Bayard Rustin as seen in John D'Emilio's Lost Prophet and Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Bustin, edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Wiese
Glenn, David
LOST PROPHET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BAYARD RUSTIN by John D'Emilio The Free Press, 2003 576 pp $35 TIME ON TWO CROSSES: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF BAYARD RUSTIN Devon W. Carbado and Donald...
...He signed on as one of FOR's youth secretaries, and he remained there until the Pasadena disaster...
...When Rustin said yes, the agent immediately reported the information to Donald Roney, head of the New York office, who contacted national headquarters...
...In 1937, one year short of graduation, Rustin left Cheyney State under circumstances that remain unclear...
...I found that I was shaking with nervous strain, and to give myself something to do, I took out a piece of paper and a pencil, and began to write from memory one of Paul's letters...
...Cleis Press, 2003 355 pp $16.95 BAYARD RUSTIN was a stubborn man, and for most of his life that stubbornness served him beautifully...
...There are dozens of potential strategic permutations that might conceivably lead to a successful social democratic coalition...
...Until his death in 1987, Rustin devoted his prodigious energies to realizing that vision—and here his stubbornness served him less well...
...He suggested as much in the 1967 essay "Guns, Bread, and Butter...
...The project therefore faced a harsh reception from the very people who should have been its central audience...
...of the New York Journal American newspaper, who said he would have a photographer and reporter at the scene to get a picture of Rustin entering the Soviet UN Mission and would give 130 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 BOOKS the matter good publicity...
...In politics, however, such a confrontation is difficult because the interests involved are merely represented...
...Nothing happened to the white guy...
...As he boarded a bus in Louisville, a small white child grabbed his tie...
...D'Emilio convincingly argues, however, that matters were not so simple...
...Rustin's pragmatism took a difficult turn after the 1963 March on Washington...
...King's circle decided once again that Rustin was a political liability, and the job offer was withdrawn...
...On one journey in 1942, he spontaneously decided to put Gandhian principles into practice...
...But we must remember that too often conflict is already at hand and that there is hence a greater danger: the inevitable use of force by persons embittered by injustice and unprepared for nonviolence...
...The FOR announced Rustin's departure from its staff in a press release that mournfully referred to his "problem...
...Between his 1946 release and his 1953 "morals" arrest, Rustin worked on dozens of low-profile, now-forgotten campaigns: peace marches, vigils at weapons sites, challenges to segregated interstate buses...
...In another 1942 essay, Rustin used arguments that foreshadowed King's language of two decades later: Nonviolence as a method has within it the demand for terrible sacrifice and long suffering, but, as Gandhi has said, "freedom does not drop from the sky" . . . [T]here are those who question the use of nonviolent direct action by Negroes in protesting discrimination, on the grounds that this method will rekindle hitherto dormant racial feeling...
...twenty-two days on a chain gang in North Carolina following a 1947 campaign against bus segregation...
...he kept thinking pragmatically at a time when many leftists gave themselves over to posturing and rage...
...I was put into the back seat of the police car, between two policemen...
...In June 1941, when the Communist Party abandoned its antiwar position, Rustin was horrified, and he thereafter sustained a lifelong disgust with the Soviet project...
...That relationship reached its apogee in 1963, when Rustin, more than any other single individual, organized the Washington march at which King delivered the "I have a dream" speech...
...He urged the crowd to "take their crusade to the streets...
...Rustin accrued those skills because he was willing to take risks even during the grimmest years of the early 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy and John Foster Dulles were in the saddle, and most of the organized left was timid or Stalinist or both...
...He urged civil rights organizations to deepen their alliances with labor and to fight for full employment and a higher minimum wage...
...Rustin's ambition was to become a professional singer—he spent several months as a chorus member in John Henry, a musical starring Paul Robeson—but he continued to devote many hours to political work...
...Rustin left town, moved in with an aunt in Harlem, and, through the Works Progress Administration, found a job as a teacher of English to the foreign born...
...The path Rustin chose, clinging tightly to a relatively conservative trade union leadership, ran into serious trouble very quickly...
...Rustin's growing sense of pragmatism helped him to accomplish great things between 1956 and 1963...
...There was also the small matter of the Vietnam War: After 1965, Rustin was appallingly absent from the struggle to end American carpetbombing and chemical warfare...
...This was not only a moral error but also suggests that he misread the feasibility of the particular Democratic coalition he yearned for...
...His political commitments deepened during his years at Cheyney State Teachers College, a Quaker-founded institution, where he joined several antiwar campaigns...
...In 1956, he went to Montgomery to assist in the city's bus boycott...
...Should the coalition fight relentlessly for ultimate goals like national health insurance or trim its sails as political conditions warrant...
...That has been the dominant interpretation over the years...
