The Man Who Taught Nonviolence to Martin Luther King Jr.

Wednesday, 18 February 2026

Bayard Rustin (right) and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. leave the Montgomery County Courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. The civil rights leaders, among many others, were arraigned after protesting segregated busing in the state. Credit: Gene Herrick/AP

Al Letson revisits a story about civil rights activist Bayard Rustin that he produced 16 years ago for Black History Month.

Back in February 2010, the radio show State of the Re:Union, created by Al Letson, produced an award-winning episode looking at civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. The episode was called “Who Is This Man?” because while Rustin was not well known, his work supported the likes of Martin Luther King Jr.

Rustin was a man with a number of seemingly incompatible labels: Black, gay, Quaker—identifications that served to earn him as many detractors as admirers. Although he had numerous passions and pursuits, his most transformative act, one that certainly changed the course of American history, was to counsel MLK on the use of nonviolent resistance.

Rustin also helped engineer the 1963 March on Washington and frame the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. With such lofty achievements, why isn’t Rustin considered an icon of both civil rights and humanity? How could a person who changed the course of American history not be a household name? Was he purposely kept out of the history books?

This week on More To The Story, we bring you an important piece for Black History Month, a reflection on Rustin.

Dig Deeper

Read: Can He Really Do That? Black History Month in the Age of Trump (Mother Jones)

Listen: Nikole Hannah-Jones: Trump Is Erasing Black History (More To The Story)

Credits

Transcript

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson:	He’s been called the lost prophet of the Civil Rights Movement and was key to the success of the 1963 March on Washington.
Bayard Rustin:	I believe the March on Washington said to the American people, “We are now capable of having that kind of love and affection and absence of bigotry, which means we can become one nation.”
Al Letson:	Coming up on More To The Story, we’re sharing a radio episode about a hero of mine, Bayard Rustin. It’s from another time in my life before President Trump and COVID and even before Reveal. You don’t want to miss it.
	This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson and almost two decades ago at this point, I hosted my first show called State of the Re:Union. It was a little program with big ambitions that I created with a small but passionate team. One of them was Taki Telonidis. You hear his name in our credits here. When I came to Reveal, I dragged him along with me. Given that it’s Black History Month, Taki and I were reminiscing about one of our first episodes that we did on State of the Re:Union about Bayard Rustin. Rustin was a Black gay Quaker who taught Martin Luther King the practice of nonviolence.
	So we thought we would bring back this important episode produced by Tina Antolini, my sister from another mister. Now one thing you got to know is when this thing came out, I was a baby host. I was just getting started, still fresh from my days as a performance poet. So even though I love this hour, there are parts of it that make me cringe a little bit and think, God, was I ever that young? But the story of Bayard Rustin does not make me cringe. It is absolutely worth a listen. The man was fascinating, and I hope you enjoy it.
	It’s February 1956, Montgomery, Alabama. A young preacher named Martin Luther King is leading a bus boycott after a Black woman, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus. At this point, you have to understand that Montgomery is one match away from an explosion. The racial tensions in the city are high and no one knows how this will end. On this day, a dark car pulls up to Dr. King’s house. Two African-American men get out of the car, walk up to the porch, nod to the armed guards by the door, and are escorted into King’s sitting room.
Bayard Rustin:	And when we rushed into Dr. King’s living room, I said, “Watch out, Bill. There’s a gun in that chair,” because he was about to sit on the gun.
Al Letson:	That is the voice of the most important civil rights leader that I’d never heard of, A Mr. Bayard Rustin. Now Bayard is an activist up north. He’d been applying the Gandhian principles of nonviolent protest to the civil rights cause long before anyone had ever heard of Martin Luther King. When the bus boycott began, it was clear that this was the moment the civil rights struggle had been waiting for. But Bayard knew that fundamental changes had to be made in order for the boycott to be a success.
Bayard Rustin:	I think it is fair to say that Dr. King’s view of nonviolent tactics was almost non-existent when the boycott began. In other words, at that point, Dr. King was committing himself and his children at home to be protected by guns.
Al Letson:	Which is understandable given the very real dangers King and his followers were facing. Bayard spoke to King passionately about his belief that the presence of guns compromised the boycott and could become a dangerous liability. His point was illustrated when late one night the armed guards posted at King’s House almost shot a young boy delivering a telegram.
Bayard Rustin:	That incident brought Dr. King up against the implications of these guns, and we talked many, many hours about tactics and nonviolence, and I presume that Dr. King may have learned something from those discussions.
