days on a chain gang. . . . 1956. . . launch[ed] the second great arc of his life in the civil rights movement. A bus boycott had begun in Montgomery, Alabama and a young reverend had been drafted to lead it. The only problem, Randolph told Rustin, this young promising leader had no experience organizing people, let alone strategically confronting the deep racism that surrounded them. Randolph dispatched Rustin to Montgomery, where Rustin began to mentor what became the next generation of leaders–specifically Martin Luther King, Jr. Mentor, though, understates the role Rustin played in helping King build the civil rights movement. When Rustin arrived in Montgomery, white anger was on the rise and so was King’s sense of threat and danger. King was already storing guns at home. Instead, Rustin proffered a strategy and method that King steadily absorbed, and he explained the possibilities of strategic civil disobedience in lengthy nightly discussions. He helped King see how protestors’ refusal to meet violence with violence, and their willingness to be arrested, turned them from powerless victims to powerful revealers of an unjust system. In fact, when city commissioners indicted the boycott leaders, including King, Rustin convinced them to turn themselves in, voluntarily, before being arrested: suddenly, a moment of seeming weakness became a moment of defiance and liberation for the boycott.
Citation: Daniel Hurewitz, “Bayard Rustin: MLK’s Secret Lieutenant and Mentor,”Hidden Voices: LGBTQ+ Stories in United States History (New York: New York City Department of Education, 2021).