Brother Outsider

February has become one short month where we pay slightly more attention to the differences we used to have and the injustices previously mainstream. Unfortunately even the slight information people learn about black civil rights is too shallow to give the movement historical justice. Often we're given some picture of black preachers singing hallelujah, and this leaves out the very (if not more) important black socialists and secularists who really made the movement. Among these are Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.

Asa Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida, 1889. From his father, Randolph learned that color was less important than a person's character and conduct. From his mother, he learned the importance of education and of defending oneself physically against those who would seek to hurt one or one's family, if necessary. Randolph remembered vividly the night his mother sat in the front room of their house with a loaded shotgun across her lap, while his father tucked a pistol under his coat and went off to prevent a mob from lynching a man at the local county jail.

After graduating high school, Randolph read W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, which helped to ferment his desire for social equality. Randolph was turned off by moderate reforms promoted by W.E.B. Du Bois, and with increasing segregation and discrimination against blacks joined the American Socialist party in 1910.

He was fairly active in the arts, playing roles such as Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo after founding the Shakespearean society in Harlem. His wife earned enough money to support them both.

Bayard Rustin is someone who inspires me whenever I think of him. One of the lesser known civil rights activists during the 60s, he was the man to organize the famous march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I had a dream" speech. Much of Bayard's life is unknown, and is as much inspiring as it is tragic. Spending his whole life as an activist for black and later gay rights, his work is overshadowed if not consciously pushed to the margins even by those closest to him.

He was born in West Chester Pennsylvania on March 17, 1912. He was raised by his grandparents, Julia and Janifer Rustin. Bayard started campaigning against Jim Crow laws in his youth, influenced by NAACP leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson being frequent guests in his home (Julia was a member of the NAACP).

A young Bayard

After going to Wilberforce University, Bayard moved to Harlem to study at City College of New York. Around 1936 he became a member of the Quakers, joined the Young Communist League, and became involved in the famous Scottsboro Boys case. Bayard would have an interest in singing throughout his life. After WW2, he would record a 10-inch LP for the Fellowship Records label. He sang spirituals and Elizabethan songs accompanied on the harpsichord by Margaret Davison.

Meanwhile in New York, Randolph had been at odds with the Pullman company. After being elected president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph managed to enlist 51% of the Pullman workforce in the union. The company responded with firings and violence. Randolph planned to call a strike, but after hearing Pullman had thousands of replacement workers, called it off, and interest and enrollment in the union faded. Luck turned around in 1932 with FDR's Railway Labor Act, giving porters federal rights and a renewed enthusiasm for the union. Membership climbed, and the Pullman company agreed to a contract which resulted in 2,000,000 dollars in pay increase, overtime and a shorter work week.

With Stalin ordering the CPUSA to abandon their focus on civil rights and turn to pushing the United States to join World War 2, Bayard felt disillusioned and turned to the American socialist party. There he would find A. Philip Randolph, A.J. Muste, and Norman Thomas as mentors.

1941, First planned march

One of the great strides accelerating the civil rights movements was made in 1941. That year Bayard, Randolph and Muste started organizing a march on Washington to end racial discrimination in the armed forces. Randolph met with Roosevelt and told him that blacks would march on the capital unless racial segregation in the armed forces would end. The president issued Executive Order 8802 (Fair Employment Act - ), which banned discrimination in defense industries an federal agencies. (This would be amended several times and expanded in 1948, 1964 (Civil Rights Act), and 1965). Though this didn't include the armed forces, it was a great step forward and the three canceled the march to keep their promise.

Bayard would next travel to California to help protect the property of Japanese citizens who had been imprisoned in internment camps, leading Muste to appoint him as secretary for student and general affairs of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Randolph in 1942

In 1942 Bayard boarded a bus in Louisville and sat in the second row. Numerous drivers asked him to move to the back, but Bayard refused. He was arrested 13 miles north of Nashville, beaten by police and taken to the police station. The next day he was released without charges. Unfortunately his time free from police was cut short, as he was imprisoned from 1944 to 1946 for violating the selective service act. Even while in jail, Bayard held a protest against segregation of cafeterias in prisons. One of his school friends later said: "Some of us were ready to give up the fight and accept the status quo, but he never would. He had a strong inner spirit."

The Journey of Reconciliation began in 1947. It was organized to test the newly banned racial discrimination in interstate travel after the ruling of Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia. Many were arrested under Jim Crow laws, including Bayard who ended up serving 22 days in a chain gang in North Carolina.

That same year, Randolph, along with colleague Grant Reynolds, renewed efforts to end discrimination in the armed services, forming the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, later renamed the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience. In 1948 Truman was facing potential defeat. His peacetime draft bill was heavily resisted by black people from the urging of Randolph. So on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman abolished racial segregation in the armed forces through Executive Order 9981.

In 1953, Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California for homosexual activity. Originally charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pleaded guilty to a single, lesser charge of "sex perversion" (as consensual sodomy was officially referred to in California then) and served 60 days in jail. This was the first time that his homosexuality had come to public attention. He had been and remained candid about his sexuality, although homosexuality was still criminalized throughout the United States.

Bayard believed deeply in pacifism and supported Ghandi-like protest. He took leave from the War Resisters League in 1956 to advise Martin Luther King Jr. on Gandhian non-violent tactics. King was organizing the public transportation boycott in Montgomery, Alabama known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. According to Rustin, "I think it's fair to say that Dr. King's view of non-violent tactics was almost non-existent when the boycott began. In other words, Dr. King was permitting himself and his children and his home to be protected by guns." Rustin managed to convince King to abandon the armed protection, including a personal handgun.

Bayard and MLK in 1956

Adam Clayton Powell said in a speech later the next year that the civil rights movement was "in danger of being captured by subversives and insidious influences". Powell tells MLK that unless he dismisses Rustin, Powell will reveal that MLK and Rustin having a sexual affair. Of course Rustin expects King to call his bluff, but in saddening irony, MLK accepts his resignation. Bayard breaks contact with King for years.

A fairly fragmented debate between Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X
or http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/5110008AA0605_s01.do (low quality but longer version)

With June of 1963 began the organization of the march on Washington. Organizers of the march turned to Rustin for help. Both Randolph and MLK thought there was no one better than Rustin to mobilize and lead the movement. But NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins didn't want Rustin to be the leader because he thought his homosexuality would embarrass the movement. A Philip Randolph was instead made leader, and made Rustin his deputy to put together the march on Washington. Rustin was given less than 2 months to organize the largest peaceful demonstration in US history. In days he'd raised 15 thousand dollars, drafted a mission statement and designed a security plan, and enlisted hundreds of volunteers to prepare bag lunches for those who had not brought their own.

1963 March on Washington

Reading demands of the march on Washington

Despite King's support, Roy Wilkins did not want Rustin to receive any public credit for his role in planning the march. Nevertheless, he did become well known in a way. On September 6, 1963 Rustin and Randolph appeared on the cover of Life magazine as "the leaders" of the March. After the March on Washington, Rustin organized the New York City School Boycott. When Rustin was invited to speak at the University of Virginia in 1964, school administrators tried to ban him, out of fear that he would organize another school boycott there.

Interesting interview from 1964
http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/interview/bayard-rustin

1965

Randolph once wrote: "Our aim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of our times,and above the cheap peanut politics of the old reactionary negro leaders. Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight to us; principle has. Loyalty is meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is."

A Philip Randolph passed away of unknown causes on may 16 1979.

During Bayard's later years, he worked for Freedom House, and also testified for the New York State's Gay Rights Bill.

In 1986 he said:
Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new "niggers" are gays... It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change... The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people

He was, and is to this day, usually overshadowed by other leaders like Martin Luther King and even Malcom X but was an integral part of the movement. He passed away August 24, 1987, of a perforated appendix.

"The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one."

Other Info:

Great, short biovideo of Bayard

Biopic about Rustin

More in depth on the march and Rustin's role

Biography of Bayard Rustin

Rustin's essay on politics and race

Short video of A Philip Randolph

After mentioning that Bayard's bus demonstration of 1942, you might be curious to know if there were any others before Rosa Parks' of 1955. Sure enough, many brave women made their stand, all without the fame and publicity.

The name Irene Morgan is perhaps not well known, but she made a courageous stand for what was right. Sometime in 1944 she boarded a bus going from Virginia to Maryland. At the time interstate travel was desegregated, but the driver stopped the bus in Middlesex County and called for the sheriff. When he tried to arrest Morgan, she tore up the arrest warrant, kicked the sheriff in the groin, and fought with the deputy who tried to pull her off the bus. Through to 1946 she used all the appeals she could, until taking the case to the supreme court. William H. Hastie and Thurgood Marshall argued her case, not on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment, but, cleverly, based on the commerce clause of the constitution. Her case would inspire the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation which later inspired the Freedom rides of 1961.

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I hope this serves as a primer for further interest and thanks for reading!

Brother Outsider

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