Al Letson:	And the universe exhaled. When I first heard this story of Bayard schooling Martin Luther King on the practice of nonviolence, I imagine that my thoughts were similar to Dr. King’s as he sat across from Bayard for the first time. You see, they were two months into the boycott. The participants had been beaten, arrested and King’s home had been bombed, and Mr. Rustin was telling him to get rid of the guns, no protection. I’m sure that Dr. King sat there, thought about his wife, his children himself, and what Bayard was asking him to do and thought, who is this man?
Dave McReynolds:	He was the American Gandhi we had been looking for.
John D’Emilio:	Bayard Rustin was a fighter for racial justice and peace in the United States.
Al Letson:	March 17th, 1912, Westchester, Pennsylvania, Bayard Rustin, born to a teenage mother raised by his grandmother whose Quaker roots run deep, but his grandmother told him not to take nothing from nobody, yet all around him injustice prevails. Who is this man that as a teenager fought segregation? One man sit-ins protesting, challenging, shaking up the status quo. Who is this man?
George Houser:	He was very innovative, very creative in his ideas.
Joyce Ladner:	But also he had a kind of strategic mind.
Rachelle Horowitz:	And he was an incredible organizer.
Al Letson:	At an early age, knew he was different.
Joyce Ladner:	Because he lived his life very openly and there was no snickering around that Bayard is gay behind his back because he was very straightforward in who he was.
Al Letson:	Comfortable in his own skin at a time when his skin was a detriment, comfortable with being gay when gayness was a crime, comfortable with standing for what he believed when what he believed pushed against the grain.
George Houser:	People took a liking to him or maybe they hated his guts in some cases.
Al Letson:	Joins the pacifists, vows to create racial equality in a segregated land. Vows to fight with words to sharpen his intellect. Thinks outside the box, but as the country fights the second world war, the peaceful warrior refuses to pick up a gun.
John D’Emilio:	Rustin declares himself a conscientious objector, which leads to a jail sentence in federal prison during World War II or two and a half years.
Al Letson:	Locked in a jail cell, far from the Red Oaks of Westchester they tell him to just be quiet and serve your time.
John D’Emilio:	Rustin being the man that he is, doesn’t just go to prison and decide, “Well, I’ll sit here until they let me out.” But he decides he’s going to organize in the prison against racial segregation.
Al Letson:	Who is this man?
John D’Emilio:	Just before he was about to launch a strike, prison officials pull him aside and bring him up on charges of engaging in sexual activity with other inmates and the remaining two years in prison were a torture for him.
Al Letson:	Shh, quiet little bird or will clip your wings. Don’t fly too high or we’ll push you down. Don’t dream of the sky or we will wake you up.
MUSIC:	Then I get down on my knees and I pray, oh, Lord.
Al Letson:	But his voice won’t be silent. He sings in the night.
Bayard Rustin:	The democratization and socialization the Negro cannot do alone.
Al Letson:	He sings in the night.
Bayard Rustin:	We are nonviolent because injury to one is injury to all.
Al Letson:	He sings in the night.
Bayard Rustin:	Now we are all one, and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.
Al Letson:	Who is this man? Black, gay, pacifist, friend, activist, rebel rouser, human being who changed the world, but the history books left behind?
Bayard Rustin:	We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
Speaker 9:	There is no Negro problem, there is no southern problem, there is no northern problem. There is only an American problem.
Martin Luther King Jr.:	So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Al Letson:	Now when most of us think about the civil rights movement, we tend to think about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X. But all of that begins to happen in the mid-1950s. But Bayard on the other hand, was doing his work in the ’40s. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Bayard and others set out on what they called the journey of reconciliation.
	In 1944, Irene Morgan, a Black woman, got on a bus going from Virginia to Maryland. She was arrested for sitting in the white section. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court where they ruled it was unconstitutional to demand segregation on interstate travel. That ruling presented an opportunity to fight racial injustice directly. The organization that Bayard was working for the Fellowship of Reconciliation decided to send a mixed group of Black and white men to travel together through the upper South to test the enforcement of the ruling.
George Houser:	And we didn’t know what was going to happen.
Al Letson:	George Hauser worked with Bayard through the ’40s and ’50s and joined him on that journey.
Igal Roodenko:	Each day we would decide on two Guinea pigs.
Al Letson:	Igal Roodenko was another participant in the journey.
Igal Roodenko:	I mean a Black and a white would sit together in the front or two whites would sit in the back, or two Blacks would sit in the front and the others on the trip would act as observers so that if and when these cases came to court, they could act as witnesses.
Al Letson:	The small unlikely group started out from DC and made their way south and for the most part, the trip went smoothly until April 13th, 1947.
