Lost Prophet:
The Forgotten Legacy of Bayard Rustin

A sermon Offered by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
January 15, 2006 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

What do we choose to remember? What do we choose to forget? Why remember some people? Why erase the memories of others? Why do we overlook some people’s foibles, their weaknesses, their unskillful choices, yet refuse to look beyond the mistakes of others? How do we measure a life, a legacy, a contribution to the world?

What if you possessed a stunningly strategic mind, capable of conceptualizing some of the greatest problems facing society? What if you knew the pain of being an outsider, a social outcast, but could transform that into a charismatic drive towards justice? What if you were a fiery speaker, capable of touching the hearts of thousands because you spoke from the heart, and the head, and were willing to speak words that few would dare? What if you had pacifist principles that were deeply imbedded into your being—a belief that violence for any reason perpetuated an unending cycle of destruction? What if you were willing to be beaten in the streets, on the buses, in the prisons, for these beliefs? What if world leaders called upon you to travel to their countries—to India, to Ghana, to Thailand, to bear witness to these nonviolent principles? What if Ghandi himself invited you to come and discuss your experiences with him? What if great leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sought you out as a mentor and a guide?

What if your name was Bayard Rustin—a man who was all these things? Should you be remembered?

Historian John D’Emilio writes:

“Bayard Rustin . .. deserves a place in our national memory as one of the key figures of his time . . . Instead . . . [he] was dismissed . . as a Communist, a draft dodger, or a sexual pervert.” (Lost Prophet, p. 1) He has also been written off as someone who betrayed the very struggle for justice that he helped orchestrate.

Who was Bayard Rustin, and how should we remember him?

Bayard Rustin was born in 1912, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Although far from the segregationist South, West Chester was still a place where race mattered. As a black child, Bayard grew up unable to eat in many of the restaurants in the town. He could only sit in the black balcony of the movie theaters. The schools he attended mixed whites and blacks in classes and sports, but he was unable to visit his white friends in their homes, or venture into their parts of town. Race was a dividing line, and it was clear to young Bayard that he was standing on the unequal side.

Born to a young, unmarried teenage mother, Bayard was raised by his grandparents, Julia and Janifer Rustin.

It was his grandmother, Julia, who became the shaping influence of his life. A Quaker, Julia Rustin raised Bayard to believe in the equality of all people. And, like many Quakers, Julia raised him in the belief that a life of complete nonviolence was the true Christian path, and the only authentically human way to live. As Bayard remembered, “My activism did not spring from being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing. . . It is very likely that I would have been involved in [civil rights] had I been a white person.” (Time on Two Crosses, xi)

During his high school years Bayard was an accomplished athlete, student, and singer. He was charismatic and well liked. It was during this period that Bayard began his first forays into nonviolent activism, staging small student sit-ins at “white only” lunch counters in West Chester, and sitting in the white section of the movie theater.

It was also at this time that he realized he was gay. Bayard remembers discussing this with his grandmother: “I told her I enjoyed being with guys when I joined the parties for dating. And she said, ‘Is that what you really enjoy?’ I said, ‘Yes, I think I do.’ Her reply was, ‘Then I suppose that’s what you need to do.’ [Because of this, I] never felt it necessary to do a great deal of pretending. And I never had feelings of guilt.” (Time on Two Crosses” p. xii) Unfortunately, as Bayard would soon find out, the world around him would not be as accepting.

And so by the time he graduated high school, Bayard had already embraced the two key themes that would define, and compromise, his life: 1) Nonviolent social protest for justice, and 2) his homosexuality.

We must fast forward through many years. There was his first stab at college, where he majored in voice, touring the country in a celebrated vocal quartet. There was his expulsion from that same college, some say for organizing a protest against the terrible food; others say because of his relationship with the son of the college president. There was his move to Harlem in 1937, where he entered the thrilling ferment of social protest and black culture. It was also in Harlem that he became involved in the Young Communist League. Bayard affiliated himself with the Communist Party for two reasons. It was the one organization in America that consistently and forcefully spoke out on issues of racial equality, and it was also fiercely against U.S. intervention in World War II. Both were stands that resonated with Bayard’s conscience. After four years, though, Bayard became disillusioned with the Communist party and severed all ties permanently. But his time in the Communist party was the beginning of his real training as a social protest organizer. It was also here that Bayard began to realize that racial rights would mean little without economic equality. Some kind of economic revolution would be needed if African Americans, and other workers, were to truly move beyond oppression.

Bayard spent many years moving through the ranks of pacifist and fledgling racial equality organizations. Out in the field, he honed his skills at communicating, organizing, and mobilizing. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison for holding to his pacifist beliefs, refusing to serve in the armed forces when drafted into service during World War II. He studied Ghandi’s techniques of non-violent social transformation. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was still a teenager, and a full decade before Rosa Parks refused to move from her bus seat, Bayard Rustin was being dragged off buses and beaten and jailed—honing the protest techniques that would later be used all over the south. While Martin Luther King was still a student at Boston University, Rustin had already traveled throughout the world teaching non-violent protest, and was one of a handful of key players in America’s social justice scene.

And then, in 1953 it all crashed around him. Bayard was arrested in Pasadena, California, for sexual conduct with two male strangers. He was sentenced to sixty days in the county jail. Bayard was crushed, emotionally and spiritually, because he realized he may have destroyed his capacity to be a public leader in the Civil Rights movement. He was censured and condemned by many of his friends and peers. Even worse, he had given those who opposed racial justice the ultimate tool. When Bayard showed up to coordinate and lead, the enemies of racial justice could shift attention to his “sexual deviancy and immorality.” Bayard Rustin was a former Communist and now a known homosexual—what could be more anti-American than that?

This is exactly what happened. A few years after the arrest, in 1955, Bayard’s strategic thinking was needed in Montgomery, Alabama. The Montgomery Improvement Association’s bus boycott, begun with Rosa Park’s act of civil disobedience, was struggling. The Montgomery coalition—and a brand new minister named Martin Luther King—were not seasoned in social protest. Despite the fierce objection of the NAACP and other black organizations who wanted nothing to do with a homosexual, Bayard was secretly sent to King to teach and advise. He arrived at King’s home to find it surrounded by armed guards. When he entered King’s home, he had to move a pistol to sit in a chair. Bayard then began to explain to King that nonviolence was not simply one strategy among many to use for a limited goal. No, said Bayard, nonviolence must be embraced as a way of life, a way of reacting to life, even unto death. He then instructed his young pupil in how a nonviolent way of resisting could change the face of race relations in America. Shortly after, a white racist newspaperman threatened to reveal that a Northern “sexual pervert” and “communist” had been brought in to advise the boycott. Bayard was forced to flee Montgomery in the trunk of a car.

Bayard continued to advise King, sometimes openly, sometimes quietly. It was Bayard and a few others who realized they could expand the Montgomery boycott into a huge protest movement across the entire south. If it worked, they believed, they could dismantle segregation. It was Bayard and two others who conceived the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its method of “mass direct action against racial oppression, combined with voter education and outreach.” (Time on Two Crosses, xxiv). But Bayard’s sexual arrest, and society’s prejudice against homosexuality, continued to haunt him. FBI transcripts of wiretaps on Martin Luther King’s phone reveal how conflicted King was with Bayard’s presence in the movement. King feared that association with a homosexual could destroy his own reputation and the entire work of the civil rights movement.

This played out painfully five years later. Bayard and King and others were planning a massive demonstration at the 1960 Democratic Presidential Convention to force the party to address the issue of race. But Democratic Senator Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. threatened to release the false accusation that Bayard and Martin Luther King were sexually involved unless the demonstration was cancelled. King called off the protest and the Democrats avoided a public debate on race. Bayard resigned his leadership position in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization he helped found. From then on, the relationship between King and his mentor was openly strained. The FBI and other forces in Washington took advantage of this tension. Records show there was an active FBI campaign to separate Bayard from King and other players in the Civil Rights Movement.

