Rustin, who had been so undisciplined in his sexual life, saw nonviolence as a means a protester could use to discipline himself against these corruptions. Nonviolent protest in this view is different from normal protest. It demands relentless self-control. The Gandhian protester must step into race riots without ever striking out, must face danger while remaining calm and communicative, must confront with love those who deserve to be hated. This requires physical self-discipline, marching into danger slowly and deliberately, keeping one’s arms curled around one’s head as the blows rain down. It requires emotional discipline, resisting the urge to feel resentment, maintaining a spirit of malice toward none and charity toward all. It requires above all the ability to absorb suffering. As King put it, the people who had suffered for so long had to endure more suffering if they were to end their oppression: “Unearned suffering is redemptive.”35
The nonviolent path is an ironic path: the weak can triumph by enduring suffering; the oppressed must not fight back if they hope to defeat their oppressor; those on the side of justice can be corrupted by their own righteousness.
This is the inverted logic of people who see around them a fallen world. The midcentury thinker most associated with this ironic logic is Reinhold Niebuhr. People like Randolph, Rustin, and King thought along Niebuhrian lines, and were influenced by him. Niebuhr argued that, beset by his own sinful nature, man is a problem to himself. Human actions take place in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension. We simply can’t understand the long chain of consequences arising from what we do, or even the origins of our own impulses. Neibuhr argued against the easy conscience of modern man, against moral complacency on every front. He reminded readers that we are never as virtuous as we think we are, and that our motives are never as pure as in our own accounting.
Even while acknowledging our own weaknesses and corruptions, Niebuhr continued, it is necessary to take aggressive action to fight evil and injustice. Along the way it is important to acknowledge that our motives are not pure and we will end up being corrupted by whatever power we manage to attain and use.
“We take and must continue to take morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization,” Niebuhr wrote in the middle of the Cold War. “We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.”36
Behaving in this way, he continued, requires the innocence of a dove and the shrewdness of a serpent. The ultimate irony is that in any struggle “we could not be virtuous if we were really as innocent as we pretended to be.”37 If we were truly innocent we couldn’t use power in the ways that are necessary to achieve good ends. But if you adopt a strategy based on self-doubt and self-suspicion, then you can achieve partial victories.
Culmination
At first Rustin and Randolph had trouble rallying civil rights leaders around the idea of a March on Washington. But the violent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, during the spring of 1963 changed the mood. The whole world saw the Birmingham police force setting dogs on teenage girls, unleashing water cannons, and hurling boys into walls. The images mobilized the Kennedy administration to prepare civil rights legislation, and they persuaded nearly everybody in the civil rights movement that the time was right for a mass descent on the nation’s capital.
Rustin, as the chief organizer of the march, expected to be named the official director. But at a crucial meeting, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP objected: “He’s got too many scars.” King vacillated and finally Randolph stepped in, saying he would himself serve as director of the march. This would give him the right to appoint a deputy, and he would appoint Rustin, who would be director in all but name. Wilkins was outmaneuvered.
Rustin oversaw everything from the transportation systems to the toilet facilities to the speaker lineup. To avoid confrontation with the D.C. police he organized a corps of black off-duty policemen and gave them training in nonviolence. They were to surround the marchers and prevent clashes.
Two weeks before the march, the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond went on the Senate floor and lambasted Rustin for being a sexual pervert. He introduced the Pasadena police booking slip into the Congressional Record. As John D’Emilio points out in his outstanding biography Lost Prophet, Rustin instantly and inadvertently became one of the most visible homosexuals in America.
Randolph leaped to Rustin’s defense: “I am dismayed there are in this country men who, wrapping themselves in the mantle of Christian morality, would mutilate the most elementary conceptions of human decency, privacy and humility in order to persecute other men.”38 Since the march was only two weeks away, the other civil rights leaders had no choice but to defend Rustin as well. Thurmond ended up doing Rustin a great favor.
The Saturday before the march, Rustin issued a final statement that summed up his policy of tightly controlled aggression. The march, he declared, “will be orderly, but not subservient. It will be proud, but not arrogant. It will be non-violent but not timid.”39 On the day, Randolph spoke first. Then John Lewis brought the gigantic crowd to full roar with a fiery, aggressive speech. Mahalia Jackson sang and King delivered his “I have a dream” speech.
He ended with the refrain from the old spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last!” Then Rustin, playing a master of ceremonies role, mounted the podium and reintroduced Randolph. Randolph led the crowd in a pledge to continue the struggle: “I pledge that I will not relax until victory is won…. I will pledge my heart and my mind and my body unequivocally and without regard to personal sacrifice, to the achievement of social peace through social justice.”
After the march, Rustin and Randolph found each other. As Rustin would later recall, “I said to him, ‘Mr. Randolph, it looks like your dream has come true.’ And when I looked into his eyes, tears were streaming down his cheeks. It is the one time I can recall that he could not hold back his feelings.”40
In the final decades of his life, Rustin cut his own path, working hard to end apartheid in South Africa, bucking the civil rights establishment in New York City during a crucial teachers’ strike in 1968, defending the ideal of integration against more nationalist figures like Malcolm X. In those final years, he did find personal peace, in the form of a long-term relationship with a man named Walter Naegle. Rustin almost never spoke about his private life in public, but he did tell an interviewer, “The most important thing is that after many years of seeking, I’ve finally found a solid, ongoing relationship with one individual with whom I have everything in common, everything…. I spent years looking for exciting sex instead of looking for a person who was compatible.”
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THE STORY OF A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin is the story of how flawed people wield power in a fallen world. They shared a worldview based on an awareness of both social and personal sin, the idea that human life is shot through with veins of darkness. They learned, Randolph instantly and Rustin over a lifetime, to build an inner structure to contain the chaotic impulses within. They learned that sinfulness is battled obliquely through self-giving, by directing life away from the worst tendencies. They were extremely dignified in their bearing. But this same sense made them aggressive in their outward strategy. They knew that dramatic change, when it is necessary, rarely comes through sweet suasion. Social sin requires a hammering down of the door by people who are simultaneously aware that they are unworthy to be so daring.