George Houser:	It was a lazy Sunday afternoon in Chapel Hill and there were an awful lot of taxi cab drivers not doing very much business. Now I was to be in the second group that day. We were staying at the home of Reverend Charles Jones, a Presbyterian minister in Chapel Hill. Bayard was in the first group, and the two persons who were in jeopardy were Joe Philbin, white and Andy Johnson, Black.
Igal Roodenko:	And I was sitting somewhere in the back over a wheel and Bayard was sitting just behind me and then the bus driver sort of got into the bus ready to take off and he looked around, counting his passengers and he saw these two people sitting together in the third seat behind him and he came over and he told them they couldn’t do it.
George Houser:	So they were arrested immediately. Both of them. The police station was just across the street. At that point Bayard and Igal who were seated out of jeopardy decided they would take the seats, which the other two had just been arrested from. They then were arrested, and I came down with bail money.
Igal Roodenko:	And we saw a bunch of people, a growing number of people outside at the bus station muttering around and milling around and looking in our direction. And the center of this were the cabbies.
George Houser:	“Well, you guys will never get out of town until alive tonight,” they said to us. Well, Reverend Charlie Jones came down, and we all piled in his car. The cab drivers followed us.
Igal Roodenko:	These two cabs drew up in front of the house and about eight or 10 men started across the lawn with clubs or sticks or something, and we were really in a sweat.
George Houser:	Bayard was a very courageous guy. We stood together looking out the window at the taxi cab drivers from the front room of Charlie Jones’ home, and he smiled. He said, “Look, George, look at these guys. They’re so angry.” So we could smile at the incident while it was taking place, but we’re a little nervous about it at the same time because you don’t know what’s going to happen.
Igal Roodenko:	And then another car came up and some guy came out and talked to them and they left. And my assumption, our assumption was that this guy said, “Well, let’s not do it in day, open daylight.”
George Houser:	And the police came after about 20 minutes so that we were able to leave the house.
Igal Roodenko:	And then we proceeded on with the rest of the journey.
George Houser:	We had 12 arrests that took place in the two weeks that we traveled, but we were before the main thrust of the civil rights movement. We were in a sense, I guess you could say, “Pioneers.”
Al Letson:	The journey of reconciliation propels Bayard to the forefront of the civil rights cause. But as we’ll find out after the break, he soon makes a mistake that nearly cost him everything. Coming up, more from our State of the Re:Union episode, but first I want to remind you that there is a really easy way that you can keep up with all the important work we’re doing here at Reveal. You can sign up for our free newsletter. Just go to revealnews.org/newsletter to receive your weekly email reminding you about all of our good reporting. We have to stay connected now more than ever. All right, thank you, and we’ll be back soon.
	This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson, and this week we’re bringing you an episode of my old show, State of the Re:Union. It’s all about the activist Bayard Rustin.
	Now the late ’40s is a heady time for Bayard. After the journey of reconciliation, he begins to travel abroad, spending time in India working with Gandhi’s successor, and he’s sought after in Africa by several independence movements, fighting colonization. Now when he returns to The States, he tours the country giving performances that are part lecture, part concerts. Bayard has an amazing gift as an orator, but he also has a beautiful voice.
Bayard Rustin:	Now this is a work song and very typical of the way in which all men raised their hammers together and they all fell together.
MUSIC:	Take this hammer.
Al Letson:	He would lecture on the evils of colonialism and midway through the speech, sing a spiritual to illustrate his point.
MUSIC:	Carry it to the captain.
Al Letson:	Then one night in January 1953 on his speaking tour in Southern California, everything changes.
John D’Emilio:	He goes out one evening after his work is over and meets two men and is in a parked car having sex.
Al Letson:	Professor John D’Emilio has studied Bayard’s life for over 12 years and has written one of the defining biographies on Bayard entitled Lost Prophet.
John D’Emilio:	And he is discovered in downtown Pasadena by the Los Angeles County police, and he’s arrested on a public lewdness charge along with the two other men who were in the car and it becomes this huge public scandal.
Dave McReynolds:	He looked desolate, he looked shattered.
Al Letson:	Dave McReynolds was a young activist then who looked to Bayard as a mentor.
Dave McReynolds:	And I went out to see Bayard when he was in the county jail. He had a 60-day term, and he was completely shattered because this was not an arrest, which was a moral principle of any kind at all.
Al Letson:	Sitting in that jail cell in Pasadena, and he must’ve felt like everything he’d worked for was slipping through his fingers. In the ’50s, the stigma of being gay was a heavy burden to bear.
