Bayard Rustin was the movement’s master tactician: a Quaker-raised pacifist who tested nonviolent direct action against Jim Crow in the 1940s, taught its methods to Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, and organized the 1963 March on Washington. Because he was openly gay and had once been a Communist, allies repeatedly pushed him out of public view, and his central role was long underrecognized.
At a Glance
- Born
- 17 March 1912, West Chester, Pennsylvania
- Died
- 24 August 1987, New York, New York
- Known for
- Journey of Reconciliation (1947); adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery; deputy director and chief organizer, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963); “From Protest to Politics” (1965)
- HBCU ties
- Wilberforce University (Attended); Cheyney University of Pennsylvania (Attended Cheyney State Teachers College)
- Fields
- Organizing · Civil Rights · Labor
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on 17 March 1912 and raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandmother, Julia Rustin, shaped by the Quaker tradition, instilled in him the values of nonviolence and the equality of all people that guided his life.
He attended Wilberforce University in Ohio and Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, and in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, moved to Harlem, where he took classes at City College of New York and performed as a singer. For a short time he was drawn to Communist politics, then broke with the party. He joined a Quaker meeting in Manhattan and became a committed student of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.
Life and Work
In September 1941 Rustin went to work for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a Christian pacifist organization led by A. J. Muste, travelling thousands of miles to lecture and train activists. He also worked with A. Philip Randolph, who became his lifelong mentor. In 1942 he helped found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and that year went to California to help protect the property of Japanese Americans sent to internment camps. Refusing to cooperate with the draft as a conscientious objector, he was sentenced in January 1944 to three years in federal prison, serving time at Ashland, Kentucky, and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was released in June 1946.
In April 1947 Rustin and George Houser of CORE organized the Journey of Reconciliation, in which Black and white men rode buses through the Upper South to test a 1946 Supreme Court ruling against segregation in interstate travel. Arrested in North Carolina, Rustin served twenty-two days on a chain gang and published an account of the experience. The journey became a model for the Freedom Rides of 1961. In 1948 he joined Randolph in a campaign against segregation in the armed forces that preceded President Harry S. Truman’s July 1948 executive order desegregating the military.
In January 1953 Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California, after a speaking engagement and convicted of a morals charge for consensual sex with men; he served sixty days in jail and was forced to leave the FOR. He joined the staff of the War Resisters League. In February 1956 he went to Montgomery, Alabama, to support the bus boycott and became an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., helping him deepen his understanding and practice of nonviolence. With Ella Baker and Stanley Levison he proposed a regional organization of Southern protest leaders, which became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. He organized the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in 1958 and 1959. In 1960 Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to spread a false rumor about Rustin and King unless a planned protest at the Democratic National Convention was called off; Rustin resigned from King’s staff.
When Randolph called for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, he made Rustin his deputy director and gave him charge of the organizing. Weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina attacked Rustin on the Senate floor over his arrest record and past politics, and Randolph and other leaders defended him. On 28 August 1963 some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in what was then the largest demonstration in the nation’s history. In February 1964 he helped lead a one-day boycott of New York City’s segregated schools.
In “From Protest to Politics,” published in Commentary in February 1965, Rustin argued that the movement must turn from street protest to building a political coalition of Black Americans, organized labor, and liberals around economic demands. He led the A. Philip Randolph Institute, established with labor support in the mid-1960s, for the rest of his career. His positions, including his coolness toward Black Power and his reluctance to break with the Johnson administration over Vietnam, estranged him from many younger activists. In later years he turned to international human rights causes, organized the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee in 1975, and made a fact-finding trip to South Africa in 1983. He was arrested for the last time in 1984, demonstrating in support of striking clerical workers at Yale University.
Legacy
Rustin died in New York on 24 August 1987 of a perforated appendix. His partner, Walter Naegle, survived him. On 20 November 2013 President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously; Naegle accepted it. At the ceremony Obama said that Rustin, “often at Dr. King’s side,” had for decades been denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay. In February 2020 Governor Gavin Newsom of California granted Rustin a posthumous pardon for his 1953 conviction.
Scholars, beginning with the biographies of Jervis Anderson (1997) and John D’Emilio (2003), have restored Rustin to the center of the movement’s history. His life illuminates both the strategic foundations of nonviolent direct action and the costs imposed on gay Americans within the movement and beyond it.
Movements succeed through careful organizing as much as through inspiring speeches, and Rustin’s story shows how prejudice inside a movement can push its own essential people out of view. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 17 March 1912 Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
- September 1941 Joins the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
- January 1944 Sentenced to three years in federal prison as a conscientious objector; released June 1946.
- April 1947 Co-organizes the Journey of Reconciliation; later serves twenty-two days on a North Carolina chain gang.
- January 1953 Convicted on a morals charge in Pasadena, California.
- February 1956 Arrives in Montgomery to advise Martin Luther King Jr. during the bus boycott.
- 28 August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which he organized as deputy director.
- February 1965 Publishes “From Protest to Politics” in Commentary.
- 24 August 1987 Dies in New York City.
- 20 November 2013 Posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Sources and Further Reading
- National Park Service, “Bayard Rustin.” Link
- National WWII Museum, “Before Montgomery: Bayard Rustin and the Fight for Racial Justice during World War II.” Link
- A. Philip Randolph Institute, “Mr. Rustin’s Bio.” Link
- Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary, February 1965. Link
- John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003).
- Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
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