[Vision2020] The Gay Man Who Organized the March on Washington 50 Years Ago

[Nicholas Gier]

Good Day Visionaries:

For the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, I've dusted off
and slightly revised the column below.

Read all of my columns on civil rights at www.NickGier.com. Go to the
"Civil Rights" link.

Let us all attempt to fulfill King's dream,

Nick

THE GAY MAN WHO ORGANIZED THE 1963 MARCH ON WASHINGTON

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington
and the “I Have a Dream” speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave on
that occasion, I want to remind readers about the brave man who
organized the event.

As a young politically active black man in the post war period, Bayard
Rustin had, in addition to his race, three strikes against him: he was
a pacifist; he was a Communist; and he was openly homosexual.

In 1936 Rustin became a member of the Young Communist League, but he
broke with the party when it decided to forego civil rights work in
favor of supporting the Soviet Union.

>From 1944 to 1946 Rustin served 28 months in a federal penitentiary
for refusing to report for military service.  While in prison he
worked diligently to end segregation in the prison dining hall.

During World War II he began his long association with the Fellowship
of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization founded by a Quaker and a
Lutheran in 1914.  His grandmother, who raised him, was a Quaker, but
she and her grandson attended a local African Methodist Episcopal
Church.

Rustin was an all inclusive civil rights worker.  He traveled to
California to protect the property of Japanese Americans who had been
interned during the war.  While in prison he established the Free
India Committee, and he urged the use of Gandhi’s principle of active
nonviolence for all civil rights work.

In 1947 Rustin led an attempt to integrate the interstate bus system.
In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he and his associates were set upon by
a mob, but it was he, rather than his attackers, who served 22 days of
hard labor for being blamed for this incident.

In 1953 he was arrested for having sex with two other men.  Thanks to
a 2003 Supreme Court decision decriminalizing sodomy, no one can be
prosecuted for consensual sex of any sort in today's America.  The
Texas law that was struck down was particularly discriminatory in that
it did not outlaw "unnatural" sex acts between heterosexuals.

In 1956 he became an adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. and his
previous civil rights experience was instrumental in the success of
the boycott. Rustin biographer John D’Emilio writes that Rustin “was
the perfect mentor for King at this stage in the young minister’s
career, and in the ensuing months and years, Rustin left a profound
mark on the evolution of King’s role as a national leader.”

Rustin convinced King that he needed a permanent organization to
stabilize his movement, so together they founded the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). When black Congressman Adam
Clayton Powell threatened to expose him as a gay man, Rustin was
forced to resign his SCLC leadership position.

Working behind the scenes, Rustin was the main organizer for the 1963
March of Washington, the venue for King’s “I have a Dream” speech.
The other organizers made sure that Rustin was not given any public
credit for this historic event.

Supplied with FBI wire tap information, Senator Strom Thurmond gave a
speech in the Senate in which he called Rustin a "Communist,
draft-dodger, and homosexual."  For the first time someone came to
Rustin’s defense.  Labor leader A. Philip Randolph attested to
Rustin’s integrity, and as David Garrow states, “Thurmond’s attack
melted away with surprisingly little impact.”

His last civil rights battle was for gay brother and sisters. As he
said:  “The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no
longer the black community, it’s the gay community. Because it’s the
community which is most easily mistreated.”

This week at the White House this courageous individual will receive a
well deserved award: President Obama will present him with a
posthumous Medal of Freedom.

Nick Gier of Moscow taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.