I can distinctly remember in grade school, making paper cutouts for a class project when I first heard King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was around Martin Luther King Day and while we worked we listened, captivated by the powerful voice rising from the audio player. Afterward, we memorized portions of the speech, learned about the civil rights movement, passive resistance, and why it’s important to preserve the legacy of a man like Dr. King.
I wouldn’t learn about Bayard Rustin, the openly gay black activist and architect of the March on Washington where King delivered that famous speech, for years to come. And, when I did discover him, it wasn’t in a text book, which begs the question: why aren’t Rustin’s contributions more widely known, and how, furthermore, do we contextualize his legacy without this institutional recognition?
Rustin recognized by President Obama, in film
With the recent announcement that President Barrack Obama will be honoring the late Rustin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom award– the highest honor awarded to civilians – there is optimism amongst social justice groups that Rustin’s contributions to history will, indeed, finally be recognized. In a press release, the Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition (NJBC), Sharon J. Lettman-Hicks, thanked President Obama for “lifting up this important piece of our nation’s history.”
Rustin’s legacy was also recently memorialized in the excellent documentary Brother Outsider, which NBJC plans to screen at a commemorative event in Washington D.C. in the coming days. The documentary, which chronicles Rustin’s life, his commitment to passive resistance and to social and economic justice, is also scheduled to return to public television in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington on August 28th, broadcasting at 7 p.m. as a part of the “America ReFramed” series on public television’s WORLD Channel.
Epitomizing his philosophy, the film opens with a clip of Rustin addressing a rapt crowd, declaring, “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable…our power is in our bodies…we need to put them in places so that the wheels can’t turn.”
Rustin’s voice was as strong as his conviction to do good for all mankind through such passive resistance, I learned from Brother Outsider. While grasping to understand this man of iconic stature, which civil rights history had almost forgotten, I sought additional modern voices who lent flesh and depth to Rustin’s burgeoning historical legacy.
Rustin’s humble beginnings lead to greatness
Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912, in Brother Outsider we watch Rustin – an eloquent orator, musician, and skilled athlete – begin his lifelong fight for social justice, holding a sit-in in his hometown to integrate a restaurant, then rising to prominence as one of Martin Luther King, Jr’s advisers, and a leading strategist for the Civil Rights Movement.
We also glimpse the bigoted attitudes that have relegated him, as an openly gay black man, to the stage wings of history. Harvey Swados, American social critic and author, astutely observed in an essay for The Nation in 1963 that, “despite a driving mind, ruthless as a clenched fist, [he] was so unrecognized that reporters were always nudging each other to ask who was the graying guy with the moustache and how do you spell his name?”
Bennett Singer, one of the filmmakers behind Brother Outsider, spoke to theGrio about how he believes Rustin’s legacy fits in to the current political landscape, specifically at a time when debates over civil rights – from Stop and Frisk to the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – continue to dominate headlines. We are finally seeing racial and sexuality justice movements converging in the public’s mind.
Singer explains that he was, “most interested in how Rustin, as a central figure in the civil rights movement, came to be so comfortable with his sexuality.” The documentarian spent five years researching for the film.
“It’s incredible,” Singer told theGrio, “to think about someone growing up in the 1920s, and coming out to his grandmother in high school.”
Rustin: Rare out man in his generation
In the documentary we learn that Rustin’s grandmother was a Quaker, and a tolerant woman who strongly believed in justice.
“At one point,” Singer added, “he was asked what led to his activism. He said it actually didn’t come from being gay or black, but from being Quaker,” signifying that his disgust with segregation was due in part with its conflict with his core religious beliefs.
Singer began his research by digging through old FBI files the agency kept on the activist, which were preserved by his partner of the last ten years of his life, Walter Neagle.
“It was important to show that from the FBI’s perspective, Rustin was a subversive,” Singer says of a theme displayed in the documentary prominently. Voiceovers depicting the FBI files bookend many crucial parts of Rustin’s life in the film.
Ostracized from history for being gay
Singer goes on to explain that it is undoubtedly Rustin’s sexuality that stands out as one of the factors in his vilification, and the cause for his effective erasure from the popular discourse on the Civil Rights Movement.
