Bayard Rustin: A Gay Man in the Civil Rights Movement. [View all]
A post in FB popped up this morning with a mention of this wonderful man, whose meaningful contributions to civil rights were largely ignored for several years because he was gay.
I am one of the comparative few who remembers him from those years. By wonderful happenstance, he was a speaker at my Peace Corps Training Program at Princeton, NJ in 1964. I will never forget the impressions of courage and humanity that literally emanated from him. I was proud to meet him in person then, and even prouder now that I had that opportunity.
It took MUCH too long for others to appreciate his contributions. But President Obama did so in 2013 with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/bhm-heroes/bayard-rustin-gay-man-in-the-civil-rights-movement/
He recognized Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen King’s leadership; Rustin promoted the philosophy of nonviolence and the practices of nonviolent resistance, which he had observed while working with Gandhi’s movement in India. Rustin became a leading strategist of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1968.
He was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was headed by A. Philip Randolph, the leading African-American labour-union president and socialist. Rustin also influenced young activists, such as Tom Kahn and Stokely Carmichael, in organizations like the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
After the passage of the civil-rights legislation of 1964–65, Rustin focused attention on the economic problems of working-class and unemployed African Americans, suggesting that the civil-rights movement had left its period of “protest” and had entered an era of “politics”, in which the Black community had to ally with the labour movement. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans.
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