...Muste, the recently appointed head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...The notion that Rustin would have gone into such a meeting with starry-eyed naïveté about Soviet behavior is absurd...
...Would he have been able to speak more plainly about Vietnam, as King began to do the year before his murder...
...So did the more left-wing model later pursued by Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Democratic Socialists of America...
...his grandparents, who were prominent members of the town's small African American community, occasionally hosted W.E.B...
...and many of the organizations, including CORE and SNCC, are encouraging that kind of debate as against doing the real job...
...But all such nuances were lost in the press melee that followed...
...BUT IF HIS RHETORIC and programmatic commitments remained on the left, Rustin's strategic instincts drifted rightward...
...The Fellowship's "very comfortable middle-class" board of directors sometimes resisted such moves...
...His campaigns and essays from 1966 onward had an admirable sobriety...
...There is a lesson here for democratic leftists today who take one look at the braying sectarians who lead today's marches and decide to stay home and do nothing at all...
...King offered him a job there in early 1964, and Rustin planned to accept—but the process was short-circuited by a disgusting FBI maneuver: On February 4. . . the agent listening on Rustin's line recorded a call from Muste asking if Rustin was going to the Soviet consulate that afternoon...
...Rustin was on the front page of the next day's Daily News, which lambasted him for "consorting with the Soviets...
...It is a cause for shame that millions of people continue to live under conditions of injustice while we make no effective effort to remedy the situation...
...In a 1964 essay in Commentary, he suggested that nonviolent direct action would not be relevant to the fight for full employment and social insurance: A handful of Negroes, acting alone, could integrate a lunch counter by strategically locating their bodies so as directly to interrupt the operation of the proprietor's will...
...In June 1965, Rustin spoke to seventeen thousand people at an antiwar rally in Madison Square Garden...
...the child's mother slapped the hand away, saying, "Don't touch a nigger...
...When he returned to New York, he found that his work had impressed A.J...
...D'Emilio writes, "Especially after Montgomery, Rustin rebelled, sometimes inwardly and sometimes openly, against the perfectionist outlook of a peace movement whose moral absolutism kept it pure but marginal...
...he was enraged to discover that in the south such camps were racially segregated...
...militarism and tolerated sexual difference...
...DAVID GLENN has written for the Nation, Lingua Franca, and the New York Times Book Review...
...During the thirteen-mile ride to town they called me every conceivable name and said anything they could think of to incite me to violence...
...It is irresistible to speculate what might have happened if Rustin had wound up on the staff of the SCLC rather than at the Randolph Institute...
...By midafternoon, the FBI's assistant director was able to let the New York office know that he had "just given this information to Mr...
...DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 131...
...As the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society abandoned nonviolence and turned toward Maoism and cultural politics, Rustin could only exhort from the sidelines...
...During the LBJ years, Rustin, like many other people in Max Shachtman's orbit, not unreasonably came to believe that a major political realignment was within the left's grasp...
...I vowed then and there that I was never going through the south again without either being arrested or thrown off the bus or protesting...
...Even in 2004, there is a social democratic politics waiting to be built...
...He persisted in this work despite periodic whispering campaigns (some of which were helped along by FBI agents) about his gay identity and his alleged unfitness to serve the civil rights movement...
...He passed through both the Young Communist League and the American Friends Service Committee, maintaining networks he had first developed while at Cheyney State...
...According to one account, he was caught making love with a young man from a prominent white family...
...Is it possible that at SCLC, Rustin would have been able to nurture a healthier variant of his coalition politics, one that combined Washington networking with ongoing street mobilizations...
...Officials of CORE rejected the premise "that we can afford both guns and butter...
...In adulthood he maintained his political commitments despite two and a half years in federal penitentiaries for draft resistance during the Second World War...
...There he met Martin Luther King, Jr., and the two men had long conversations about how to apply Gandhian and Quaker principles of nonviolence to the civil rights struggle...
...Here was the campaign he had been dreaming of for decades— a nonviolent action that (in the words of a memo from Rustin to King) involved "all strata of society" and "did not rely exclusively on a handful of leaders...
...After hearing that insult, Rustin realized that he could not in good faith sit in the bus's Jim Crow section...
...And now even his own tiny niche, the circle of left-wing pacifists clustered around A.J...
...In any case, the basic contours of the story are clear...
...Among the thousand tasks, Rustin later told an interviewer, was to decide "how many blankets we would need for the people who were coming in early .. . how many doctors, how many first aid stations, what people should bring with them to eat in their lunches . . . We had, of course, to have fantastic planning of all the parking lots for the thousands of buses and automobiles...
...There's no great shame in that...
...By the end of 1953 he found a new position at the War Resisters League, a secular cousin of FOR...
