Bayard Rustin Book

Bayard Rustin's death in 1987, The New York Post editorialized, marked "the passing of the last great apostle of the creed of nonviolence." Author Jervis Anderson brings him to life.

Without Rustin, the 20th-century civil rights movement in the United States would have unfolded very differently. Rustin influenced Martin Luther King by guiding King as he incorporated into the movement the Gandhian principles of non-violence that because its most notable and effective feature. Rustin gave King valuable strategic advice on everything from the Montgomery bus boycott that started King's career to the sanitation strike in Memphis at which King was assassinated in 1968.

Rustin was the architect of the pivotal 1963 March on Washington that marked the movement's transformation into an effective legislative force. He convinced a reluctant King to speak, which provided the platform from which King ringingly proclaimed, "I have a dream." Rustin's foresight and meticulous planning helped -- in the days before marches on Washington became familiar rituals -- to prevent the violence that many feared would mar the March and set back efforts to end racial discrimination.

Life magazine, then one of the most important media outlets in the world, recognized Rustin's vital role when it put him on the cover of its issue about the March, along with Rustin's mentor, A. Philip Randolph, who had envisioned a similar march in 1941 but called it off at the request of Franklin Roosevelt.

Rustin rarely was lit by the kind of spotlight shone by Life. Mostly he tried to avoid publicity because he feared that his homosexuality and socialism would be used against the movement by its opponents. And they were, especially by Adam Clayton Powell, the U.S. Representative who wanted the spotlight for himself, and Strom Thurmond, the U.S. Senator who fought to preserve segregation.

The historian Jervis Anderson worked for Rustin from 1966 to 1968. His Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen, a Biography is a detailed, affectionate account of Rustin's complex personality and his varied work crusading for peaceful social change around the world. Until someone writes the comprehensive, multi-volume biography of Rustin that his character and career warrant, Anderson's Bayard Rustin holds his place in history well.

The book falls short of being a top-tier biography because it slights its subject's own words. Anderson calls Rustin "one of the more articulate and engaging public speakers of his time" and says that "with his clear and crisp and intellectually sparkling presentations, he had no equal in lucid, instructive extemporaneous oratory." But he leaves us to take his word for this most of the time. The biography Bayard Rustin, which quotes its subject in more detail about his beloved antiques than about his beliefs, would have been richer if Anderson had made better use of Rustin's own words.

Rustin was born and raised in a family of prominent Quakers in Pennsylvania. His family history was complicated. The people he thought were his parents actually were his grandparents. One of his "aunts" was his mother. The family maintained the deception to avoid the scandal of an out-of-wedlock birth.

It was not until he was in his mid-60s that Rustin found lasting romantic love. Anderson gives extensive consideration to Rustin's homosexuality and how it affected his work, but he makes only fleeting mention of Rustin's partner, Walter Naegle. A slightly better source on their relationship is John D'Emilio's Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

When he died at age 75 in 1987, Rustin was revered for his involvement in the U.S. civil rights movement and his wide-ranging work around the globe, including efforts to encourage nuclear disarmament and to secure independence for African nations. It wasn't always like that. In the late 1960s, his consensus activism was too moderate for radicals demanding "black power." They regarded Rustin with skepticism, even scorn.

This painfully echoed an earlier disappointment. Before the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions in 1960, Adam Clayton Powell threatened to leak fabricated allegations of a sexual affair between Rustin and King. Powell demanded that King distance himself from the man who helped him develop from a regional leader into an international icon. King acquiesced and was rebuked by James Baldwin and others who rallied to Rustin's defense. King and Rustin worked together after that and Rustin accompanied King to Oslo in 1964 when King received the Nobel Prize for Peace, but their friendship never fully recovered.

More than a decade earlier when Rustin first met the Kings, he offered a letter of introduction. Coretta Scott King waved it away. She remembered him from when he spoke at her high school about pacifism in the early 1940s. She said, "I know you, Mr. Rustin."

Anderson's Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen, A Biography allows the rest of us to know him also.