A Complex Man’s Complex Legacy: What the Movie Rustin Leaves Out
by John Whitehead
The great civil rights activist and thinker Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) has received renewed attention thanks to the recently released movie Rustin. The movie is an engrossing look at Rustin’s role as an advisor to Martin Luther King and the organizer of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Rustin organized one of the most successful peaceful mass demonstrations in US history despite immense logistical challenges, political obstacles, and the hostility he faced, inside and outside the civil rights movement, as an openly gay man.
The revived attention to Rustin is an occasion to remember his career in all its complexity. Although the March for Jobs and Freedom was probably Rustin’s greatest achievement, his work both before and after 1963 is worth remembering. Rustin’s career contains much both to inspire and to sadden Consistent Life Ethic activists.
Rustin Movie
The Years before the March: An Advocate for Peace and Justice
Rustin’s coordination of the 1963 March was the culmination of decades of peace activism, as the movie mentions but largely does not portray. In fact, the Rustin movie implies that the peace movement was some dreary backwater community unworthy of its hero’s abilities. The reality was dramatically different.
Raised a Quaker in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Rustin started working in the 1940s for the peace organization the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Rustin lectured and conducted workshops for the FOR at schools and churches around the United States. During World War II, he refused to cooperate with US conscription law, writing that “War is wrong. Conscription is a concomitant of modern war…Its design and purpose is to set men apart—German against American, American against Japanese.” (Rustin, “Letter to the Draft Board,” in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, p. 12) He subsequently served time in federal prison.
Rustin combined peace activism with work for racial equality. In prison, he engaged in civil disobedience to integrate the prison cafeteria and chapel. In 1942, he traveled in the south on an interstate bus, sitting in the “whites” section. This defiance of segregation earned him beating and arrest from police officers, yet his composure apparently so rattled his captors that, as Rustin recounted the incident, an exasperated police captain declared “you’re supposed to be scared when you come in here!” (Rustin, “Nonviolence vs. Jim Crow,” in Time on Two Crosses, pp. 2-5)
Along with other activists, Rustin repeated his defiance of segregated transportation in 1947 as part of the “Freedom Ride” organized by the FOR and the affiliated Congress on Racial Equality. The interracial group rode a bus through southern US states, being arrested six times and being attacked once.
Working for the FOR and later the War Resisters League, Rustin agitated for peace in the 1940s and 1950s, as the Cold War and nuclear arms race escalated. Determined to challenge US development of the hydrogen bomb, Rustin wrote in 1950 that “We must find some way to let people know that now we are prepared to go to jail or even to give up all—to get shot down if necessary—but to cry out.” (Vincent Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement, p. 42)
Rustin in Life Magazine
He contemplated civil disobedience at Los Alamos to “obstruct the coming in of materials” and eventually organized an eight-day “Fast for Peace” in Washington, DC, to protest nuclear weapons. The fast included a Good Friday vigil, led by Rustin, in front of the Pentagon and inspired similar actions across the United States and in other countries.
Rustin’s peace activism took him to India, Ghana, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. He also visited Montgomery, Alabama, during the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and thus became a key advisor to King.
Speaking at a 1958 anti-nuclear march in Britain, Rustin linked the peace and civil rights struggles, saying,
There must be unilateral [disarmament] action by a single nation, come what may. There must be no strings attached. We must be prepared to absorb the danger. We must use our bodies in direct action, non-cooperation, whatever is required to bring our government to its senses. In the United States, the black people of Montgomery said, “We will not cooperate with discrimination.” And the action of those people achieved tremendous results. They are now riding the buses with dignity, because they were prepared to make a sacrifice of walking for their rights. (Intondi, p. 50)
The following year, Rustin took part in a campaign to protest French nuclear testing in Africa that brought together the peace and anti-colonial struggles.
After the March: A Disappointing Record
The March for Jobs and Freedom was Rustin’s triumph, “the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on,” as he put it. (Time on Two Crosses, p. 31) The March was also a turning point for Rustin.
In 1964, Rustin wrote “From Protest to Politics,” arguing that Black Americans should move away from seeking equality through civil disobedience and similar protests to working within the political system, in alliance with labor unions and the Democratic Party. He subsequently became head of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an AFL-CIO affiliated group focused on anti-poverty efforts. Economic issues dominated Rustin’s work for the rest of his life.
During his later years, Rustin adopted many stances that dismayed his admirers and should dismay Consistent Life Ethic activists.
Like so many social justice advocates, Rustin sadly had a blind spot toward children in the womb. In 1970, he stated “I am entirely for free abortions on demand, since I think women should be able to choose whether they want to have children.” (“Feminism and Equality,” in Time on Two Crosses, p. 238) That Rustin should be indifferent to some of the most vulnerable humans is deeply disappointing.
Equally disappointing and more surprising was Rustin’s move away from peace activism. Although an early Vietnam War critic who never exactly abandoned this position, Rustin became cautious as the war progressed. He was equivocal about linking opposition to the war to the anti-poverty cause. While supportive of King’s opposition to the war, he criticized his colleague for linking the civil rights and anti-war causes, calling such an approach “distinctly unprofitable and perhaps even suicidal.” (Intondi, pp. 77-78)
Rustin’s attitude frustrated his allies. Fellow activist Eleanor Holmes Norton commented, “The Vietnam War seemed to me to be so wrong that on that one I really did expect to be led by Bayard…That was a very disillusioning notion.” (Interview in documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin [2003]) Years after the war’s bitter and bloody end, Rustin remained ambivalent about whether the US involvement in Southeast Asia was wise or just and was still critical of King’s approach. In the 1980s (amid the depths of the nuclear arms race), Rustin similarly opposed linking civil rights and peace work.
Yet Rustin was willing to link civil rights to a different foreign policy issue: he strongly supported Israel, founding the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee. This stance included advocating in 1970 for the United States to send military jets to Israel for defense against Arab nations. Rustin commented, “I believe that sending jets to Israel when it was requested would have been best for the world situation and would have upheld democracy.” (I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters [2012, ebook edition], p. 204) Rustin wrote President Gerald Ford urging him “to provide Israel with whatever supplies she needs in order to maintain safe, secure borders.” (I Must Resist, p. 215) He later expressed sympathy for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
A possible reason, identified by friendly and unfriendly critics alike, for Rustin’s shifting views is that he became wary of positions that might jeopardize his vision, expressed in “From Protest to Politics,” of working within the political system.
For example, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s ability to deliver pro-Black and pro-poor economic policies may have made Rustin wary of too vocally opposing the war Johnson was prosecuting in Southeast Asia. Rustin reportedly warned civil rights leaders about the dangers of alienating Johnson and told peace groups “You guys can’t deliver a single pint of milk to the kids in Harlem and Lyndon Johnson can.” (Time on Two Crosses, p. xxxiv) Mainstream political commitments may have carried a price.
Conclusion
By highlighting Rustin’s questionable positions, I am not seeking to tear him down or argue he is unworthy of celebration. Bayard Rustin was a man of extraordinary intelligence and courage whose accomplishments are worthy of cinematic and other celebration.
Rather, Rustin’s failures in advocating against violence and for the lives of all humans teach the very humbling lesson that even the most admirable people can have their moral and political blind spots. These failures perhaps also teach that efforts to be politically effective can come at the expense of moral clarity.
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For more posts covering about the same historical period, see:
“An Inferno That Even the Mind of Dante Could Not Envision”: Martin Luther King on Nuclear Weapons
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic?
Is it Too Late? 1971 Speech of Fannie Lou Hamer
The Poor Cry Out for Justice, and We Respond with Legalized Abortion
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