Three years later, when the 1963 March on Washington was first conceptualized, it was clear that only one man could pull off such a massive mobilization. After much heated discussion, it was agreed that Bayard Rustin would be the chief planner of the march, although someone else would hold the official public title. Calling for a “massive assault on racist political power and institutions,” Bayard began planning for the largest single political gathering in American history, a great rally for jobs and freedom. One out of a hundred black Americans would travel to Washington, joined by huge delegations of white labor organizations and social justice groups, all coordinated by Bayard.

As the march drew closer, opposition forces struck. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “disseminated a transcribed telephone recording in which King made disparaging comments about” Bayard and his homosexuality. (Time on Two Crosses, xxix) Then, Senator Strom Thurmond strode to the floor of Congress and denounced Bayard as “a sexual degenerate.” But the march’s momentum was too great. On August 28th, 1963, Bayard’s March on Washington became a turning point in American protest history and in the civil rights movement. Bayard’s march ended on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King’s now historic words: “I Have A Dream.”

In the aftermath of the march, Bayard Rustin seemed to have overcome his past. He was the man of the moment, openly applauded nationally for the great success he had orchestrated. And for the first time in his life, he was no longer the voice crying from the outside. He found himself inside the chambers of power, he found himself holding power.

And then, something happened. Bayard Rustin began to shift his perspective from the power of protest to the power of political alliances. The march, he believed, was successful because of the coalitions he had formed between black groups, organized labor, and the White House. Mass protest had gotten the attention, but now only targeted economic policy could create the economic opportunities he saw as central to true black equality. Bayard now saw the Democratic Party and Lyndon Johnson as partners in a coalition of conscience.

And the times they were a’ changing as well. Kennedy was assassinated, militant black movements were emerging, violence and rioting were erupting in the inner cities, Martin Luther King was shot dead. Bayard began to believe that mass protest had not only run its course, but that mass protest had become a violent tinder-box that could destroy all the progress he and the movement had made.

Bayard the protestor had become Bayard the political operative. This horrified many of his peers in the civil rights movement.

And there was a further price to pay. Communing with the whites in power meant compromise. Once the ardent pacifist who was jailed for his beliefs, Bayard now refused to speak out strongly against the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies.

Bayard defended himself, saying: “I have been asked where I stand on the war in Vietnam. Sometimes the question is asked with hostility by former civil rights activists who now devote nearly all their energies to opposing the war. They want to know why I don't do likewise. The reason is simple. Unlike many of them, I don't believe that the civil rights movement is dead, so I am not ready to help bury it. Getting decent jobs, housing and education is harder than integrating lunch counters. We need to redouble our efforts, not dilute and divert them. Someday, this war will be over, and my job is to help see to it that when the black soldiers come home, they will have something decent to come home to.”

The civil rights movement and the pacifist movement felt betrayed by the man who had helped put them all in motion. This earned Bayard the reputation of being a political conservative. (Time on Two Crosses, xxxv) Whether this reputation is justified is open for debate, but there is no question that his complicated legacy was further clouded by this later direction.

What should we remember about Bayard Rustin? What should we be willing to forget?

Perhaps Bayard answered that question himself, when, as teenager, he wrote:

I ask of you no shining gold;
I seek not epitaph or fame;
No monument of stone for me,
For man need never speak my name.

But when my flesh doth waste away
And seeds from stately trees do blow,
I pray that in my fertile clay,
You gently let a small seed grow.

May we tend carefully the seeds Bayard Rustin planted with his life: the seeds of equality, nonviolence, and economic opportunity for all. May we allow these seeds to grow in us, through us, and because of us.

Like Bayard Rustin, we, too, may be forgotten. Our names may fade away. But we can never let these seeds, this vision, fade from able hearts and minds. It must be planted anew. It must grow afresh.

It must be our moral imperative.

Blessed Be. Amen.