Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin (born March 17, 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania , † August 24, 1987 in New York City ) was an African-American civil rights activist who mainly worked behind the scenes. He was a pioneer and driving force of the civil rights movement and advised Martin Luther King, Jr. on questions of nonviolent resistance .
Rustin was openly gay and had been an LGBT lawyer for the last few years of his career .
In 1986, a year before his death, Rustin said: “The barometer where we stand on issues of human rights is no longer the black community, it is the gay community. This is the group that is most easily mistreated. "
youth
Rustin was the illegitimate child of Florence Rustin and Archie Hopkins and was raised by his mother's parents. Rustin's grandmother Julia was a Quaker , even though she attended her husband's African Methodist Episcopal Church . She was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NAACP leaders like WEB Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson were regular guests of the Rustins. Influenced in this way, Rustin was already active in his youth against the discriminatory Jim Crow laws of that time.
From 1932 Rustin went to the private Wilberforce University in Ohio, but left it in 1936 before the final exams. He moved to the Cheyney State Teaching College , now the Cheyney University of Pennsylvania . After completing an activist course from the American Friends Service Committee , Rustin moved to Harlem in 1937 and began studying at City College of New York . While there, he worked on the Scottsboro Boys case - nine young black men falsely charged with raping two white women. In 1936 he became a member of the Young Communist League .
Relationship Development
The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) had originally strongly supported the civil rights movement; But after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 , Joseph Stalin ordered the CPUSA to break off civil rights work and to campaign exclusively for the United States to enter the Second World War . Disaffected by this betrayal, Rustin began working with anti-communist socialists such as trade unionist A. Philip Randolph and pacifist A. J. Muste , director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).
These three proposed the “March on Washington ” to protest racial discrimination in the US Army ; but the march was canceled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a law on June 25, 1941 banning discrimination in the defense industry and in government agencies. Rustin also traveled to California to protect the property of the Japanese Americans who had been locked in camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor . Impressed by Rustin's organizational skills, Muste made him FOR's secretary for student and general affairs.
In 1942, Rustin helped two other FOR employees, George Houser and James L. Farmer, Jr. , and a third activist, Berniece Fisher , found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rustin was not one of the founders himself, but was, as Farmer and Houser later said, "an uncle of CORE". CORE was planned as a pacifist organization based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau and organized along the lines of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to British rule in India. The pacifists Rustin and Houser and other FOR and CORE employees were arrested for violating the Selective Service Act of 1940 as conscientious objectors .
Rustin was in prison from 1944 to 1946, from where he organized protests against racial segregation in restaurants and for the liberation of India. Even after his release, he was arrested again and again for protesting against British rule in India and Africa.
Influence in the civil rights movement
Rustin and Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947 . This was the first of the Freedom Rides that tested the Supreme Court ruling banning racial discrimination in interstate travel. The NAACP was strongly against CORE's Gandhi tactics, and participants in the reconciliation journey were arrested several times. Rustin and Igal Roodenko were sentenced to 30 days as a chain convict by a judge in North Carolina in 1947 for disregarding “the customs of the south”.
In 1948 Rustin traveled to India to learn nonviolent techniques directly from the leaders of the Gandhi movement. Between 1947 and 1952, Rustin met with the leaders of the independence movements of Ghana and Nigeria and in 1951 founded the Committee to Support the Resistance in South Africa , which later became the American Committee on Africa . In 1953 Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California . Initially charged with vagrancy and indecent behavior, he then pleaded guilty to the lesser count of "sexual perversion" and sent to prison for 60 days. His homosexuality, which at that time was still a criminal offense in the entire United States, became public for the first time. After his conviction, he was released from FOR; he became managing director of War Resisters International .
Rustin was part of the team of authors, anonymously at his request, of the influential and hotly debated pacifist essay “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence”, published in 1955. It analyzed the Cold War and recommended non-violent solutions.
1956 Rustin took time out from the War Resisters to Martin Luther King Jr. to discuss Gandhi tactics as King the bus boycott in Montgomery planned. The following year, Rustin and King began organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Many African-American officials were concerned that Rustin's open homosexuality and communist past could harm the civil rights movement. In 1960, MP Adam Clayton Powell Jr. forced Rustin's resignation from the SCLC.
When Rustin and Randolph were preparing the “ March on Washington for Work and Freedom ” in 1963 , Senator Strom Thurmond insulted Rustin as “communists, slackers and homosexuals” and showed an FBI photo of Rustin showing him with Dr. King speaks while he is bathing. He wanted to suggest a homosexual relationship between the two, which both men denied. Despite King's support, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins did not allow public recognition for Rustin's achievement in organizing the march.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed, Rustin advocated closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party and its union base. Rustin initially supported President Lyndon B. Johnson's policy on Vietnam ; however, when the war escalated and ousted the Democratic programs for racial reconciliation and labor reform, Rustin returned to his pacifist roots. Nevertheless, he was seen as a traitor by the emerging black power movement, whose identity politics he rejected.
In the early 1970s, Rustin served on the University of Notre Dame's Board of Trustees .
During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a human rights and election observer for the NGO Freedom House and was heard as an expert in advising on the New York State Gay Rights Bill . He called on gay and lesbian organizations to stand up for all minorities.
Rustin died on August 24, 1987 in New York City of complications from a perforated appendix . He left behind his longtime partner Walter Naegle, who is his estate administrator and archivist.
In New York City and his hometown of West Chester were named after him two high schools.
In 2013 Rustin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously by President Barack Obama .
literature
- Jervis Anderson: Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen. HarperCollins Publishers, New York 1997.
- Taylor Branch: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. Touchstone, New York 1989.
- Devon W. Carbado, Donald Weise (eds.): Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. Cleis Press, San Francisco 2003, ISBN 1-57344-174-0 .
- John D'Emilio: Lost Prophet: Bayard Rustin and the Quest for Peace and Justice in America. The Free Press, New York 2003.
- John D'Emilio: Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2004, ISBN 0-226-14269-8 .
- James Haskins: Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement. Hyperion, New York 1997.
- Nicole Hirschfelder: Oppression as Process: The Case of Bayard Rustin. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8253-6390-1 .
- Nancy Kates, Bennett Singer (dirs.): Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. 2003.
- Bayard Rustin: Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. Quadrangle Books, Chicago 1971.
See also
Web links
- Some articles from Rustin
- Bayard Rustin and My Jihad for Peace on Diepiriye
- Brother Outsider , a PBS documentary about Rustin
- You Don't Have to Ride JIM CROW! PBS documentary about the "reconciliation trips"
- Stephen Steinberg: Bayard Rustin and the Rise and Decline of the Black Protest Movement.
- Randall Kennedy: From Protest to Patronage. The Nation
- Short biography of the Bayard Rustin High Schoo. L
- Steven Thrasher: Bayard Rustin: The Man Homophobia Almost Erased From History. buzzfeed, August 27, 2013
swell
- ^ New York Times
- ↑ Rustin's report on the prison camp ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ President Obama Names Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rustin, Bayard |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American civil rights activist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 17, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | West Chester, Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 24, 1987 |
| Place of death | New York City |