Bayard Rustin and the Rise and Decline of the Black Protest Movement

By Stephen Steinberg, New Politics, Vol.6 no.3 (n.s.), whole no. 23, Summer 1997

"THERE HAS BEEN . . . A NEGRO REVOLT in every decade of this century," Lerone Bennett wrote in 1963. "Each revolt failed, only to emerge in the next decade on a higher level of development."1 If there is a single person who served as the nexus between these decennial revolts, it was Bayard Rustin. This is one of the important lessons to be drawn from Jervis Anderson's recent biography: Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen.2 Indeed, if Anderson had his politics right, the subtitle would have read: Troubles I've Caused.

Rustin is to be remembered as a political gadfly who, more than any other single person, was a catalyst behind the various stages of the civil rights movement as it evolved from individual acts of resistance, to fledgling organizations that forged a praxis for challenging the Jim Crow system in the South, to a full-fledged political movement that not only overcame seemingly insuperable odds to achieve is immediate objectives, but also ushered in a period of extraordinary progressive transformation. This is Bayard Rustin's incontestable political legacy. Unfortunately, Rustin must also be remembered for his political perfidy, beginning in 1963, when he made a fateful shift "from protest to politics."

Anderson's rich biography sheds light on the formative influences that shaped Rustin's sensibilities and politics. Rustin was raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, by his maternal grandmother, who was a Quaker in her youth, and became a charter member of the NAACP in 1910. These two political strains -- pacifism and racial activism were to become the leitmotif of Rustin's life, though as we shall see, they at times coalesced into a potent amalgam but at other times were fatally at odds with one another.

Rustin's career as political activist began in high school when he was arrested for refusing to sit in the balcony of the local moviehouse, dubbed Nigger Heaven. As offensive lineman on the football team, he instigated a revolt among his black teammates to their Jim Crow accommodations. He led a group of classmates in acts of defiance to Jim Crow practices in restaurants, soda fountains, movie houses, department stores, and the YMCA. Graduating with honors in 1932, Rustin was class valedictorian and received a prize for excellence in public speaking. If this were the first act of a play, one would applaud the playwright for skillfully weaving together the various elements of personality and intellect that would drive the narrative.

Rustin did two short stints at black colleges, Wilberforce and Cheyney State Teachers College. In the spring of 1937, he returned to Cheyney for a two-week training program as a peace volunteer, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. Here peace volunteers were trained in the tactics of opposing war with courage and goodwill, and then dispatched to towns and cities across America. That winter Rustin abruptly packed his bags and moved to Harlem, where he lived with his aunt, a public-school teacher, on Sugar Hill. The Communist Party had a conspicuous presence in Harlem. As Rustin would comment later, it was the one organized group speaking out about the Scottsboro case and the ravages of Jim Crow in the South. It was apparently at the behest of the Young Communist League that Rustin enrolled as a student at CCNY in 1938. There he played a leading role in the Communist takeover of the student senate, its campus newspaper, and the American Student Union. In 1941 the YCL commissioned Rustin to organize a campaign against segregation in the armed forces, but that directive was abruptly withdrawn when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Disillusioned, Rustin quit the YCL, and on that very day walked down the hill into A. Philip Randolph's office. In short order Rustin was assigned to head the youth arm of Randolph's emerging March on Washington Movement (MOWM).

According to Anderson, Rustin registered "explosive dissent" at Randolph's decision to call off the march after Roosevelt issued his executive order desegregating defense industries. He and other "radical youth organizers" were also disappointed that no concessions had been won concerning the desegregation of the armed forces. With the MOWM in remission, Rustin shifted his allegiances to the pacifist movement, and began working for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). As field secretary for youth and general affairs, Rustin crisscrossed the country, organizing new chapters, lecturing on college campuses, addressing civic and religious groups -- in short, honing his skills as a political organizer.

