Congratulations to Steve Hendrix and the Washington Post for running a long article about unsung hero Bayard Rustin and the challenges he faced for being gay, both from people inside and opposed to the civil rights movement. Hendrix writes:
"In 1960, Adam Clayton Powell, the minister-congressman from Harlem, threatened to float a rumor that King was one of Rustin’s lovers if King didn’t exile him from his inner circle. King pushed him away, reluctantly, and Rustin resigned from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“Bayard had a lot of baggage — communist youth member, conscientious objector,” says Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner for the last decade of his life. “But being gay was the one thing that was still unforgivable to a lot of civil rights leaders.”
"But others never abandoned him, most notably A. Philip Randolph, a dean of the movement and Rustin’s longtime mentor. When the moment came for an unprecedented mass gathering in Washington, Randolph pushed Rustin forward as the logical choice to organize it.
“The details for him had real meaning,” Horowitz says. “It had to be well organized, nonviolent and peaceful, because nobody believed that black Americans could organize a march of this size. Even liberals said there would be riots.”
"In mid-August, with the march looming over Washington as a growing juggernaut, it was then-Sen. Strom Thurmond who took aim at the man steering it. Speaking on the Senate floor, the South Carolina segregationist, then a Democrat, filled eight pages of the Congressional Record with detailed denunciations of Rustin as a draft-dodging communist homosexual and a convicted “sex pervert.” Thurmond had the entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record."
For more, read John D'Emilio's biography Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
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