After a very public arrest in 1953 for ”homosexual acts,” he served 60 days in jail in California, and was stigmatized for much of the remainder of his career, his reputation seen by some in the movement as a liability. The American poet and activist Amiri Barraka went so far as to refer to him in an open letter as “the big gun of white oppression” for collaborating with labor movements, and a “paid pervert.”
Nonetheless, Rustin maintained his beliefs and remained outspoken on issues of civil rights as a matter of universal human rights, turning in the 1980s to the gay rights movement as the next measure of America as a civil society.
In an essay adapted from a speech Rustin delivered to a gay rights group at the University of Pennsylvania, he drew a very clear connection between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement towards the end of his life.
“Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us,” Rustin said. “Nor was it our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America… such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest the hate. That’s our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiments.”
On the black-gay civil rights divide
Today, many would agree that it can be hard for African-Americans and gay Americans can see their common struggle. When asked why he thought some groups were sensitive to these kinds of comparisons, Singer is clear.
“It is absolutely important to underscore that those movements are different and it doesn’t do to conflate them,” he told theGrio, “but as President Obama put it in his inaugural speech, there are important connections to be drawn between Seneca Falls and Stonewall. I think Rustin would focus on the continuous struggle for universal economic equality and political engagement across movements.”
Sultan Shakir, Director of Youth and Campus Outreach for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve LGBT equality, shares Singer’s view.
“From where [he] sits,” Shakir said of Rustin’s wider view of activism, “in the fight for social justice, there is a need to identify allies wherever you can find them, in any space that you can. Any smart organizer understands that it has to be a broader movement if it is going to be really successful, wherever the talent comes from.”
The power of uniting in struggle
This point is well drawn by The Nation‘s Swados, who in his gripping profile of the organizers of the March on Washington decades ago, recognized that it took “the joint efforts of talents as diverse as Cleve Robinson and Anna Arnold Hedgeman… joining together… to produce the mighty torrent of humanity flowing through Washington.” He also referenced the shared interests of the labor movement, led by A. Phillip Randolph, and the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., which led to greater success for both struggles through uniting.
Shakir goes further, pointing out that, “for both movements — [the civil rights and the gay rights movement] — creating allies is key, and there are plenty of community leaders — Al Sharpton and Ben Jealous -– who see the importance of identifying the intersections.”
The question, however, remains – where do we go from here? That is to say, while Rustin’s legacy is being honored by the Obama administration 26 years after his death, how is the preservation of that legacy of unifying movements being secured, and what are social justice groups doing to propagate his memory?
Surprisingly, Singer indicates that one way Rustin’s legacy is reaching people is through corporate diversity programs.
Keeping Rustin’s legacy alive — one step at a time
“A number of workplaces have been inviting us to show the film,” Singer told the Grio. “Government agencies, the Department of Justice, American Express, Google, lots of law firms, have all posted programs as part of diversity initiatives. Often it’s the first time black groups and LGBT groups at these organizations have collaborated.”
He also points to new legislation signed by California Governor Jerry Brown, adding lessons on LGBT history to social studies classes in California as a precedent that he hopes will ensure stories like Rustin’s are told with more consistency.
For organizations like HRC, Shakir explains that in their outreach, “Not only do [they] make an effort to look back on individuals like Rustin, who [were] asked to prioritize one social identity over another, [they] also ask [their] students to reflect inwardly on what parts of themselves they’ve been asked to make invisible.”
Meanwhile, NJBC has been working for the last two years on the Bayard Rustin 2013 Commemoration project to promote Rustin’s legacy by petitioning for the Medal of Freedom, and employing a “multi-tiered strategy to garner Rustin the recognition he deserves.”
What seems essential to all of these strategies is the need to continue to educate young people on Rustin’s legacy, if his contributions are to be known to posterity. Perhaps if we’re able to weave stories like his more equitably into the American tapestry, his greatest legacy will be opening our eyes to the need to acknowledge our overlapping identities, while proudly portraying them in the stunning truth of accurately recorded history.
Chase Quinn is a freelance writer, art critic, and budding novelist, who has worked with several leading human rights organizations in the U.S. and the U.K., promoting social and economic justice. Follow Chase on Twitter at @chasebquinn.