FOR WAS A BREEDING GROUND FOR RADICAL IDEAS AND LEADERS, most of whom were disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. With James Farmer as its race relations secretary and Rustin as field secretary, FOR was the progenitor of the Congress of Racial Equality, founded in 1940 with Rustin as its first field secretary. CORE combined the racial militancy of Randolph's MOWM with the tactics of the pacifist movement, thus forging a new praxis, centered around nonviolent direct action, for challenging Jim Crow in the South. Although CORE's experiments with sit-ins and boycotts were minimally effective in the 1940s, they constituted a political legacy that was readily adopted by the evolving civil rights movement in the 1950s

As a conscientious objector, Rustin was exempted from the draft on the condition that he enlist in the Civilian Public Service. He refused. Like the radical activists in the War Resisters League, Rustin regarded the civilian work camps as aiding the war effort, and he was sentenced to three years in a federal prison. There he joined other conscientious objectors in hunger strikes against segregated seating in the dining hall.

Emerging from prison in June 1946, Rustin went back to work for the Fellowship of Reconciliation as race relations secretary, a position that he shared with George Houser. Together they planned a Journey of Reconciliation to demand enforcement of a recent Supreme Court ruling against Jim Crow in interstate buses. Thurgood Marshall warned that a "disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved."3 Marshall was not entirely wrong, at least measured by the short term. Rustin narrowly escaped violence, was arrested and sentenced to a harrowing 22 days on a chain gang, and the buses remained segregated. On the other hand, the Journey was a precursor to the freedom rides of the 1960s. As Rustin commented in 1948: "the Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services."4 Rustin's political genius was his ability to simultaneously pursue short-term and long-term objectives, without allowing one to eclipse the other.

It is noteworthy that Rustin's activism on behalf of civil rights was grounded in a broader matrix of ideological principles, and his activism found varied outlets. Indeed, Rustin was the peripatetic organizer who over a lifetime of activism would gravitate to whatever struggle emerged for peace, democracy, or racial justice. In 1946 he travelled to India to meet with Gandhi intellectuals, stopping in Britain to address various pacifist groups. Then he worked for several years in a campaign against America's development of nuclear weapons and its programs for war preparedness. Soon after the abortive Journey of Reconciliation he travelled to Paris and Moscow with David Dellinger and other pacifists. In Paris he learned about the emerging anticolonial struggles in Africa, and in 1952 travelled to Africa on a mission sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Friends Service Committee, with the purpose of linking American pacifist movement with leaders of West African independence. After a humiliating arrest for a homosexual incident in 1953, he was ejected from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. But a year later he was appointed executive secretary of the War Resisters League, a position that he retained for 12 years, though he was frequently "released" to work with the evolving civil rights movement.

RUSTIN'S RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY CAME IN DECEMBER 1955, when Rosa Parks's act of courage precipitated the Montgomery bus boycott which would catapult Martin Luther King into a leadership position. By February Rustin was summoned to Montgomery. At 44 he was a seasoned organizer; King, at 27, was a neophyte who by sheer accident was drawn into the swirling vortex of black revolt. King had previous academic exposure to Gandhi, but according to Anderson, it was Rustin who prevailed on King to dispense with armed guards and to embrace nonviolent action as the trademark of the budding movement. It was also Rustin who forged links to radicals in the North. In April 1956 Liberation carried King's first piece of political journalism, and Rustin and the War Resisters League mobilized leading pacifists and radicals into a Committee for Nonviolent Integration which funneled aid to King. Rustin helped to organize yet another group, In Friendship, which sponsored a rally at Madison Square Garden that raised some $20,000 for the Montgomery Improvement Association. There was always nervousness among King's advisors about Rustin's Communist past and his homosexuality, but his organizing skills and political savvy proved indispensable.

It would be difficult to exaggerate Rustin's contribution as the Montgomery boycott evolved into a broad strategy for protest. According to Anderson, Rustin "conceived and charted" the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with Ella Baker and Stanley Levison. This was to serve as the organizational mechanism for King's ascent to national prominence. Over the next decade Rustin remained a close advisor to King, especially during moments of crisis. Rustin was the chief organizer of the Prayer Pilgrimage -- a precursor to the March on Washington. Held at the Lincoln memorial on the third anniversary of the Brown decision, the Pilgrimage drew some 30,000 participants from labor, student, religious, and civil rights organizations. This was King's first major protest event outside the South, and his oratorical gifts captured the attention of commentators both inside and outside the movement. Rustin also had a hand in drafting King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom, which reached a national audience with the riveting story of the Montgomery boycott. In 1958 Rustin organized yet another mass demonstration in Washington -- the Youth March for Integrated Schools. These were the feats of creative organizing through which the civil rights movement grew from a regional protest against Jim Crow to a national movement for racial justice.

