Tomorrow we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an American hero who devoted his life to making this country a place where everybody could enjoy the rights promised by our constitution. As we honor Dr. King, it is fitting to remember other fighters in the cause of justice who worked side by side with him. I'm thinking particularly of a dear friend, Bayard Rustin, the tenth anniversary of whose death will come this year.
Saying that Rustin was a major force in the civil rights movement of the 1960s is true, but it doesn't get to the heart of his life and character Rustin was a gifted leader, but he headed no mass organization. His influence came from his moral, intellectual, and physical courage. In some respects, he was the quintessential outsider-- a black man, a Quaker, a one-time pacifist, a political and social dissident, a homosexual. Yet Rustin always believed in the necessity of creating political coalitions to enable minorities to build majorities in support of lasting progress. Jervis Anderson's new biography, Bayard Rustin: The Troubles I've Seen, which is being published this month by Harper Collins, presents a full-length portrait of this extraordinary man that 'will tell even Rustin's friends things they did not know about his fife.
Anderson's account of Rustin's role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s is particularly valuable because Rustin often worked behind the scenes. For example, he played a critical part in helping Martin Luther King develop the strategy of nonviolence that King first used in the Montgomery bus boycott. Dr. King was strongly attracted to the idea of nonviolent protest. However, he was uncertain about the practical strategies needed to carry it out. Rustin's Quaker pacifist background and his understanding of nonviolence, as practiced in India by Gandhi and his followers, provided the practical knowledge Dr. King needed to create the form of protest that he would use in Montgomery And throughout his career.
He always insisted that racism is evil, no matter who is the victim. Rustin is perhaps best known as a strategist and chief organizer for the 1963 March on Washington. As Anderson reminds us, it was largely thanks to Rustin's political insight that the march focused on jobs as well as freedom, Rustin understood that political equality would be worth very little unless black people could also have equality of economic opportunity. But the march was also a success because Rustin made sure the details were right. We are now relatively blase about the idea of large numbers of people converging on Washington. In 1963, it created great apprehension. Would the march really be peaceful? How did the organizers propose to get 100,000 protesters into the city and out again on the same day? Anderson reports that one policeman said it took nearly a year to get ready for an inaugural parade-and Rustin had only seven weeks to organize every detail of this march. There could be no greater tribute to Rustin's skill than the fact that no one ever comments on the logistics of the march-only on its enormous success.
With the passage of the civil rights and voting rights legislation, Rustin believed it was time to change course and move, as he put it in one of his articles, "From Protest to Politics." Street protest had achieved what it could. The remaining problems were social and economic and required political solutions. Rustin believed that the best future for African-Americans lay in building coalitions with others who also opposed injustice and racism and who wanted to work for a society in which everyone had a decent education and a chance for a decent job. A staunch integrationist, he opposed the new movement toward racial separatism, and he continued to insist that racism is evil, no matter who is the victim. These were not popular positions, and many of his old comrades accused him of being an Uncle Tom and worse. But Rustin was never one to stick his finger up to see which way the wind was blowing.
In a commencement address to Tuskegee students in 1970, Rustin described the kind of society he envisioned: ... an integrated social order in which black people, proud of their race and heritage, shall have no door closed to them. In such a social order there will no longer be walls, representing fear and insecurity, to separate people from one another. Such walls, whether constructed by whites or by blacks, are built to oppress and repress, but never to liberate. I admit that most likely we will not achieve such equality next month, or next year, or even in this decade. But it is a goal that we must hold ever before us ... for it not only confers dignity upon our struggle, but it should indicate to us how we must act toward one another today if we are to preserve for tomorrow the possibility of a just society.
Jervis Anderson's book reminds us of how much we have lost.