Speaker 12:	What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick, a sickness that was not visible like smallpox but no less dangerous and contagious, a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demand-
Al Letson:	Bayard’s arrest makes national news, and this may be the lowest point in his life, humiliated. Not wishing to bring shame on the fellowship of reconciliation, he resigns. Eventually he joins another peace organization, the War Resisters League, where he works on issues he’s passionate about. The difference being is that he’s moved out of the spotlight and concentrates his efforts behind the scene. And then in 1956, history comes calling.
Speaker 13:	Just the other day, one of the fine citizens of our community, Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger.
Al Letson:	Which brings us back to that night in Montgomery when Bayard first goes to see Dr. King.
John D’Emilio:	This is one of the ways in which Bayard Rustin affects the course of history in a significant way. Dr. King, of course, proves to be a man of enormous talents, and he was also a young man who did not have political organizing experience, and that’s what Bayard was able to provide. He was able to become Dr. King’s tutor at a very early stage in King’s career.
Al Letson:	Bayard gives the Montgomery boycott something it desperately needs, not just the expulsion of guns, but a righteous indignation, the feeling that they’re on the right side of history. When the arrest warrants were issued for a number of the boycott’s leaders, Bayard tells them, “Put on your Sunday best. Go as a group, turn yourself in, make it a celebration. Show them that you are not scared. Show them that you are on the side of justice.” You see the boycott tells Blacks not just in Montgomery but across the nation, that they have power, that they can make change, that the future they dream of for their children is right around the corner. And they may not be able to take a bus to get there. They may have to walk, carpool or take a taxi. It may take longer than they’d like, but they will get there. Bayard knows that in order for the boycott to work, it has to spread beyond Montgomery. The protest catches the imagination of the nation, but now they had to cast their net wider.
Bayard Rustin:	And I had said to Dr. King, “That I don’t think you can win in Montgomery unless these other places are better organized.” So Dr. King said, “What do you think we ought to do?” And I said, “I think there’s only one thing to do and that is to bring all these groups into a single organization.”
Al Letson:	That conversation is the beginning of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. With the help of several others, Bayard and Dr. King gather some 60 ministers from across the South. Their goal is to create an organization that will coordinate and support nonviolent direct action to fight segregation. Bayard serves as liaison between King and several northern civil rights leaders. His longstanding connections with prominent figures like A. Philip Randolph and A.J. Muste prove beneficial to the young organization. After a series of victories in the South, they begin to plan mass demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican conventions when Bayard’s past catches up with him. Historian John D’Amelio.
John D’Emilio:	And at that point, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell from New York City, a representative in Congress from Harlem, doesn’t like how public Rustin is becoming, doesn’t like that civil rights forces are going to target his Democratic Party. Doesn’t like that he’s not controlling what’s happening in this political arena.
Al Letson:	Powell pressured by the Democratic Party and possibly his own ambitions, lets it be known to Dr. King that if he doesn’t withdraw his support from the demonstrations, he’ll release to the press that King and Bayard are lovers.
John D’Emilio:	It’s a completely ridiculous thing. There isn’t a shred of truth to it, but it leads King to panic, and Bayard realizes that King is not going to defend him and stand up to Powell, and so Rustin chooses to resign.
Al Letson:	And it happens again. Bayard’s sexuality follows him like a shadow, a readily available weapon for his opponents to neutralize him and his work. In what has become a pattern when these accusations surface, Bayard chooses to remove himself from the front line and quietly works in the background. Occasionally he advises King from a distance, but he has no official role in the civil rights movement until A. Philip Randolph, who’d been a mentor to Bayard since the ’40s, begins to engage him once again.
John D’Emilio:	By the beginning of 1963, the civil rights movement was so in the headlines and was creating so much upheaval that Rustin and Randolph, and I don’t think one can ever know who brought it up first, but Rustin and Randolph in a conversation together at the end of 1962, say, “Well, in 1941 we talked about having a march on Washington and we never did it. Maybe now is the time.”
Rachelle Horowitz:	The 1963 March on Washington was a long time a coming, so to speak.
Al Letson:	Rachelle Horowitz has been working for Bayard ever since she was an idealistic college student in Brooklyn in the late ’50s.
Rachelle Horowitz:	And originally it was going to be a march for economic justice, but then events caught up with the planners, so to speak.
Al Letson:	The Kennedy administration has just filed a civil rights bill that shifts and broadens the focus of the march from solely economic issues to include equal rights. Now, the leaders of all the major civil rights organizations all know that Bayard is demand to organize the march, but they’re scared that his sexuality could become an issue. A. Philip Randolph, the elder statesman of civil rights, well respected by all parties declares that he will be the organizer, and he’ll appoint his staff as he sees fit and Bayard would be his right hand.
Rachelle Horowitz:	Bayard was named the deputy director or some Mickey Mouse title, but everybody knew that it was Bayard who was really organizing and making this thing happen.
