Martin
Luther King, Jr. Day and the Legacy of Bayard Rustin
By
Harper Jean Tobin
This time each year the nation pauses to
contemplate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We congratulate ourselves
on our nation's progress; we renew our resolve to work for equality and social
justice; and, perhaps most of all, we debate just what that legacy means, and
how it relates to the pressing issues of the day. Now that Dr. King, once a
controversial risk-taker and an enemy of the government, has belatedly taken
his place as a symbol of American freedom, we argue over what he would say
about affirmative action, national security measures, the war in Iraq, and gay
and lesbian rights.
It is perhaps on this last issue
that our debates remain most contentious; even King's family members take
public stands on opposite sides of the issue. The fallen leader's niece, Alveda
King and youngest daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, recently spoke at King's
grave for a demonstration denouncing same-sex marriage and any attempt to link
it to King's legacy. Around the same time, Coretta Scott King, his widow and
still a formidable activist, as well as his former student-activist colleague
Rep. John Lewis, invoked that same legacy as vocal advocates of marriage
equality. Son Martin Luther King III, meanwhile, denounced homophobia but
declined to take a stand on marriage.
But perhaps more significant on this
day of reflection than the fractured current positions of King's family and
colleagues is the story of the little-known man who masterminded the historical
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, chronicled definitively in the recent
biography Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.
A lifelong activist for peace and
equality, Rustin organized sit-ins and even a proto-Freedom Ride against
segregation as early as the mid-1940s. When he heard of the Montgomery bus
boycott, Rustin rushed to meet its leader, and quickly became the much-younger
King's mentor and confidante. Indeed, Rustin, a devoted student of Gandhi,
taught King practically everything he knew about nonviolent political action.
But Rustin's homosexuality, known
and generally tolerated among his activist colleagues, quickly became a
political liability for the blossoming civil rights movement. In that age of
shame and secrecy, furtive trysts with relative strangers were the only kind of
affectionate connection available to most gay men and America -- rendezvous
local police were ever eager to target.
On a handful of occasions Rustin was
the victim of such arrests, and foes of King et al eagerly leapt upon them to
blackmail the movement. A Black moderate alarmed by King and Rustin's
disruptive tactics, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell threatened to charge the two with
having an affair if they went ahead with plans for a march on the 1960
Democratic convention. Outraged by the upcoming 1963 March on Washington,
segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond -- whose unsteady relationship with his
illegitimate Black daughter was detailed in her recent memoir -- brandished one
of Rustin's arrest slips on the Senate floor, denouncing the March and the
movement as the machinations of a sexual pervert. Thurmond had obtained the
years-old document from the FBI Director and closet case, J. Edgar Hoover.
Though King stood by Rustin in
internal debates on this matter, Rustin insisted on remaining out of the
limelight and, eventually, on distancing himself from King and SCLC. He largely
accepted that society was not ready to accept him -- though at times he
resented being singled out for his sexual liaisons while King and others in his
circle were openly adulterous.
Though active for the rest of his
life in campaigns against the war in Vietnam, Apartheid in South Africa, and
poverty in America, and buoyed by finally finding in the late 1970s a loving
life partner, Rustin's career after the March was something of an anticlimax.
It was not until the 1980s that, at the urging of his partner Walter Neagle, Rustin
began to advocate for gay and lesbian rights. Just a year before his death in
1987, Rustin declared that, "the barometer for social change is measured
by selecting the group which is most mistreated," and that in the '80s,
"the new 'niggers' are gays."
A civil rights activist long before Brown
v. Board, today Rustin would recognize across America a kind of sequel to
the social and political backlash that accompanied that decision and that
movement's coming of age. Just as Brown and Black protests gave renewed
passion to American racism even as it was in decline, so today forces in our
nation mobilize with renewed fervor against gay and lesbian equality. Like Gov.
George Wallace, and the young segregationist preacher Jerry Falwell, these
forces are unwilling or unable to recognize that none of their temporary
victories can prevent their ultimate defeat. Indeed, the campaigns against
marriage equality may be a kind of long last stand in a generation-long war of
attrition.
Without doubt, the struggle for gay
and lesbian equality is not the same struggle, its history not the same
history, as the long and continuing struggle for Black equality. Some of the
most important differences stem from the changes wrought on America by the
latter. But the crucial parallels, embodied in the life and work of Bayard
Rustin, are clear to see, as it is that Rev. Falwell's eager apologies for his
former racist stance will be echoed in the future by his colleagues today.