If one had to list the greatest accomplishment of Bayard Rustin’s career, it would probably be the 1963 March on Washington. He was called in as official organizer less than two months in advance—and against the private objections of some civil rights leaders, who worried that his sexual orientation, an open secret, would detract from their aims. Against the odds, Rustin (1912–1987) brought a fractious movement together and helped to orchestrate an event that changed history.
Rustin’s life as an activist spanned many decades and embraced more than a single cause, however; he was at once intensely principled and politically savvy, a rare combination. In the late 1930s, as a student at City College, he joined the Young Communist League, working by day to coordinate the league’s Committee against Discrimination in the Armed Forces, and by night singing the blues in a Greenwich Village nightclub. He broke with the party in 1941 after it called for American intervention in the war against Germany—his Pennsylvania Quaker upbringing and deeply held pacifist convictions trumping shallower affiliations—and became A. J. Muste’s youth secretary and protégé at the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In 1942 he joined other fellowship members in nonviolent protests—among the first “Freedom Rides”—on segregated buses in the South.
Rustin continued to protest segregation during the war, as a prisoner of conscience in federal correctional facilities in Ashland, Kentucky, and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he spent twenty-eight months, all told. (His letter to his draft board opposing conscription is reprinted below.) Prison authorities isolated and then transferred Rustin not only for his civil disobedience but for his “psychopathic personality”—his too overt sexual relations with other prisoners. Even the charitable Muste chided him for such behavior.
Following his release in 1947, Rustin resumed his civil rights work. Gandhi personally invited him to India to attend a pacifist conference scheduled for 1949; after Gandhi’s assassination, he met with members of his circle. In 1956 he arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, to advise the young Martin Luther King Jr. on both strategy and Gandhian thought; he helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to aid King, and mentored young activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality.
Rustin was a risky colleague to have in those days, both because of his history with communism and because of his homosexuality, so he was sometimes kept out of sight; the dimensions of his role in the peace and civil rights movements have become clearer only since his death. In 2013, President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presenting it to his longtime partner Walter Naegle.
November 16, 1943
Gentlemen:
For eight years I have believed war to be impractical and a denial of our Hebrew-Christian tradition. The social teachings of Jesus are: (1) respect for personality; (2) service the “sumum bonum”; (3) overcoming evil with good; and (4) the brotherhood of man. Those principles as I see it are violated by participation in war.
Believing this, and having before me Jesus’ continued resistance to that which he considered evil, I was compelled to resist war by registering as a conscientious objector in October 1940.
However, a year later, September 1941, I became convinced that conscription as well as war equally is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus. I must resist conscription also.
On Saturday, November 13, 1943, I received from you an order to report for a physical examination to be taken Tuesday, November 16, at eight o’clock in the evening. I wish to inform you that I cannot voluntarily submit to an order springing from the Selective Service and Training Act for War.
There are several reasons for this decision, all stemming from the basic spiritual truth that men are brothers in the sight of God:
1. War is wrong. Conscription is a concomitant of modern war. Thus conscription for so vast an evil as war is wrong.
2. Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe, but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.
Today I feel that God motivates me to use my whole being to combat by nonviolent means the ever-growing racial tension in the United States; at the same time the state directs that I shall do its will; which of these dictates can I follow—that of God or that of the state? Surely, I must at all times attempt to obey the law of the state. But when the will of God and the will of the state conflict, I am compelled to follow the will of God. If I cannot continue in my present vocation, I must resist.
3. The Conscription Act denies brotherhood—the most basic New Testament teaching. Its design and purpose is to set men apart—German against American, American against Japanese. Its aim springs from a moral impossibility—that ends justify means, that from unfriendly acts a new and friendly world can emerge.
In practice further, it separates black from white—those supposedly struggling for a common freedom. Such a separation also is based on the moral error that racism can overcome racism, that evil can produce good, that men virtually in slavery can struggle for a freedom they are denied. This means that I must protest racial discrimination in the armed forces, which is not only morally indefensible but also in clear violation of the Act. This does not, however, imply that I could have a part in conforming to the Act if discrimination were eliminated.
Segregation, separation, according to Jesus, is the basis of continuous violence. It was such an observation which encouraged him to teach, “It has been said to you in olden times that thou shalt not kill, but I say unto you, do not call a man a fool”—and he might have added: “for if you call him such, you automatically separate yourself from him and violence begins.” That which separates man from his brother is evil and must be resisted.
I admit my share of guilt for having participated in the institutions and ways of life which helped bring fascism and war. Nevertheless, guilty as I am, I now see as did the Prodigal Son that it is never too late to refuse longer to remain in a non-creative situation. It is always timely and virtuous to change—to take in all humility a new path.
Though joyfully following the will of God, I regret that I must break the law of the state. I am prepared for whatever may follow.
I herewith return the material you have sent me, for conscientiously I cannot hold a card in connection with an Act I no longer feel able to accept and abide by.
Today I am notifying the Federal District Attorney of my decision and am forwarding him a copy of this letter.
I appreciate now as in the past your advice and consideration, and trust that I shall cause you no anxiety in the future. I want you to know I deeply respect you for executing your duty to God and country in these difficult times in the way you feel you must. I remain
Sincerely yours,
Bayard Rustin
P.S. I am enclosing samples of the material which from time to time I have sent out to hundreds of persons, Negro and white, throughout our nation. This indicates one type of the creative work to which God has called me.