MUSIC:	Oh [inaudible 00:23:46]
Rachelle Horowitz:	We actually, I think, organized the march itself once everybody agreed to it in about eight to six weeks and work began very early in the morning, ended very late at night and continued on through Sundays when often we’d have staff meetings and Bayard would give us the half day off at 3:00.
	Well, by that time it was 1963. I was a veteran Rustin hand, and he asked me if I would be the transportation coordinator, which I thought was pretty funny because I was 24 years old at that point and I didn’t know how to drive. I was a typical New Yorker, but he said, “No, no, you’re compulsive, and I know that you will not lose one bus.”
Joyce Ladner:	My job in preparation of the march was to help to bring as many poor people from the South to the march as possible. My name is Joyce Ladner. I met Bayard Rustin in the summer of 1963 in New York. I had to go out around New York, metropolitan area of New York City to raise as much money as possible. One of my friends Rachelle Horowitz always says, “That each time I went out to raise money, I came back with enough to charter yet another bus to bring a busload of people up to the march.”
Rachelle Horowitz:	Bayard was absolutely adamant that this was going to be a peaceful day, and all the press before we planned the march was virtually hysterical. That they’d have to call in the National Guard, that if all these Black folks came to Washington there would be riots. And Bayard was determined that not only would the march be peaceful, but it would go beyond that, that it would police itself and that it would be absolutely nonviolent.
Bayard Rustin:	The major thing we decided was that we would have only Black police inside the march policing, and only white police on the fringes where the Ku Klux Klan and other bigots were coming in so that you reduce the possibility of violence by having whites arresting whites who misbehaved and Blacks arresting Blacks who misbehaved.
Rachelle Horowitz:	So virtually every day during the planning of the march groups of 30 policemen and firemen would come up to March headquarters and Bayard would take them into a back alley, so to speak, and show them how to nonviolently move people in a crowd. You sort of do that by linking arms and pushing gently and really trained them in nonviolence. He believed that if things are well organized, people will naturally be well-behaved.
Al Letson:	But for all the meticulous planning Bayard is doing, there’s some things he has no control over.
Dave McReynolds:	Bayard had been very frightened or worried that the gay issue had come up before the march and Strom Thurmond took the floor of the Senate maybe three or four weeks before the date of the march.
Al Letson:	Strom Thurmond, senator from South Carolina and bitter enemy of desegregation, stands on the Senate floor and rails against Bayard and the march. He calls Bayard a draft dodger, a communist, a homosexual, and includes details of his arrest. Panic spreads through the march’s office. I mean Bayard must feel like it’s happening all over again. At the dawn of what could be his greatest accomplishment, a mistake from 10 years ago could take it all away, but A. Philip Randolph would not be coward.
Dave McReynolds:	Randolph calls a press conference because they have to deal with it, and Randolph, who was nothing if not extremely dignified, said…
John D’Emilio:	“How dare a segregationist like Strom Thurmond condemn someone for immorality? We stand by Bayard Rustin. He is our organizer. He is Mr. March on Washington.” And it’s that moment, really that is the end of using the gay charge against Rustin effectively.
Dave McReynolds:	The gay issue had been taken away, ironically by Strom Thurmond.
Speaker 13:	6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Rachelle Horowitz:	Well, the day of the march was incredible. I think probably by 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning we were all awake. We were on the mall, and Bayard had his pad and was doing everything. He was making sure that the sound system was working. The mall is dead.
Bayard Rustin:	I’ll tell you, I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous at the beginning. The one thing I remember above all others is the press was around us, and they said, “Mr. Rustin, it’s 5:00 in the morning.” You said, “There were going to be a quarter of a million people here. We don’t see 5,000 people yet. Where are they all?” I took a blank piece of paper out of my pocket and looked at it. I pulled my watch out, and I looked at it and I said, “Gentlemen, everything is going according to schedule.”
Rachelle Horowitz:	And I am standing next to him. And I said to him, “Bayard, what are you talking about?” He said, “I don’t know, I just made it up.” And sure enough, at a given time, people began to come off the trains and the buses arrived.
Speaker 14:	What about that trademark, do you want to be free?
Audience:	Yeah.
Speaker 14:	Do you want to be free?
Audience:	Yeah.
Speaker 14:	Let me hear you say, “Freedom.”
Audience:	Freedom.
Bayard Rustin:	Around 9:00 in the morning from every direction that you looked, you could see these people coming in and cars, buses, on foot. It was absolutely exhilarating. It was mostly exhilarating because the crowd was about 50/50 Black and white.
