Spectator's Journal/Remembering Bayard Rustin
Decter, Midge
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL REMEMBERING BAYARD RUSTIN C ince Bayard Rustin's death last Auk.) gust, many people—some who knew him, some who did not—have attempted publicly to sum up his life and career....
...Not even the president of the New York City Council was there—he, too, sent a flunky...
...That his people would take that victory and march elsewhere with it—to the brink, in fact, of destroying the school system, and the city, and themselves, he had not foreseen: the nobility of the struggle was still too much with him...
...Once in Israel we visited a settlement of the Gush Emunim on a barren, rocky hillside overlooking Nablus and listened to the arguments of a fiery-eyed young fanatic who declared that he was living on the ground God Himself had promised to the Jews...
...He was just shy of seventy when we were together at a conference in Spain...
...He was in the midst of organizing what would turn out to be a successful black boycott of the schools in New York City...
...On the return trip he occupied a seat several rows behind mine on the plane and whiled away the hours undermining what he felt was my unwarrantedly oversober bearing by sending scurrilous messages to me through the stewardess and throwing spitballs at my head...
...Such, such, are the rewards of bravery, decency, and honor...
...If these summings up are given fitting prominence, appear, say, on the front page of the New York Times and/or its equivalents in the obituary world, we feel that, however inadequate to the living presence of the person, some kind of justice has been done...
...When we left, Bayard said to me, "I know these people well because I have known so many like them...
...Yes to be Midge Decter is executive director of the Committee for the Free World sure he was, all these and more, but the music is missing...
...We say these things and imagine that we have made some proper gesture, paid some proper obeisance to the idea that his absence will be a loss to the human community . . . and then, as we must in any case, move on...
...How would damaging a system already showing signs of intolerable burden benefit the children who needed it more than ever...
...What can one say to bring alive on the page a man who was a Quaker without one trace of goodyness...
...The civil-rights movement had recently "moved North" from the inspiriting days of sit-ins and freedom marches and was now riding the shaky rails of "de facto" Northern segregation declared to be running parallel to Jim Crow...
...And it was not his answer (which would before too many years were out acquire a disastrous echo) but his manner of delivering it that told me from that moment on I would be safe in standing wherever this man stood...
...a pacifist who sided with the hawks...
...They are mad, besotted, and if sticking to their ground means bringing down the whole country, they will do it...
...a passionate advocate of civil rights who wasted little time brooding about racism...
...an ex-con without one trace of self-pity or self-dramatization...
...He was loyal to the labor movement...
...He never stopped believing that the problems of the black community would have to be dealt with through massive government programs and interventions, but he knew that what nowadays passes for "liberalism" on race is condescending and hurtful...
...He hated the South African government but knew that there could be no settleby Midge Decter ment in that unhappy country that was not a settlement of blacks and whites together, and he opposed sanctions on the ground that only through ever greater economic strength could the black community in South Africa peacefully and decently acquire political power...
...He exhaled no fire and engaged in no blackmail—and it cost him...
...He was too friendly to the Jews...
...When I wished him happy birthday, he leaned into my face and whispered conspiratorially, "Baby, sixty is marvelous...
...He answered me without hesitation, as he was to answer every question on any problem ever put to him, without prologue or maneuver, from a deep, earned clarity, "Because my people need a victory...
...gratitude to God was another...
...He was opposed to black studies...
...This is, of course, no more than the customary response to the loss of an eminence among us...
...Still," he laughed, "if ever I came to live in this country, it is among them I would probably choose to live...
...He was too anti-Communist...
...Now here am I, adding these words to all the rest, and doomed like all the rest to fail...
...He had quite obviously been celebrating for several hours...
...He was opposed to racial quotas...
...rr he first time I met Bayard he was 1 sitting in a makeshift office on 125th Street in Harlem...
...That he was brave, noble, complex, independent...
...I never in twenty-five years heard him utter the word "God," but once I ran into him on what happened to be his sixtieth birthday...
...He and I were in the course of time to move rather far apart politically—or rather, I was to move apart from him...
...They sent messages via flunkies...
...He always knew his mind, Bayard did...
...Bayard always remained Bayard—but, at least as far as I was concerned, no essentials, nothing to die for, ever came between us...
...Nor was that first impression ever diluted: one was always safe standing where he stood, though that could, politically as well as intellectually, sometimes be on the edge of a very sharp and narrow precipice...
...He said, "Do you know what I want engraved on my tombstone...
...an ex-Communist without one trace of vindictiveness...
...a Ghandian without one trace of holiness...
...We say: he was born then, educated there, as a young man did this and that, subsequently accomplished this and that, was especially noted for this and that, and in his later years was seen by all, friend and foe alike, to have lived an important life...
...and above all, a leader, an organizer, a solemn spokesman, whose highest appetite was for merry mischief...
...When he did see it, he declared, in a famous essay in Commentary, that there should be an end to protest and a turn to grown-up politics...
...a homosexual through whose lips the word "homophobia" was never heard to pass...
...But Bayard's reward in the end was of a kind that all the careless and calculating politicos of this world cannever imagine, let alone aspire to...
...He could make wonderful speeches and stir great throngs, or he could make quiet speeches that brought harmony to rancorous disputations...
...He kept urging his fellow blacks to eschew the self-indulgences of professional victimhood and to behave like serious men after serious power...
...He would have been pleased, we say...
...I asked him, timidly and piously, why the schools...
...You have to understand, I lectured the bewildered stewardess, you are dealing here with a venerable and heroic civil-rights (continued on page 26) 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 leader and a famous credit to his people...
...Indeed, the most vivid memories of Bayard that remain to his friends have to do not with his significant moments in the world of affairs but with his undying, ever-ready gusto...
...This black man had fun!' " For the rest of us, things will never be so much fun—or feel so safe, so much to be trusted—again...
...And what is true for every living presence is ten times true for Bayard...
...Here's who did not make an appearance at the dinner: Governor Cuomo, Mayor Koch, Senator Moynihan...
...So was seventy and so was seventy-five...
...This man, I knew, had been the real force behind the great March on Washington, and as a good Northern liberal on a leftward swing, I felt timid and pious in his presence...
...a singer of songs, a drinker of whiskey, a collector of beautiful objects, a forbidden smoker...
...He sang to us that night—he used to sing at the drop of a hat—and he had never sung more beautifully in his life...
...Clarity, then, was one thing he had...
...When his seventy-fifth birthday came around and his friends threw him a banquet, he had long since left thecompany of those whom liberal politicians found it necessary to butter up...
...He was, in the days of "burn, baby, burn," too wedded to non-violence, and in the days of black power, too wedded to building coalitions with the rest of America's needy...
...And as he had on his sixtieth birthday, he whispered to me one of his unforgettable consoling secrets...
...How ridiculous...
...This, I declared, is how the truly venerable behave...
...The things he set out to do, those he accomplished, those for which he was noted and admired (and reviled) don't begin to scratch the surface of him...
...But what he did best of all had to do with laughter: laugh himself, and be the cause, as Shakespeare would have said, that laughter was in others...
...s the 1960s and seventies rolled by, Bayard increasingly lost ground in the so-called civil-rights community...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