Again it is noteworthy, especially as a foreshadow of Rustin's later deviation, that even during this period of heightened racial conflict, Rustin never abandoned his pacifist crusade. As Anderson put it, Rustin was "a leading member of the radical jet set," flying off to conferences in Europe, India, and Africa. In late 1959 Rustin was abroad protesting France's first nuclear test in the Sahara, and was absent from the planning for the 1960 national conventions, much to the ire of Randolph. According to Anderson, "Rustin therefore found himself in the middle of a tug-of-war between the two political causes to which he was equally committed, pacifism and black protest activism."

Yet it was Bayard Rustin who emerged as the chief organizer and tactician for the climatic 1963 March on Washington. Despite the qualms of some civil rights leaders, Rustin was named Randolph's deputy director. The march was originally conceived, not as a demonstration for civil rights, but as a demonstration around economic issues, particularly the need for jobs and a higher minimum wage. It was to be sponsored by the Negro American Labor Council, the association of black trade unionists that Randolph formed within the AFL-CIO. According to an internal memorandum that Rustin prepared for Randolph, the march would entail "the co-ordinated participation of all progressive sectors of the liberal, labor, religious, and Negro communities." It was King who insisted that the march focus on civil rights as well as economic issues, and to appease King the march was renamed as a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The March is remembered as the epitome of protest politics. It was, after all, "the biggest, and surely the most diverse, demonstration in history for human rights." In retrospect, however, the March was the glorious finale of the protest movement, and embodied the seeds of an imminent transformation "from protest to politics," for Rustin personally and for the movement as a whole.

THERE WAS A POLITICAL PRICE TO THE COALITION that Rustin so actively sought. In order to enlist the support of hundreds of civic, labor, and religious organizations, the politics of the march had to be confined to what was politically safe. As Milton Viorst comments in Fire in the Streets, "the March increasingly adopted the posture of a moral witness against evil; participation became not a matter of politics but of conscience, and support swelled."5

Thus, while the March had all of the earmarks of "protest," it actually represented the ascendancy of a new brand of "coalition politics," the antithesis of the politics of confrontation that were at the core of the black protest movement. Nothing better illustrates this than the well-documented muzzling of John Lewis. According to Viorst:

Lewis had planned to denounce Kennedy's civil rights bill as inadequate, and declare that SNCC could not support it. He saw an opportunity for SNCC to shatter an illusion that the palliatives of liberal America could achieve the goals of racial justice. SNCC's rhetoric was now of revolution.

Rustin required all speakers to hand in the text of their speeches the night before, and Lewis's touched off an acrimonious debate. James Forman, who helped draft the speech, insisted that it was "a dynamite speech" that "would puncture the tranquility of the march and the efforts of the Kennedy administration to make this look like a popular uprising in favor of his civil rights bill."6 On the other hand, Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall were determined that Lewis be muzzled, and they enlisted the support of Bishop Patrick O'Doyle who was scheduled to deliver the opening invocation.7 Even as the ceremonies were about to begin, O'Doyle threatened to withdraw. At a hasty conference behind the Lincoln Memorial, Randolph and Rustin prevailed on Lewis to excise the controversial passages.

Thus did a mass demonstration at the apex of the black revolt against America's racial tyranny proceed without so much as a discordant note that might rankle the political establishment. King's celebrated I-have-a-dream oration was embraced precisely because it vented no anger, cast no aspersions, but on the contrary, invoked America's ideals and substituted utopian reverie for political action. It is worth noting that King's oration had another message: "There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges." But if these words were heard at all, they were instantly expunged from collective memory.

After King spoke, it was Rustin who took the microphone, asking for verbal ratification of the goals of the March: passage of Kennedy's civil rights bill, a $2.00 minimum wage, desegregation of schools, a federal public-works job program, and federal action to bar racial discrimination in employment. Later that evening Rustin and the other civil rights leaders were received at the White House, remuneration for keeping within the bounds of political acceptability.

