Review of Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen,
A Biography. Harper Collins. From Virginia Quarterly Review,
Winter 1998, 185-190.
Posted May 27, 2008
Jervis Anderson’s biography of Bayard Rustin reveals that the restricted
opportunities for gays did not always result in constricted lives.
Individuals like Rustin overcame those barriers to lead productive
lives while contributing to the enhancement of the entire nation. Rustin
is best known as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, at which
a quarter of a million assembled, black and white, male and female, and
heard Rev. Martin Luther King enunciate his “dream” of a time when his
children would be judged by their character and not by the color of
their skin. That March had major political consequences—pressuring
Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Rustin excelled in high
school at track, academics, public speaking, and music. He received a
scholarship to a black religious college and sang (well enough to be a
professional) in a quartette to help raise funds for the school. He was
expelled his second year, however. Anderson reports the rumored reason
for his dismissal was that Rustin had fallen in love with the son of the
college’s president. Shortly thereafter, Rustin ended his studies at
Cheney State Teachers College, again because of “something naughty.”
Bayard’s family had ties both to the African Methodist Episcopal and the
Quaker churches. In the 1930’s, with war looming in Europe, Rustin
veered toward his Quaker pacifism. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the
American Communist Party strongly opposed American involvement in the
war, especially on the side of the imperialist powers, Britain, France,
Belgium, and the Netherlands. Rustin was then a member of the Young
Communist League and enrolled at New York’s CCNY, a center of
intellectual political debate. For the YCL Rustin was asked to lead a
campaign against segregation in the U.S. armed services, then vastly
expanding because of the newly instituted draft. He was preparing this
campaign when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Immediately, the
American Communists reversed themselves, and urged American
participation in the war against fascism. Rustin was ordered to halt
his campaign against the U.S. services. Rustin then quit the Communist
In 1941 Rustin made contact with A. Philip Randolph, head of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Workers, the only black union in the AFL.
Randolph, a long-time black activist, had also felt betrayed by
Communist tactics of reversal when he headed the National Negro Congress
Rustin’s pacifism now led him to the Fellowship of Reconciliation [FOR],
a small, slightly religious pacifist group headed by Rev. A. J. Muste.
Also in FOR was the youthful James Farmer, who induced FOR to subsidize
a new, pacifist organization to combat racism, the Congress of Racial
Equality [CORE]. Farmer and Rustin were the most prominent black
spokesmen for pacifism in FOR, and both sought to create new,
non-violent methods to overturn racist practices.
In 1943 Rustin chose to abandon his status as a religious conscientious
objector; yet, he refused to be drafted. Consequently, in 1944 he was
sentenced to three years in prison. Released in June 1946, Rustin
resumed work for FOR. In 1947, following a Supreme Court decision
invalidating segregation in interstate travel, FOR organized the first
“freedom ride,” the Journey of Reconciliation of 1947. Though the
NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall discouraged the venture, Rustin was among the
integrated teams on the Greyhound and Trailways buses, and among those
arrested for integrating facilities. When the North Carolina NAACP
refused to appeal their cases, Rustin had to spend 30 days on a chain
gang for that crime.
Rustin, a skillful orator and a stirring singer, was a powerful
spokesman for FOR, and travelled to Europe, Africa, and India to promote
the cause. In India, the principles of Gandhi’s non-violent resistance
had been implemented to liberate the nation from British rule, and Rustin met prominent figures there. He also met blacks who were about
to assume leadership of their new nations during the twilight of
imperialism and the dawn of independence. Indeed, Rustin was offered
and accepted a post with Nigeria’s Nnandi Azidkiwe as soon as he
completed one more speaking tour in the U.S. for FOR.
But during that tour, in January 1953, Rustin was arrested in Pasadena,
California on a “morals charge.” He had been caught by police in a
parked car having sex with two men. Rustin now had to endure a prison
sentence, not for the cause of peace, or the cause of ending racism, but
for what was then a shameful crime. When released, FOR essentially
fired him and gave him almost no severance pay after eight years’
employment. Other job offers evaporated. Rustin wondered if Muste now
wanted him to become a shoeshine man. Rustin endured low-status jobs,
humiliation, unemployment, and therapy sessions—not an easy “sentence”
for a proud man in his 40’s who had been groomed to become an American
Gandhi. Happily, there was another small, but less religious, pacifist
organization, the War Resisters League, and after some months, it hired
Rustin. But for Rustin, those were terribly long months.
Then in December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, the bus boycott began, and
WRL sought to keep it on track as a nonviolent protest. With prodding
from Lillian Smith and FOR, in February 1956 Rustin was dispatched to
aid Rev. King advising him on matters of symbol and substance. For
example, segregationists had bombed King’s home. When Bayard arrived,
he noticed King had a rifle in the living room, and he urged King to
remove it. If his followers were to remain non-violent in the face of
hatred and provocation, so must King. Indeed, King could not afford to
have a weapon, for his enemies would contend that he started the
violence. Acceding to Rustin’s reasoning, King removed the rifle.
Rustin also urged King to create an organization to advance other such
peaceful protest campaigns, and the Southern Christian Leadership
Council was formed. However, Rustin was deemed suspect by various SCLC
ministers—men who disdained a former Communist recently arrested on a
morals violation. But King found Rustin’s advice profound and essential,
and Rustin headed the Harlem office of the SCLC. In May 1957 Rustin
organized the SCLC’s Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington in which 30,000
partook, and he also organized other marchers and boycotts in the late
In 1960 Rustin was planning SCLC protests for both the Democratic and
Republican conventions of 1960, but Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton
Powell objected to the protests aimed at the Democrats. Powell
threatened King privately, saying he would start a rumor that Rustin and
King were lovers if Rustin were not fired. For the good of the
movement, King asked Rustin to resign. Because of the threatened gay
charge, Rustin was effectively exiled from the Civil Rights Movement at
a time when non-violent direct action was being most widely applied
throughout the land.
Rustin had demonstrated too many talents to be crushed by Powell’s
blackmail. The WRL assigned him to new projects with anti-nuclear
marches in Britain and Africa, where he remained a prominent spokesman
of peaceful protest. In 1963, when Randolph began to propose his old
dream of a March on Washington, he sought Rustin to coordinate it. This
time, the other civil rights leaders agreed, and Rustin did coordinate
that massive project. Anderson is at his best in the chapter on the
march. Having seen so many film clips of the event, one is tempted to
skip the chapter, but the author recreates its electricity. He
describes the in-fighting, the disputed speech of SNCC leader John
Lewis, the criticism of Rustin’s past; as well as the carping from
outside, by Southern segregationists and Malcolm X. But Rustin arranged
to have a quarter of a million come to Washington and leave on the same
day in a demonstration of determination, topped by the rhetoric of King.
And despite the fears and warnings, the demonstration was peaceful.
Rustin then renewed his contacts with King and helped plan the itinerary
and accompanied the SCLC leader on his trip to Europe to accept the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Rustin was the only major civil rights leader without an organization,
and one was created for him. The A. Philip Randolph Institute began in
the spring of 1965, with Rustin as its director. The institute was
funded by organized labor, and for a change, Rustin received a
But in the mid-60’s new issues rose that were to divide the civil rights
movement, and alienate Rustin from both it and the peace movement.
Black Power, a slogan used by Stokely Carmichael during a march in
Mississippi, was opposed by King, Rustin, and the more established civil
rights leaders. Rustin for decades had urged an alliance of labor,
peace, civil rights, and religious groups to push a liberal agenda. But
younger activists were becoming disillusioned with the liberal
leadership. At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Rustin, like most
liberals, advised the Mississippi Freedom Democrats to accept a
compromise offered by President Johnson, seating two of their
delegation, while retaining most of the all-white segregationist,
official Mississippi group. The militants viewed this “compromise” as
Similarly, on the ever-increasing numbers of Americans being sent to
Vietnam, the peace movement became ever more strident in its demands
that America pull out. Rustin, long-time spokesman for pacifism, argued
that a pull-out would result in a Communist victory. He, Vice President
Humphrey, and other liberals, demanded peace talks instead. To the
growing, militant peace movement, Rustin’s defense of the Democrats
seemed like a sell-out and a betrayal of peace.
