Bayard Rustin on Non-Violence

Rustin was an activist whose work revolved around his intersectional identities. He was a Black man who was gay. He also was raised as a Quaker. His religious convictions led him to become a pacifist. Pacifism is the belief that any violence, including war, is unjustifiable under any circumstances. While Rustin was imprisoned for refusing to participate in World War II, he expressed his thinking about non-violence in a letter to the federal prison warden.

Dear Sir: I would like to submit to you my thinking on the situation we discussed yesterday.

  1. Racial segregation exists in this federal correctional institution...
  2. There are four ways in which one can deal with an injustice:
    1. One can accept it without protest
    2. One can seek to avoid it
    3. One can resist the injustice nonviolently
    4. One can resist by violence
    1. To use violence is to increase injustice
    2. To accept it is to perpetuate it
    3. To avoid it is impossible
    4. To resist by intelligent means and with an attitude of mutual responsibility and respect (education by nonviolence) is, according to the prophets and to history, much the better choice, since attitudes simply cannot be challenged by avoidance, by complete or continuous acceptance, or by stupidity and violence.
  4. Nonviolent resistance does not mean any one kind of action but a variety of methods in which ends and means are consistent. Thus nonviolent resistance may first and most effectively be education, or when such an approach fails, direct action.
  5. The chief aim of such methods of dealing with social change is to so behave that the attitude of those who believe in a system which creates injustice shall be challenged, and over a period change their feeling, which in turn affects their ideas and their outward behavior. This is often a slow process and requires deft hands and a wide and considerate spirit.

Citation: Letter from Rustin to R. P. Hagerman, warden of Ashland Federal Correctional Institution, March 30, 1944, Courtesy of the Estate of Bayard Rustin.

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