But Randolph had one more important contribution to make to the civil rights movement. In the 1940s and 1950s he was among those who championed nonviolent resistance as a tactic to advance the civil rights cause. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and some of the early labor movement tactics, he helped form the League of Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation in 1948.14 Against most of the established civil rights groups, which advocated education and reconciliation over confrontation and contention, Randolph argued for restaurant sit-ins and “prayer protests.” As he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1948, “Ours would be [a movement] of non-resistance…. We would be willing to absorb the violence, absorb the terrorism, to face the music and to take whatever comes.”
This tactic of nonviolence relied on intense self-discipline and renunciation of the sort Randolph had practiced his entire life. One of the aides who influenced Randolph and was influenced by him was Bayard Rustin. A few decades younger, Rustin shared many qualities with his mentor.
Rustin
Bayard Rustin grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and was raised by his grandparents. He was well into boyhood before he learned that the person he thought was his older sister was actually his mother. His father, who suffered from alcoholism, lived in the town but had no role in Rustin’s life.
Rustin remembered his grandfather as having “the most erect carriage of any person you have ever seen. None of us can remember a single unkindness in him.” His grandmother had been raised a Quaker and was one of the first black women in the county to receive a high school education. She impressed upon Bayard the need for calm, dignity, and relentless self-control. “One just doesn’t lose one’s temper” was one of her favorite maxims. His mother also ran a summer Bible camp, with emphasis on the book of Exodus, which Bayard attended every day. “My grandmother,” he recalled, “was thoroughly convinced that when it came to matters of the liberation of black people, we had much more to learn from the Jewish experience than we had to learn out of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”15
In high school Rustin was a good athlete and wrote poetry. Like Randolph, he spoke in a proper, almost British accent, which could appear haughty to those who first met him. His classmates teased him for his excessive dignity. One high school classmate recalled, “He spoke biblical poetry. And Browning. He would tackle you and then get up and recite a poem.”16 As a freshman he became the first black student in forty years to win his high school’s oratory prize. By senior year he made the all-county football team, and he was a class valedictorian. He developed a passion for opera, Mozart, Bach, and Palestrina, and George Santayana’s novel The Last Puritan was one of his favorite books. On his own he also read Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, which, he testified, was like “taking a whiff of something that simply opens your nostrils except that it happened in my brain.”17
Rustin went off to college at Wilberforce University in Ohio and then Cheney State in Pennsylvania. While in college he realized he was gay. The realization did not induce too much emotional turmoil—he had been raised in a tolerant family and was to live more or less openly as a homosexual for his entire life—but it did cause him to move to New York, where there was at least an underground gay culture and a bit more acceptance.
Once in Harlem, he went in multiple directions at once, joining leftist organizations and also volunteering to help organize Randolph’s March on Washington effort. He joined a Christian pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and quickly emerged as a rising star of the movement. Pacifism was a way of life for Rustin. It provided him with both a path to inner virtue and a strategy for social change. The path to inner virtue meant suppressing personal anger and the violent tendencies inside. “The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself,” Rustin would say.18 As a strategy for change, pacifism, he later wrote in a letter to Martin Luther King, “rests upon two pillars. One is resistance, continuous military resistance. The evildoer is subjected to pressure so that he never is permitted to rest. Second it projects good-will against ill-will. In this way, nonviolent resistance is a force against apathy in our own ranks.”19
Throughout his late twenties, Rustin traveled for FOR, electrifying audiences around the country. He staged constant acts of civil disobedience, which quickly became legendary in pacifist and civil rights circles. In 1942 in Nashville he insisted upon riding in the white section of a public bus. The driver called the police. Four officers arrived and beat him while Rustin maintained a passive, Gandhian demeanor. As David McReynolds, a member of FOR, later recalled, “Not only was he the Fellowship’s most popular lecturer but he was also a genius at tactical matters. Bayard was being groomed by FOR to become an American Gandhi.”20
In November 1943, when he received his draft notice, Rustin decided he would take a stance of noncooperation and go to jail rather than serve in one of the rural labor camps as a conscientious objector. At that time, one out of every six inmates in federal prison was a prisoner of conscience. These inmates thought of themselves as the shock troops of pacifism and civil rights. Locked away, Rustin aggressively defied the prison’s segregationist policies. He insisted upon eating in the Whites Only part of the dining hall. During free time he stationed himself in the Whites Only part of the cell block. Sometimes his agitation got him in trouble with the other prisoners. On one occasion a white prisoner went after him, bashing him with a mop handle, landing blows on Rustin’s head and body. Once again, Rustin went into a Gandhian pose of nonresistance. He simply repeated over and over again, “You can’t hurt me.” Eventually the mop handle snapped. Rustin suffered a broken wrist and bruises across his head.
Word of Rustin’s exploits soon spread beyond prison walls, to the wider press and activist circles. In Washington, officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, under the leadership of James Bennett, classified Rustin as a “notorious offender,” in the same category as Al Capone. As his biographer John D’Emilio put it, “Throughout Rustin’s 28-month imprisonment, Bennett was plagued by letters from subordinates who pleaded for advice on what to do about Rustin, and from Rustin’s supporters on the outside who kept an eye on his treatment.”21
Promiscuity
Rustin behaved heroically, but there was also an arrogance and an anger and sometimes a recklessness in his behavior that was not in keeping with his stated beliefs. On October 24, 1944, he felt compelled to send a letter to the warden apologizing for his behavior at a disciplinary hearing. “I am quite ashamed that I lost my temper and behaved rudely,” he wrote.22 There was also a recklessness to his sexual life. Rustin was gay at a time when gay life was pushed underground, when there was no public affirmation for gays and lesbians. But there was a relentlessness to Rustin’s search for partners that even his lovers found disturbing. His speaking tours before and after prison involved constant rounds of seduction. One long-term lover complained that “coming home one day and finding him in bed with somebody else was not my idea of fun.”23 In prison he was flagrant about his sexual interests and was several times caught performing fellatio on other prisoners.
The prison authorities eventually convened a disciplinary hearing. At least three prisoners testified that they had seen Rustin performing oral sex. At first Rustin lied, vehemently denying the charges. When authorities announced they were putting him in a separate part of the prison as punishment, he wrapped his arms and legs around a swivel chair, resisted the guards, and ended up in isolation.