In the late 1960’s Black Power advocates demanded, and often got
universities to establish Black Studies Departments. Rustin denounced
these fields as symbolic, separatist, and an attempt to politicize
academia. He warned that blacks who majored in such programs were
choosing the wrong majors: they should be competing in math, science,
business, and other traditional fields instead.
Under President Nixon a quota system of hiring and promotion, called
affirmative action, was instituted and expanded. Rustin openly
denounced any such system based on ratios or proportional hiring by
The radical of the 1940’s, 1950’s, and early 1960’s, began to look ever
more conservative after 1965. To some, the reason was clear—he had sold
out. But ever since 1941 Rustin had been suspicious of communism.
Though he may have worked with some Communists in King’s entourage,
like Jack O’Dell and King’s influential advisor (and former and possible
secret Communist) Stanley Levison, Rustin, like Randolph, had been
burned by the party. Thus, they were much more likely to criticize the
American anti-war movement of the 60’s whose pull-out position they
believed would result in a Communist Vietnam. Rustin also criticized
King’s address at the Riverside Church of 1967 at which King blamed the
continuance of the war on American policy.
Similarly, Rustin had been involved in integrated groups since the
1940’s. His friends and milieu were not examples of black (or white)
power, but of integration. And he believed that integration, through
non-violent means, would heal the nation. He appealed to blacks and
whites to join civil rights protests, to join the March on Washington,
to pass civil rights legislation. So how could he endorse quotas and
affirmative action if it would discriminate against whites?
Later he did revise his antagonism to Black Studies, seeing it as a
legitimate field of study. But he also noted there were charlatans in
Rustin also split from the radicals on Middle-Eastern issues. Whereas
they generally supported the oppressed, dark-skinned Palestinians, he
supported Israel, the only democracy in the area, founded as a haven for
the Jewish victims of anti-Semitism.
Rustin continued to win various awards in the 1970’s, but he was no
longer a radical. Like his associates among the anti-Communist social
democrats, Rustin was more akin to those who would be labeled
neo-conservatives. By the 1970’s his gayness was no longer an issue.
In 1972 he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, an antique
cane that sheathed a sword. But in an era of rising crime, Anderson
does not report that Rustin was mugged.
After a ruptured appendix was misdiagnosed and mistreated, Rustin died
Anderson’s book is a good read, but there are some questionable
judgments. He states that Wilson Record’s Cold-War study, The Negro
and the Communist Party, is the definitive work on blacks and
Communists! Indeed, one of the gaps in this biography concerns when
Rustin joined the YCL, and who were his associates at the time. The
possibility that Stan Levison was one is surely intriguing. While
Anderson interviewed many social democrats, he seems to have ignored
those who might have been Communists when Rustin was a member.
A fuller discussion of Rustin’s critique of Black Studies and quota
hiring, though politically incorrect, may have given the reader more
appreciation of Rustin’s intellect and dissent. Moreover, there were
charges that Max Schachtman and the international wing of the AFL-CIO
had worked closely with the CIA since the 1950’s. As Rustin grew closer
to Schachtman and the AFL-CIO, and as Rustin remained an influential
spokesman on foreign affairs while he roved the world, one should have
asked about possible links between Rustin and the CIA. Anderson avoids
the topic. He notes in a few sentences that Rustin had a steady
companion for a decade, William Naegle, but says nothing more about the
relationship or even who Naegle was.
wrongly states that a FOR-launched group, the Americans for South
African Resistance, was “the first organized effort in the United States
on behalf of any African freedom movement.” Had he not heard of Paul
Robeson’s Council of African Affairs? Or even the NAACP? Or the many
groups that organized to aid Ethiopia when Mussolini’s armies invaded in
Despite my quibbles, Anderson has written a fine biography of the
courageous man, Bayard Rustin.