...Did Rustin regretfully decide that he had no time for antiwar work, that his proper role now was to concentrate on civil rights and economic justice...
...and a nationally publicized 1953 arrest for having sex with two men on a Pasadena roadside...
...Tin arriving at a political decision, numbers and organizations are crucial...
...The Randolph Institute was promoting a full-employment "Freedom Budget" drafted with Harrington's consultation...
...HOW SHOULD we understand the weakening of Rustin's voice after 1965, when he became the founding director of the labor-funded A. Philip Randolph Institute...
...One place to begin is the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, when Rustin first encountered a truly mass movement...
...Rustin's account of his arrest that day, originally written for FOR's newsletter and reprinted in the new anthology Time on Two Crosses, has a bracing directness...
...The record of his huge courage and huge compromises makes uncomfortable reading...
...What one does with that insight, however, is not obvious...
...Should nonviolent direct action have no role or simply a reduced role...
...But the possibilities are worth an afternoon of hard thought...
...Then things fell apart...
...He was moving into late middle age, and what he did in the 1950s is miracle enough for one lifetime...
...This was the rough equivalent of the mealy-mouthed argument of 1950s liberals, to the effect that segregation had to end because it sullied the United States' image in the worldwide struggle against communism...
...Neither second-wave feminism nor recession nor the election of Richard Nixon seemed to affect his imagined playbook for the left...
...In Rustin's eyes, this was a thrilling window thrown open by history, and it was important to accomplish as much as possible before that window closed...
...their numbers were relatively unimportant...
...Michael Kazin, then an undergraduate SDS activist at Harvard, scorned the Freedom Budget: "They're willing to keep all the defense money intact just so they can keep George Meany happy" In later years, as the napalm continued to drop, D'Emilio writes, "Rustin was nowhere to be found in the largest antiwar movement in the history of the United States...
...Among other tasks, he was asked to assess the conditions of conscientious objectors on the island...
...Not every campaign offers the moral clarity or the personal immediacy of the Woolworth sitins...
...He shrugged off racial stigma during his early-1930s high school years in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he faced the usual lunatic cruelties (he was never allowed to enter the home of his white best friend...
...His relentless work in campaigns that were marginal even on the left's terms paid huge dividends a decade later: When it came time to construct the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin was one of the few people in the country with the organizing ability to pull off the feat...
...For a few years, he and his allies brilliantly yoked together the intense personal ethic of nonviolent direct action and the impure pragmatic work of building mass political coalitions...
...When the draft board came calling, Rustin refused to comply with the government's program of work camps for conscientious objectors, and instead did hard time in two federal prisons...
...Through the League he eventually developed deep friendships with Michael Harrington and other members of the Shachtmanite-socialist milieu...
...Fa XCEPT: RUSTIN'S absence from the later stages of the movement against the Vietnam War is astonishing...
...D'Emilio quotes a friend of Rustin who heard this story years after the fact: "I forget what happened to Bayard, but it was very very unpleasant...
...Muste, whose background was in the socialist movement, hoped to import into FOR the direct-action techniques pioneered by Gandhi's anticolonialist campaigns...
...A more fragile person might easily have fallen into despair after the Pasadena arrest...
...This country must dig deep and be prepared to make revolutionary change in its economic and social life," he said in a mid-1960s speech...
...0 NE OF THE MANY virtues of Lost Prophet, John D'Emilio's excellent new biography of Rustin, is that it preserves a vivid sense of the day-to-day reality of Rustin's activist work...
...He could probably have found a job at one of the antique shops he frequented in Greenwich Village, which could hardly have paid less than his old staff position at FOR...
...Rustin joined Muste that day to meet with a "peace delegation" from Eastern Europe...
...He could have spent his 1950s evenings in MacDougal Street coffee shops, playing chess and expostulating about the insanity of the arms race, adding that he used to be an activist, once, and still would be, if only there were a corner of the left that despised Soviet tyranny and hated U.S...
...Muste and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, rejected him...
...After 1965, by and large, he passively waited for the emergence of the correct kind of street mobilizations—which never did emerge—to complement his coalition work...
...In the summer of 1941, Rustin traveled to Puerto Rico on a project organized by the AFSC...
...THE ARREST MARKED the beginning of Rustin's long struggle to disrupt the everyday rituals of racism...
...He took a seat up front, in the DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 127 BOOKS whites-only section...
...There is undeniable truth to that argument...
...LOST PROPHET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BAYARD RUSTIN by John D'Emilio The Free Press, 2003 576 pp $35 TIME ON TWO CROSSES: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF BAYARD RUSTIN Devon W. Carbado and Donald Wiese, eds...
...We need allies...
...What Congress and the courts give, the market place could take away," he wrote in a memo to the planners of Johnson's White House Conference on race...
...The Conscription Act denies brotherhood," he told the board...