Joyce Ladner:	And the place filled up so rapidly. I saw people marching from I guess the train station or wherever the buses were marching, I don’t know, a hundred deep or whatever, but each group, they were marching on the banners.
Speaker 16:	And ask you to assemble in your respective group and begin to march for freedom now [inaudible 00:30:10]
MUSIC:	[inaudible 00:30:10] overcome someday.
Speaker 17:	I pledge my heart and my mind and my body to the achievement of social peace. We must say, “That we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.”
Speaker 18:	Slow down, we are tired.
Speaker 17:	We will not stop our militant peaceful demonstrations. We will not come off of the streets.
Martin Luther K…:	One day right there in Alabama, little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers, I have a dream today.
MUSIC:	You and me brother.
	In his hands, he’s got you and me.
Speaker 19:	And now, Bayard Rustin, deputy director of a march will read the demand.
John D’Emilio:	At the end of the rally at the Lincoln Memorial, Rustin gets his moment in the sun when he leads the crowd in a recitation of what the 10 demands of the march on Washington were.
Bayard Rustin:	The first demand is that we have effective civil rights legislation.
John D’Emilio:	And he reads each of them into the microphone, standing on the podium and hears back the shout from all of the people who were assembled there on the mall.
Bayard Rustin:	What do you say? We demand let segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963. We demand that-
John D’Emilio:	At this point, he knows the march has been as successful as it can possibly be, and he had a lot to do with it.
MUSIC:	Oh, freedom.
	Oh, freedom.
Bayard Rustin:	Some people say, “Well, it was more like a picnic than a protest.” Well, when a quarter of a million people can come to speak to their government, and it is more like a picnic than a protest, that is a salute to everyone who attended and to the response which our government gave. I believe the march on Washington said to the American people, “We are now capable of having that kind of love and affection and absence of bigotry, which means we can become one nation.”
MUSIC:	I’ll be a slave.
	I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free.
Al Letson:	We all remember Martin Luther King giving the I Have a Dream speech. It’s a beautiful moment in American history, but it wouldn’t have happened without Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. So how do you follow that up. After you’ve made history, what do you do next? That answer might surprise you.
MUSIC:	I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free.
Al Letson:	I’m Al Letson, and on today’s show, we’re featuring the life of Mr. Bayard Rustin. As the chief architect of the March on Washington, Bayard has made history, the event’s a huge success earning Bayard and A. Philip Randolph, the cover of Life magazine. The march gives an urgency to the civil rights bill working its way through Congress, but the afterglow of that event doesn’t last long as Bayard’s assistant Rachelle Horowitz recalls.
Rachelle Horowitz:	After the march itself, I think we had a week or two of euphoria where we thought we will now go forward. We will pass the bill, we are going to walk into the sunshine. And then there was the bombing in Birmingham where the four little girls were killed.
Speaker 20:	18 days after the march on Washington, Birmingham, Alabama, a bomb exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church just before a Sunday morning service. 15 people were injured, four children were killed.
Al Letson:	These are hard times for the United States. The death of those four little girls shatters an idealism that was born on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and just four months later, President Kennedy is assassinated.
Rachelle Horowitz:	So that ended euphoria, and we knew that the struggle had to continue and would take a long time.
Al Letson:	Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president, and with his legislative muscle, he’s able to pass several significant laws that ban discrimination on the base of race. With the federal government marching in step with the civil rights agenda, Bayard decides now is the time to shift strategies.
Bayard Rustin:	We are in a totally different period. In the old period, all the youngsters needed was bravery and perseverance. They just sat at the restaurants, they swam in the swimming pools. No matter what they did to them, they arrested them, they’d come back, they’d beat them, they’d come back and finally get a breakthrough. No young Negroes today with mere courage and perseverance are going to make any contribution.
John D’Emilio:	I think Rustin starts marching a bit out of step with many others in the Black freedom struggle.
Al Letson:	Professor John D’Emilio.
John D’Emilio:	Don’t spend all your time in one rally or protest after another, but throw yourself into the political system until we become the people who actually are making the laws of the land.
Bayard Rustin:	I say, “My dear friends, that no economic or social order has ever been developed on the basis of color.” It must be developed on the basis of class.
John D’Emilio:	Rustin developed something called the Freedom Budget, which was a document that was designed to show how the federal government, by reapportioning its resources, could actually end poverty in America and make everyone free.
Bayard Rustin:	Because the problem is not plain prejudice, which is there in all people. It is that the economic and social order where there are not enough jobs in this society, where there is not enough housing in this society, where there is not enough medical care in this society.
