News of the incident spread across activist circles nationwide. Some of his supporters were upset to learn he was gay, but Rustin had never really hidden that. Mostly they were upset because his sexual activities undermined the example he had been setting as a disciplined, heroic resister. In a movement that called upon its leaders to be peaceful, self-restrained, and self-purifying, Rustin had been angry, arrogant, lax, and self-indulgent. A. J. Muste, the leader of FOR and Rustin’s mentor, wrote him a harsh letter:
You have been guilty of gross misconduct, especially reprehensible in a person making the claims to leadership and—in a sense—moral superiority which you were making. Furthermore, you have deceived everybody, including your own comrades and most devoted friends…. You are still far from facing reality in yourself. In the self that has been and still is you, there is nothing to respect, and you must ruthlessly cast out everything in you, which prevents you from facing that. Only so can your true self come to birth—through fire, anguish complete and child-like humility…. You remember Psalm 51: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness—wash me thoroughly from mine iniquities and cleanse me from my sin…. against thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight…. Create me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”24
In a later letter, Muste made it clear that it was not Rustin’s homosexuality he was objecting to, but his promiscuity: “How utterly horrible and cheap where there is no discipline, no form in the relationship.” Just as an artist with the freest vision, the most powerful creative urge, submits to the severest discipline, so, too, must a lover tame his impulses in order to reach “the discipline, the control, the effort to understand the other.”
With promiscuity, Muste continued, “we come close to the travesty and denial of love, for if love means depth, means understanding above the ordinary…means exchange of life blood, how can that happen among an indefinite number of people?”
Rustin initially resisted Muste’s harsh judgment, but eventually, after weeks in isolation, he surrendered, writing a long, heartfelt letter in reply:
When success was imminent in our racial campaign my behavior stopped progress…. I have misused the confidence that negroes here had in my leadership; I have caused them to question the moral basis of non-violence; I have hurt and let down my friends over the country…. I am a traitor (by our means of thought) just as surely as an army captain who willfully exposed military positions during a battle…. I have really been dedicated to my “ego.” I have thought in terms of my power, my time, my energy and of giving them to the great struggle. I have thought in terms of my voice, my ability, my willingness to go into the non-violent vanguard. I have not humbly accepted God’s gifts to me…. [This] has led, I now see, first to arrogance and pride and then to weakness, to artificiality and failure.25
A few months later Rustin was permitted to travel home, with an accompanying guard, to visit his dying grandfather. While on the way home, Rustin met up with Helen Winnemore, a fellow activist and an old friend. Winnemore told Rustin she loved him and wanted to be his life companion, to give him the heterosexual relationship, or at least cover, so that he could continue his work. In a letter to his longtime male lover, Davis Platt, Rustin summarized the offer Winnemore had made, paraphrasing her words:
Now since I believe that once redeemed your power for service and redemption of others will be vast, and since I believe your greatest immediate need is for real love, real understanding, and confidence, I tell you without shame of the love I have for you, of my desire to be with you thru light and darkness, to give all that I possess that the goodness within you shall live and flower. Men must see the goodness that potentially is yours and glorify your creator. This, Bayard, she went on to say in effect, this [is the] love I have for you and I offer it joyfully not for myself or for you alone, but for all mankind, which would profit by what your integration would mean—and then for a long time we were silent.26
Rustin was touched by Winnemore’s offer. “Never had I heard such unselfish love speak in a woman. Never had I sensed a more simple and complete offering.” He did not take Winnemore up on her offer, but he regarded it as a sign from God. The memory of their conversation brought him “a joy that is almost beyond understanding—a flash of light in the right direction—a new hope…a sudden reevaluation…a light on the road I know I should travel.”27
Rustin vowed to curb his arrogance, the spirit of anger that had marred his pacifist activities. He also rethought his sex life. He fundamentally accepted Muste’s critique of his promiscuity. Rustin worked on his relationship with his longtime lover Davis Platt, exchanging a series of long, searching letters with him in the hopes that one truly loving relationship would serve as a barricade against lust and promiscuity.
Rustin remained in prison until June 1946. Upon his release he immediately became active again in the civil rights movement. In North Carolina, he and some fellow activists sat at the front of a segregated bus and were beaten and nearly lynched. In Reading, Pennsylvania, he extracted an apology from a hotel manager after a clerk denied him a room. In St. Paul, Minnesota, he conducted a sit-in until he was given a room. On a train from Washington to Louisville he sat in the middle of the dinner car from breakfast straight through lunchtime as the waiters refused to serve him.
When A. Philip Randolph called off a resistance campaign, Rustin harshly criticized his mentor for issuing a statement that was nothing more than a “weasel worded, mealy mouthed sham.”28 He was quickly ashamed of himself, and he avoided Randolph for the next two years. When they finally met again, “I was so nervous I was shaking, waiting for his wrath to descend upon me.” Randolph laughed it off and resumed their relationship.
Rustin went on speaking tours around the world, a star once again. He also continued to seduce men at every stop. Eventually Platt threw him out of their apartment. Then, in 1953, while on a speaking engagement in Pasadena, he was arrested at just after three in the morning. He was performing oral sex on two men in a car when two county police officers approached and arrested him for lewd vagrancy.
He was sentenced to sixty days in jail, and his reputation would never fully recover. He had to dissociate himself from his activist organizations. He tried unsuccessfully to get a job as a publicist for a publishing house. A social worker suggested he get a job cleaning bathrooms and hallways in a hospital.
Backstage
Some people try to recover from scandal by starting where they were and simply continuing through life. Some people strip themselves down and start again from the bottom. Rustin eventually understood that his new role was to serve his good cause, but in the background.
Rustin slowly recommitted himself to the civil rights movement. Instead of being the star speaker, leader, and organizer, he would forever after be mostly in the shadows, working behind the scenes, receiving no credit, shifting the glory to others, like his friend and protégé, Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin wrote for King, spread ideas through King, introduced King to labor leaders, pushed him to talk about economic as well as civil rights issues, tutored him on nonviolent confrontation and the Gandhian philosophy, and organized one action after another on King’s behalf. Rustin was a significant player in the Montgomery bus boycott. King wrote a book about the boycott, but Rustin asked him to take out all references to his own role. When asked to sign some public statement on behalf of this or that stand, he generally refused.