I hope this helps. Rustin. He had predicted a crowd of 100,000 marchers, and
with only four and a half hours to go before the meet-up, he had his
doubts.
A. Phillip Randolph and Rustin had come
very close to delivering on their plans for a first march as a way to
pressure President Franklin Roosevelt into opening defense-industry
hiring to blacks. Roosevelt was so alarmed by the specter of violence
and the negative publicity during the “war against fascism” that a deal
was reached before the march could even begin. Now, with the 1963 march
about to begin, Rustin was forced to wonder, could they really pull this
off? And would its impact help to achieve the goals of the movement? In
a matter of hours, he would have his answers.
His Early Struggles. Bayard Taylor Rustin was born in West Chester, Pa., March 17, 1912.
He had no relationship with his father, and his 16-year-old mother,
Florence, was so young he thought she was his sister. From his
grandparents, Janifer and Julia Rustin, he took his Quaker “values,”
which, in his words, “were based on the concept of a single human family
and the belief that all members of that family are equal,” according to
Jervis Anderson in Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen.
As a teenager, Rustin wrote poems, played left tackle on the high
school football team and, according to lore, staged an impromptu sit-in
at a restaurant that would serve his white teammates but not him. When
Rustin told his grandmother he preferred the company of young men to
girls, she simply said, “I suppose that’s what you need to do.”
In 1937, Rustin moved to New York City after bouncing between
Wilberforce University and Cheney State Teachers College. Enrolling at
City College, he devoted himself to singing, performing with the Josh
White Quartet and in the musical John Henry with Paul Robeson. He also
joined the Young Communist League. Though he soon quit the party after
it ordered him to cease protesting racial segregation in the U.S. armed
forces, he was already on the radar of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Disappointed when the 1941 March on Washington was called off, Rustin joined the pacifist Rev. A.J. Muste’s Fellowship
of Reconciliation, and when FOR members in Chicago launched the
Congress of Racial Equality in 1942, Rustin traveled around the country
speaking out. Two years later, he was arrested for failing to appear
before his draft board and refusing alternative service as a
conscientious objector. Sentenced to three years, he ended up serving 26
months, angering authorities with his desegregation protests and open
homosexuality to the point they transferred him to a higher-security
prison.
Once released, Rustin embarked on CORE’s 1947 Journey of
Reconciliation, an early version of the Freedom Rides, to test the
Supreme Court’s ruling in Morgan v. Virginia (1946)
that any state forcing segregation on buses crossing state lines would
be in violation of the Commerce Clause. It was a noble attempt, but
Rustin soon found himself on a chain gang in North Carolina.
As part of his deepening commitment to nonviolent protest, Rustin
traveled to India in 1948 to attend a world pacifist conference. Mahatma
Gandhi had been assassinated earlier that year, but his teachings
touched Rustin in profound ways. “We need in every community a group of
angelic troublemakers,” he wrote after returning to the States. “The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn”
Before then, however, was shame. In January 1953, Rustin, after
delivering a speech in Pasadena, Calif., was arrested on “lewd conduct”
and “vagrancy” charges, allegedly for a sexual act involving two white
men in an automobile. With the FBI’s file on Rustin expanding, FOR
demanded his resignation. That left Rustin to conclude, “I know now that
for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this
world longer,” according to Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings
of Bayard Rustin, edited by Devon Carbado and Donald Weise.
In 1956, on the advice of labor leader and activist A. Philip
Randolph, Rustin traveled to Alabama to lend support to Dr. King, and
the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While remaining out of the spotlight, Rustin
played a critical role in introducing King to Gandhi’s teachings while
writing publicity materials and organizing carpools. After helping King
organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1956-1957,
Rustin demonstrated against the French government’s nuclear test program
in North Africa. As he once said, so simply and clear, “I want no human
being to die” (as quoted in the documentary film, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin).
Rustin experienced one of the lowest points in his career in 1960,
and the author of this crisis wasn’t J. Edgar Hoover; it was another
black leader. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, angry that
Rustin and King were planning a march outside the Democratic National
Convention in Los Angeles, warned King
