Celebrating Black History Month: Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin, born on March 17, 1912, was a civil rights organiser and activist, best known for his work as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and ‘60s.

He attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, and Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheney University of Pennsylvania) in Pennsylvania, both historically Black schools. In 1937 he moved to New York City and studied at City College of New York. He was briefly involved with the Young Communist League in 1930s before he became disillusioned with its activities and resigned.

In 1953 Rustin, who was homosexual, was arrested in California after he was discovered having sex with a man. He served 50 days in jail and was registered as a sex offender. However, he continued to live as an openly gay man. While his sexual orientation resulted in him taking a less public role, he was hugely influential within the civil rights movement.

In the mid-1950s Rustin became a close adviser to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and he was the principal organizer of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin later was the chief architect of the March on Washington (August 1963), a massive demonstration to rally support for civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress.

Rustin was attacked as a “pervert” or “immoral influence” by political opponents from segregationists to Black power militants, and from the 1950s through the 1970s. In addition, his pre-1941 Communist Party affiliation when he was a young man was controversial. To avoid such attacks, Rustin served only rarely as a public spokesperson. He usually acted as an influential adviser to civil-rights leaders. In the 1970s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes.

“…of all the leaders of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin lived and worked in the deepest shadows, not because he was a closeted gay man but because he wasn’t trying to hide who he was…I ask that if you teach children one new name from the heroes of black history, please let it be Bayard Rustin.” - Henry Louis Gates, Jr., scholar, 2013

During the 1980s, Rustin also opened up publicly about the sexuality he had “sublimated” since the 1950s. (This coincided with his falling in love with Walter Naegle, now serving as executor and archivist of Rustin’s estate.) In a 1987 interview with the Village Voice, Rustin said, “I think the gay community has a moral obligation … to do whatever is possible to encourage more and more gays to come out of the closet.”

For his part, he worked to bring the AIDS crisis to the attention of the NAACP, once predicting, “Twenty-five, 30 years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.”

On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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