...By the mid-1970s, D'Emilio notes, Rustin was enough of a Washington player that "he was on a first-name basis with individuals such as Donald Rumsfeld, President Ford's secretary of defense...
...In other words, it was true, but it comfortably evaded the central moral realities...
...Or did he, like others in Shachtman's circle in the late 1960s, sincerely come to believe that the struggle against Leninist tyranny justified the Vietnam War and all that came with it...
...In the late 1960s, in a different kind of inhospitable environment, Rustin failed to create a politics that matched his vision, and instead did the honest, tepid work of left-libDISSENT / Winter 2004 n 129 BOOKS eral inside-the-Beltway coalition-building...
...Three years earlier, when he helped to organize a pro-disarmament march across Europe, Rustin had insisted that there be no alliances with phony official East European "peace" groups...
...Full-blown social democracy was just over the horizon, if only a BOOKS labor-civil rights coalition could be stitched together within the Democratic Party...
...The pamphlet's summary declared that the Budget "neither endorses nor condemns present military policies"—and nothing in its structure required money to be diverted from the war effort...
...While in jail, he was punished for trading sexual favors—an incident that brought him into his first serious conflict with Muste...
...in 1965, Rustin's old friend Staughton Lynd castigated him as a "labor lieutenant of capitalism...
...But that year the war issue was already causing him trouble...
...No longer a marginal figure in a marginal movement, Rustin was suddenly on the cover of Life...
...Du Bois and other traveling lecturers...
...Rustin was willing to condemn the Johnson administration's domestic policies in fiery terms, and he also took on racist practices within the building trades—so he does not seem to have been all that frightened of making waves within his coalition...
...As the 1960s progressed, Rustin occasionally worked on street protests (including an awkward stint with the Poor People's Campaign of 1968), but worked primarily on building a new left-wing establishment: making sure that labor and civil rights groups spoke to one another and that they had access to Congress and the White House...
...Rustin was then forty years old, a socialist, an anticommunist, and a pacifist of a radical Christian stripe—which meant, by definition, that he found most of the American left (to say nothing of American society as a whole) to be deeply complicit in evil...
...He advised in the creation of 128 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 BOOKS the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he helped bring together the alphabet soup of organizations (CORE, SNCC, the UAW, and the NAACP) that sponsored the March on Washington...
...The future of the Negro struggle depends on whether the contradictions of this society can be resolved by a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the United States...
...Rustin's project probably would have been shipwrecked by one thing or another in any case: it's hard to imagine a political vehicle that could have encompassed both George Meany, who was drifting toward Nixon, and Stokely Carmichael, who had taken on an insane brand of third worldist Leninism...
...D'Emilio suggests that Rustin sometimes later exaggerated the extent of his involvement with the Young Communist League, and notes that before the break Rustin had already developed a friendship with the staunchly anticommunist A. Philip Randolph...
...Many of them are much more concerned with debating whether you should be called Negro, AfroAmerican, or black...
...There's no evidence for that hypothesis...
...And so on...
...Muste, Rustin, and their small group of pacifists persisted with their work and, almost accidentally, pioneered the techniques that built the mass civil rights movement...
...In tandem with Randolph, Harrington, and other democratic socialists, Rustin argued that federal civil rights legislation might not mean much if the labor market kept most African Americans in poverty...
...Two others sat in front...
...But that sort of withdrawal was not in Rustin's nature...
...Rustin's particular mission was to travel the country checking on the work camps established for conscientious objectors...
...126 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 At that point it must have been tempting for Rustin to withdraw from political life, to immerse himself entirely in the Manhattan bohemia where he already had many friends...
...Rustin always quietly maintained that he opposed the war, although after 1965 he usually argued against it only on pragmatic grounds, saying that the right wing was using the war "as an excuse to cut back on the war on poverty and the struggle against racism...
...Rustin helped to craft the Randolph Institute's powerful get-out-the-vote apparatus, which plays a major role in certain states to this day...
...In the decade after World War II, in an incredibly inhospitable environment, Rustin had helped to create a living praxis that embodied his politics...
...But Rustin's invocations of the labor-civil rights-Democratic Party recipe quickly became rote, formulaic, and weirdly disconnected from the actual unfolding of history...
...The Rustin of the 1950s surely had contempt for such evasions...
...In an interview that appeared in Dissent in 1968, he again urged civil rights leaders to fight for jobs and the redistribution of wealth...
...And nothing short of that...
...His first exposure to political life came during his West Chester childhood...
...Or were Rustin's choices, as Kazin suggested, driven by a narrow desire to keep his job and to keep the AFL-CIO within his imagined social democratic coalition...
...Late that night he spoke at another rally in front of the United Nations...
Vol. 51 • January 2004 • No. 1