Al Letson:	Bayard’s concepts have evolved as he moves from protest to politics. The idea of working inside the machine to achieve your agenda. Now, we tend to think of events as singular, mutually exclusive, but that’s usually not how it occurs. Events are often overtaken by other events and the national agenda shifts. For example, currently we’re at war while our economy is struggling, scientists are worried about global warming. Healthcare is an issue and so on and so on and so on. All of that happening at the same time. So when Bayard is announcing his Freedom Budget, he has several factors that begin to work against him. One of them is the younger generation of civil rights activists.
John D’Emilio:	It wasn’t a popular message at the time because a younger generation was feeling its strength and its power as protesters and didn’t have much faith in the political system to make the kind of change they wanted.
Stokely Carmichael:	Many of us feel, many of our generation feel that they’re getting ready to commit genocide against us.
Al Letson:	Young activists like Stokely Carmichael who’d once idolized Bayard were finding their voice, and the tenor of that voice was very different from the stances that Bayard has taken.
Stokely:	We have to recognize who our major enemy is. The major enemy is not your brother, flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood. The major enemy is the hunky and his institutions of racism. That’s the major enemy. That is the major enemy.
Bayard Rustin:	We want Black power, whatever that is, with no real definition of it. We want self-respect, we want Negro dignity, all of which I am in favor of, but it is another blind alley because dignity and self-respect must spring from the economic and social position which you hold in the society.
Al Letson:	While the Black power movement is gaining momentum, the war in Southeast Asia is peaking at a fevered pitch. Vietnam takes all the oxygen in the room, leaving Bayard’s causes in the background.
Bayard Rustin:	Psychologically, the war in Vietnam has trapped us. It has split the civil rights movement down the middle. It has caused many white people who were in it to say, “That must wait now until we stopped Vietnam.”
Rachelle Horowitz:	There were disagreements between him and Dr. King about Dr. King’s opposing the war and bringing the movement into it. He thought the civil rights movement had to stay separate and not be, not that individuals couldn’t do it, but that it had to be a distinct movement and not get into that controversy.
Al Letson:	Bayard is a peace activist who strangely doesn’t come out hard against the war. In a time when pacifist organizations were in overdrive, Bayard was largely silent.
Bayard Rustin:	And my own views on the war were complicated. As most conflicts that democracy is involved in are complicated.
Rachelle Horowitz:	It was a question of priorities. He opposed the Vietnam War. He absolutely believed that his job and the most important thing he could do at this point was continue to pursue the Black economic struggle, and he saw it being subsumed by the opposition to the Vietnam War.
John D’Emilio:	Where Rustin departed from many anti-war activists is that he refused to demonize Lyndon Johnson. Rustin believed that Lyndon Johnson had done more than any other president since Abraham Lincoln to forward racial equality in the United States, and he was not willing to write off Johnson because Johnson was fighting this unpopular war.
Rachelle Horowitz:	I think psychologically the leadership of the pacifist organizations that he belonged to felt abandoned, and I think they never understood right from the beginning that his main interest was primarily the struggle for Black freedom. And so I think there was a psychological problem.
Al Letson:	And so in the midst of pushing for his Freedom Budget, these factors merged to form the perfect storm.
Bayard Rustin:	Now, I come therefore to the Freedom Budget because the Freedom Budget is for the purpose of restoring hope.
Stokely Carmichael:	We talk about survival, that’s all. They can cut all that junk about poverty program, education, housing, welfare.
Bayard Rustin:	There is only one difference between a man who is rich and one who is poor. One has money and one does not.
Speaker 9:	We’re in Vietnam to fulfill one of the most solemn pledges of the American nation.
Speaker 22:	Until the President stands up and says, “We’re bringing all of the troops home as quickly as we can bring them home, the anti-war sentiment in the country will continue to grow.”
Bayard Rustin:	And if anyone expects me to go back to the ghetto and tell Negroes that I’ve just been talking with my white liberal friends who have convinced me that nothing for you can be done until the war in Vietnam is over, then I think I must have holes in my head.
Speaker 23:	Kitchen time, and you are dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that, part of you are not only a chump, but you are a traitor to your race.
Bayard Rustin:	We have to fight for the war on poverty. Why do we have to fight for it? Because we must continue to establish that this nation has an obligation to eliminate poverty.
Al Letson:	Bayard’s strategy is falling apart. The Freedom Budget fails despite early support from hundreds of groups and congressmen. The Black power movement has labeled him and Uncle Tom, and the members of the pacifist community, a community he’s been a part of since the ’40s are leery of him. Bayard is a big idea man in a nation that no longer has the stomach for a social movement of that scale, but that doesn’t stop Bayard who continues to work in the trenches, co-founding the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization that works on civil rights and labor issues. It’s in these years that once again, Bayard’s personal life takes center stage, but this time it’s a little different.
