Bring on the angelic troublemakers

This week I’m writing about a man I knew nothing about; when I did become aware of him, I felt sheepish that I hadn’t known of him earlier. We are on the eve on the presidential election as I write, so we have another 24 hours at the earliest before we’ll know the results of America’s voting, but we have already seen some of the corrosive results of the vitriolic atmosphere of this presidential campaign that has gone on way, way too long. You might think an electorate already cynical and/or apathetic about politicians who for years have seemed bent on adding to the mountain of obstructionism, deceit, corruption, immorality and just plain stupidity would be inured to further disappointment, but that is not the case, and it concerns me deeply.

I have talked with many people who are sick of the whole process and have quit paying attention at all; many who don’t like either candidate and lump them into equal balls of dislike, disgust and distrust; and most alarmingly, some people who are so disheartened with the distortion of democracy, they have said they will not vote at all. I do understand that people feel hopeless and disillusioned, thinking they have no good choices; that their vote doesn’t count; that they’re not tuning out or choosing not to vote because they care too little but because they care too much and can’t take the pain. If we give up, I feel that those who have lost sight of what it even means to work for the common good, making a mockery of the democratic process, have triumphed.

So I pay tribute to a man who had multiple reasons to give up many times in his life, but as a gay, black, radical pacifist, he persisted in his efforts to speak up and right what he felt was wrong, providing leadership in social movements for civil rights, socialism, non-violence and gay rights. Bayard Rustin is best-remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States with 250,000 attending. Near the end of the march, Rustin read aloud the list of the march’s ten “demands of this revolution,” right before King and Roy Wilkins hand-delivered them to President Kennedy.

By immersing myself in the life and words of Bayard Rustin, then sharing them with you, I hope to contradict some of the invective and hate-mongering that has been clogging the airways and my brain by bringing to our attention this amazing human being. Actually, he was beyond amazing: he was good––really, really good; not a saint, but a man who followed his conscience to a degree that would probably make most of those around him uncomfortably aware of their own shortcomings.

Rustin lived from 1912 to 1987, born into a Quaker family that gave him a foundation in civil rights work, nonviolence and belief in the worth of every person. He flirted with communism in his 20’s while in college and was openly gay, which are two of the reasons he is less well known to us. Opponents attempted to discredit him with this ammunition, so he rarely acted as a public spokesperson, operating instead behind the scenes so as to not to negatively impact the groups he worked with. Not until the 1980s did he became a public advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes. He was jailed for two years when he refused to register for the draft during World War II. He could have avoided jail as a conscientious objector, but he felt the war was immoral and that he couldn’t cooperate with the war effort even in that manner. He said, “It was by going to jail that we called the people’s attention to the horrors of war.”

In his personal philosophy, Rustin combined the pacifism of the Quaker religion, the non-violent resistance taught by Mahatma Gandhi, and the socialism espoused by African-American labor leader A. Philip Randolph with whom he worked during WWII to fight discrimination in war-related hirings. After meeting the labor organizer, Rev. A. J. Muste, he participated in several pacifist groups, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

In spite of his skills as a strategist, activist and leader, he was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. For protesting segregated public transit in North Carolina in 1947, 10 years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, he was sentenced to a chain gang for several weeks. For engaging in homosexual activity, he was sent to jail for 60 days.

By the 1950s, Rustin was an expert organizer of human rights protests. In 1958, he helped coordinate a march in England of 10,000 people protesting the use of nuclear weapons. He brought the techniques of nonviolence to the American civil rights movement, convincing Martin Luther King, Jr. to embrace non-violence and do without the armed guards. As a valued advisor, he helped King become an international symbol of peace and nonviolence.

Rev. William Barber, called the most important progressive political leader in North Carolina in generations, said of Rustin: “If it wasn’t for the Quaker Brother Bayard Rustin, the 1963 March on Washington wouldn’t have ever gotten out of the gate. Nobody else could handle all those egos and put them in their place. I don’t know what he said, but he made those folk get together and understand that the March had to be more than a one-day event in Washington, D.C. It had to be a call to go back home and continue the work.”

In 2013, President Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given to a private citizen, saying, “Bayard had an unshakable optimism, nerves of steel, and, most importantly, a faith that if the cause is just and people are organized, nothing can stand in our way,” adding, “These are the men and women who in their extraordinary lives remind us all of the beauty of the human spirit, the values that define us as Americans, the potential that lives inside of all of us.”

Speaking about his life, Rustin said, “My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. Those values are based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal.... The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief in the oneness of the human family. It demanded my involvement in the struggle to achieve interracial democracy, but it is very likely that I would have been involved had I been a white person with the same philosophy.”

Today, our country still struggles with many of the issues Bayard Rustin worked to change. Continued activism for peace, economic justice, human rights and the dignity of all people is an ongoing need, the only appropriate response for people of conscience. Rustin said in one of his most famous quotes, “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.”