BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin
(March 1, 1912 – August 24, 1987)
American political activist, accomplished tenor vocalist
Born in West Chester, PA
“We are all one. And if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.” — Bayard Rustin
Rustin was a brilliant theorist, tactician and organizer for the trade union and civil rights movements. Highly educated, he attended Wilberforce College, Cheyney State Teachers College and City College of NY. He conceived the coalition of liberal, labor and religious leaders who supported passage of the civil rights and anti-poverty legislation of the 1960s.
Most notably, Rustin organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with only two months of planning. Recruited by his mentor A. Philip Randolph; he helped create what would be, at the time, the largest protest in America’s history.
Rustin and the leaders of the march made it clear that economic and workers’ rights were an integral part of the fight for civil rights for African Americans. The primary list of demands included a massive job training and placement program with a living wage, a national minimum wage that gave all Americans a decent standard of living, an expanded Fair Labor Standards Act and a federal Fair Employment Practices Act that would prohibit discrimination not only by the government, but by employers and unions, too.
Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship, in 1954; and before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group to provide material and legal assistance to people threatened with eviction from their tenant farms and homes.
He organized Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips taking by civil rights activist to combat segregation; and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign and to teach King about non-violent engagement.
In 1965, Rustin co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), a labor organization for Black trade union members. Rustin worked to strengthen the labor movement, which he saw as the champion of empowerment for the African American community and for economic justice for all Americans. He contributed to the labor movement’s two sides, economic and political, through the support of labor unions and social-democratic politics. Rustin worked to integrate unions and promote unions among African Americans to ensure African American workers’ rightful place in the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization). He was the organization’s executive director until 1972, a regular columnist for the AFL-CIO newspaper and remained an honorary president until his death in 1987.
Despite being beaten, arrested, jailed and fired from various leadership positions; he overcame and made a huge impact on the civil and economic rights movement. Later in life, Rustin joined other union leaders in aligning with ideological neoconservatism. Bayard Rustin was a man for all people. He left a legacy that people throughout the world still benefit from today. In a statement by President Ronald Reagan he described Rustin as, “a great leader in the struggle for rights in the United States for human rights throughout the world. He added that Rustin ” never gave up his conviction that minorities in America could and would succeed based on their individual merit”.
Some of his accolades include several buildings named in his honor in various states and the UK, honorary degrees from universities, streets, plays, movies and documentaries of his life. In addition, a Pennsylvania State Historical Marker was placed at Lincoln and Montgomery Avenues, West Chester, PA, and on the grounds of Henderson High School, which he attended.
On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
For more information about Bayard Rustin check out your local library.