Walter Naegle:	Well, we met really quite by chance in New York City. We were just kind of waiting for a light to change and looked at each other and said, “Hello,” and started talking. At that moment, I wasn’t quite sure who he was, except that he was a very attractive, dignified, well-dressed, friendly man.
Al Letson:	Walter Naegle was Bayard’s partner for 10 years.
Walter Naegle:	In his personal life he was really very warm and friendly and with a wonderful sense of humor and kind of an impish, devilish kind of sense of humor, playing practical jokes on people and doing things like that and really very generous in spirit.
Al Letson:	Walter is much younger than Bayard, and because there was no marriage or civil union for them, in 1982, Bayard legally adopted Walter.
Walter Naegle:	He wanted to do something to protect my rights, and also we were very aware of a situation where a partner becomes sick and is in the hospital and their loving partner is turned away because they have no legal rights to visit and to have any say in their healthcare, and we wanted to do whatever we could to avoid that kind of a situation. So we began a legal adoption process, which eventually went through.
Al Letson:	It was through Bayard’s relationship with Walter that after a lifetime of activism and speaking out on issue after issue, his sexuality became something he could speak more publicly about. Now, Bayard had never hidden his sexuality.
Walter Naegle:	But I think that by the time he met me, a lot of his associations with his sexual orientation, at least in terms of the public perception, they were negative. They were negative.
Al Letson:	Bayard had always been comfortable with his sexuality, but it’d been used against him for so long it was hard to shed all those bad memories.
Walter Naegle:	I think perhaps my relationship with Bayard, if anything, affirmed the sense or the idea that you can have a positive relationship with a person of the same sex. Here with somebody who we had a loving, peaceful, committed relationship for 10 years, and I think that that may have made him feel more comfortable talking about it.
John D’Emilio:	In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when Rustin was experiencing all of these attacks around being gay, most people didn’t think of sexuality and sexual identity as having anything to do with politics and social justice. By the 1980s, things are changing quite a bit in the United States. There was a gay liberation movement.
Al Letson:	Bayard gets involved with the struggle for gay rights. He begins to speak at gay conferences and address meetings of gay activists. He also uses his clout to champion gay causes. You see, many of the people he had worked with in the past had eventually done what Bayard proposed and moved from protests to politics.
Bayard Rustin:	The barometer for judging the character of people in regard human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian. The judgment as to whether you can trust for the future, the social advancement, depending on people, will be judged on where they come out on that question. And if they come out poorly on that question, they will become out poorly on all other human rights questions.
Al Letson:	In 1986, Bayard testifies in front of the New York City Council, a bill he’s lobbied for to add sexual orientation to the city’s human rights laws being challenged. He tells the members of the council, “History demonstrates that no group is ultimately safe from prejudice, bigotry, and harassment so long as any group is subject to special negative treatment.” The bill remains unchanged and this will be Bayard’s final victory.
MUSIC:	I ain’t got long to stay here.
	Tombstones are busting.
	Poor sinner stands trembling.
Al Letson:	A year later, August 24th, 1987, Bayard Rustin would pass away from a ruptured appendix. In his obituary Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was quoted as saying, “He gave us love. He gave us peace.”
MUSIC:	Still I do, Jesus.
Al Letson:	Many years ago, someone I can’t remember who told me that Martin Luther King’s chief advisor was a gay man, but no one knows about him. I did a little research, and I was shocked because he had done so much and I’d never heard of him. I thought if I ever had the opportunity, I would tell people about Bayard Rustin because it’s stories like his that make us the United States of America. All across the country, people are doing things to help in their community, to help each other, and they are the reason this country is great.
MUSIC:	Won’t you sit down, sit down, Lord, I can’t sit down.
	Sit, Lord, sit down, Lord I can’t sit down.
	Sit down, sit down, I can’t sit down.
	Just got to heaven, want to move around.
Al Letson:	This episode of State of the Re:Union originally aired February 2010. The show was produced by Tina Antolini and edited by Taki Telonidis. The beats were by Willie Evans Jr. The State of the Re:Union team included Ian D’Souza, Brenton Crozier, Laura Starczewski, Delaney Hall, Zack Rosen, and Bree Burge. Thanks to Columbia University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the LBJ Presidential Library, Cornell University, and Pike Malinowski. More to the stories produced by members of the Justice Society, Josh Sanburn and Carl McGurk Allison.
	Theme music and additional scoring by Fernando My Man Man Yo Arruda, and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. Lastly, a reminder, we are listener supported. That means listeners like you. You can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift. Thank you. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this again next week. This is More To The Story.