In 1949, a five-part series in the New York Post, entitled “22 Days on a Chain Gang,” compellingly documented the day-to-day grind experienced by men being held in a North Carolina prison. Its author was none other than Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader—and later one of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s top confidants. “As I lay in bed for a few last minutes’ rest, I began to think about the food,” he recounted. “We had beans—boiled beans, red beans, or lima beans—every day for lunch…. One of the most frequently quoted bits of folk poetry described the lunch: ‘Beans and cornbread / Every single day / If they don’t change / I’ll make my getaway. / How long, Oh Lord / How long?’”
Rustin, along with several fellow activists, had been arrested two years before for attempting to integrate America’s interstate bus system in a campaign known as the Journey of Reconciliation, a lesser-known precursor to the Freedom Rides of 1961. Rustin’s “22 Days” series in the Post helped end prison chain gangs in North Carolina. It was but one of many instances in a remarkable life of moral clarity and outsize impact.
Bayard Rustin, an openly queer pacifist, conscientious objector, and early American proponent of nonviolence, was one of the most important yet long-neglected figures in the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. He was personally invited to India to study Mahatma Gandhi’s tenets of reconciliation and nonviolence. He worked with A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He advised Dr. King through his 1968 assassination. Most critically, he was the key architect of the 1963 March on Washington. (Rustin died in 1987 at age 75.)
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Rustin’s advocacy and thought leadership were always ahead of the movement’s mainstream. And in recent years, he has been getting his overdue accolades in fits and starts (not to mention in a raft of books and plays). Rustin was the focus of the 2003 documentary Brother Outsider. In 2013 President Barack Obama bestowed him with a posthumous Medal of Freedom. In 2023 he was the subject of George C. Wolfe’s eponymously titled film starring Colman Domingo in an Academy Award–nominated turn. And last fall he was honored in song—in Bryan Carter’s jazz oratorio Rustin in Renaissance, which premiered at New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center. His contributions to the success of the Civil Rights Movement are unquestionable, but only now are historians beginning to appreciate his prescience in espousing intersectional socioeconomic justice (specifically during the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign), as having laid the groundwork for both Occupy Wall Street and today’s revitalized Poor People’s Campaign, co-led by the Reverend Dr. William Barber II.
“When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”
Now Rustin’s impact is being lauded anew in a multimedia exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. The show is called “Speaking Truth to Power: The Life of Bayard Rustin,” and it runs through December 31. The sprawling presentation will further humanize Rustin, the political philosopher, global citizen, and partner of artist Walter Naegle, whose collection of Rustin’s works, archival material, and ephemera make up a good portion of the more than 500 personal objects in the exhibition, ranging from correspondence to photographs to sculptural artifacts. It was Naegle, Rustin’s executor and surviving companion with whom he spent the last decade of his life, who offered access to educator Gay Feldman and photographer David Katzenstein to help curate the exhibition.
The museum is an ideal venue for the show. Since 1991, it has stood on the site of the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. And through the years, one of Rustin’s observations has stood out prominently on a wall in the museum’s permanent collection. It is a phrase that speaks volumes about the present moment: “When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”
Raised by his Quaker grandmother in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Bayard Rustin was born in 1912 into a multiracial community. He was first arrested when he was in high school for attempting to desegregate a lunch counter in his community. Beatings and incarceration were recurring experiences throughout his first 50 years. Violating the Selective Service Act by refusing to register for the draft in the final year of World War II, Rustin was sentenced to three years in prison.
In the early 1940s, his burgeoning public advocacy and organizing efforts brought him to the attention of both James Farmer, director of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and Randolph, the head of the country’s largest union of Black workers. Working with them and the writer and organizer A.J. Muste, Rustin became a tireless political organizer and staunch advocate of nonviolent protest.
Rustin’s sway among civil rights leaders was damaged when he was arrested in January 1953 in Pasadena, California, on charges of consorting with two men in the back of a parked car. Compelled to leave his role at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he was still able to influence Dr. King several years later at the outset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Traveling to Montgomery in the early stages of the campaign, he counseled the young minister to initiate what would become the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), using the bus boycott as a foundational event. Drafting a statement of purpose for King and other signatory pastors around the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, Rustin explained that “nonviolence is not a symbol of weakness or cowardice, but as Jesus and Gandhi demonstrated, nonviolent resistance transforms weakness into strength and breeds courage in face of danger.”
Rustin offered five principles for those he affectionately called “angelic troublemakers”: nonviolence, constitutional means, democratic procedures, respect for humanity, and the belief that all people are one.
Less than a decade later, it was Rustin who acted as the behind-the-scenes architect of 1963’s March on Washington, drawing more than a quarter of a million visitors to the National Mall in Washington, DC, for the storied “I Have a Dream Speech” as well as introducing the world to a passionate young student named John Lewis.
Given Rustin’s past affiliation with the Communist Party, incarceration during World War II as a conscientious objector, and arrest for allegedly engaging in gay sex, Rustin was forced into the background of the catalytic event, even though his fundamental role was long acknowledged by Randolph, King, and others. With the rise of the Black Power faction within the movement, the decreasing relevance of the SCLC on younger activists, and the radicalization of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Rustin sought to work with elders such as Randolph on developing strategies for broader socioeconomic advances.
It is Rustin’s post-civil-rights legacy that Walter Naegle believes will be most exciting for museumgoers in Memphis. “Not many people understand Bayard’s contribution to immigration, anti-colonialism, and human rights,” Naegle told me. “He had such a diversity of interests, including his religious values and travel to India as well as throughout Africa in his later life.”
“In order to understand history, we have to understand the concept of people who make this history occur,” explained Ryan Jones, director of history, interpretation, and curatorial services at the National Civil Rights Museum. “I think that people need to understand you don’t have to be a Dr. King or a Malcolm X or an Ida B. Wells to make a change. [Bayard Rustin] was a man who had humble beginnings, raised by women in the Quaker movement. He’s not able to be on this Mount Rushmore of civil rights pioneers. This is an opportunity to show the current generation and the future generation that even in a time where we’re dealing with chaos, politically, we can remember when folks were able to come together for one common cause. There are many topics that Rustin and those he worked with were seeking to achieve. The priceless, incredible, and iconic objects [in this exhibition] tell an American story.”
Near the end of his life, Rustin, who served on the board of the International Rescue Committee, offered five distinct principles of his lifelong theory of social change and justice for those he affectionately called “angelic troublemakers”: nonviolence, constitutional means, democratic procedures, respect for humanity, and the belief that all people are one.
“Speaking Truth to Power: The Life of Bayard Rustin,” will be on display in the State of Tennessee Gallery of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, starting March 28, 2025.
The post Bayard Rustin: Still Speaking Truth to Power appeared first on Vanity Fair.