Whether the March, with its decorum and stirring oratory, helped to build momentum for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is open to question. Malcolm X's appraisal is memorable: "Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing in 'We Shall Overcome' . . . while tripping and swaying along, arm-in-arm, with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against?" Even the New York Times concluded that the demonstration "appeared to have left much of Congress untouched physically, emotionally, and politically."8 To say, as Anderson does, that "in November 1963, the spirit of the March on Washington was dealt a severe blow by the assassination of President Kennedy" is to miss the point. It was Kennedy's assassination and Johnson's subsequent landslide that secured the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

ACCORDING TO ANDERSON, IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MARCH Rustin "began emerging as a political figure in his own right, not simply an intellectual factotum of the protest movement." No longer the outsider, the gadfly, the troublemaker, he was photographed alongside Randolph on the cover of Life. Whether such personal blandishments played a role in Rustin's move toward the respectable center is difficult to say. What is clear, though, is that the 1963 March marked a decisive turn in Rustin's politics. It would be followed in short order by three events that would complete his political metamorphosis:

1. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention Rustin was drawn into the imbroglio over the challenge by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, organized by SNCC, to unseat the party regulars. At Johnson's behest, Walter Reuther and Hubert Humphrey brokered a compromise that would have given the FDP two seats alongside white supremacists in the Mississippi delegation. Rustin opted on the side of compromise. This, from the man whose credo as both pacifist and civil rights activist was never to forego principle for expediency, never to back down even if one had to endure the blows and the retribution of the oppressor.

It is one thing, predictable and even pardonable, that pragmatists within the Democratic Party would seek a compromise to avoid a fissure that could bring the party down to defeat. But it is quite another thing when Bayard Rustin -- the personification of resistance -- capitulates to Dixiecrats from a state infamous for racist violence and the murder of civil rights workers. According to Anderson, this episode "marked the virtual end of the popularity Rustin had once enjoyed among young militants of the protest movement."

2. Rustin's next act of political perfidy took the form of an article that he published in the February 1965 issue of Commentary. Aptly entitled "From Protest to Politics," the article was a manifesto in reverse. Now that the structure of segregation had been destroyed, Rustin reasoned, the politics of confrontation had outlived its purpose. Future progress would depend not on the tactics of direct action, but forging a progressive coalition that would seek power through the Democratic Party. To quote Rustin:

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. I speak of the coalition which staged the March on Washington, passed the Civil Rights Act, and laid the basis for the Johnson landslide -- Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups.9

In the abstract, this might well seem a plausible political stratagem. The reality, however, was quite otherwise. In the first place, Rustin's strategy was predicated on blind faith in the labor movement. Rustin wrote: "The labor movement, despite its obvious faults, has been the largest single organized force in this country pushing for progressive social legislation." However, the pervasive racism in labor unions can hardly be wiped away with a parenthetical phrase: "despite its obvious faults." In an article in the Fall 1966 issue of New Politics, ironically entitled "From Protest to Politicking," Julius Jacobson derided Rustin's starry-eyed depiction of organized labor in terms that are instructive to those who today look to labor for a resurgence of Left politics:

. . . the coalitionists who preach the vital necessity of a Negro- Labor alliance today and are guided in their actions by coalitionist concepts, never give an idea of what the Labor half of this partnership-to-be looks like! It is an extraordinary omission, especially since most of them will admit that there are "obvious faults" and "inadequacies" afflicting the labor movement. Exactly what and how extensive are these failings? What is its vision? What are the internal practices of labor organizations? What is their record in action? Are they democratic organizations? Etc., etc. These are questions assiduously avoided by most coalitionist theorists, for good reason. . . . To reveal the trade union establishment as it actually is would not only embarrass their patrons but expose the central fallacy of coalitionism.10

Jacobson went on to review the sorry record of unions with respect to blacks, especially the systematic and near-total exclusion of blacks from craft unions, and the failure of the AFL-CIO even to endorse the March on Washington.

Rustin's coalitionism required yet another leap of faith: that the Democratic Party would serve as the venue for a progressive politics. In "From Protest to Politics," Rustin claimed that "the Johnson landslide proved the 'white backlash' to be a myth." We now know that this was a profound miscalculation, that Nixon would soon be swept into office on a white backlash that reached deep within the ranks of organized labor, and that the Democratic Party would renounce its own liberal traditions and gravitate fatally toward the political center. This we know with the benefit of hindsight. However, in his 1966 critique of coalitionism, Jacobson prophetically denounced the idea that Rustin's liberal coalition could ever reshape the Democratic Party into "a truly progressive people's party." To quote Jacobson: