Bayard Rustin: A legacy of protest and politics, ed by Michael G Long

Author: Michael G Long. Review by Simon Webb

Everybody knows something about the 1963 March On Washington, when Martin Luther King delivered his powerful ‘I have a dream’ speech. Fewer people know that it was organised by a black Quaker, Bayard Rustin. This new book of essays on Rustin reveals how, over five decades of activism, Bayard did even more.

Born to an unmarried teenager in Pennsylvania in 1912, Rustin, named after the Quaker poet Bayard Taylor, grew up thinking that his mother was his sister and that his grandmother was his mother. ‘The legacy of Grandmother Julia Rustin’, an essay by Walter Naegle that appears in this book, shines light on the indomitable spirit of this woman, whose heritage included Lenape first nation forbears. Julia seems to have been immensely supportive of her grandson, even when it became clear that he was gay (Naegle was Bayard’s partner until the latter’s death in 1987). Others, in the mid twentieth century when gay activity was illegal in every US state, were less enlightened.

In the run-up to the 1963 march, Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, told Rustin that he objected to him being in control because of ‘the whole business of you being arrested in California on a sex charge’. In the same frank phone conversation, Wilkins also expressed his uneasiness about Rustin having once been a communist, and a conscientious objector. But Rustin’s ally and fellow activist, the union organiser A. Philip Randolph, found a way to put Bayard in charge without him being officially in charge.

In 1963, the Quaker’s contribution went far beyond organising the sandwiches. It was Rustin who had instructed Martin Luther King in the intricacies of his own brand of Gandhi-inspired nonviolent protest. Rustin himself also spoke at Washington, his practical words contrasting with King’s more poetic and visionary speech.

In his introduction, Long warns the reader that, fearless though he was, Rustin made mistakes. What about the women who were not allowed to speak in 1963? What about Bayard’s misplaced belief that the Democrats would bring about the fairer society he had campaigned for, and his assertion that ‘the colour issue’ might be becoming old hat, and that the new fight was for gay rights?

The book ends with inspiring essays from a new generation re-interpreting Rustin’s legacy for a new century – a century characterised, as Ariel Gold puts it, by ‘the overturning of Roe v. Wade, rampant voter suppression, the pervasiveness of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, rising attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, and a gun violence epidemic in which Black Americans are ten times more likely to die from gun homicide than their white counterparts’.

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