Reviews for Bayard Rustin

The average rating for Bayard Rustin based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-26 00:00:00 Jacob Flores As exemplified in this biography Bayard Rustin was a complicated person. From the very beginning of his life he was a committed pacifist and was jailed for refusing to serve in World War II. He was an active member in various pacifist groups, some of them Quaker. He also, in his quest for racial justice, became drawn to civil rights groups. He was a great behind the scenes organizer and would expedite and facilitate events. He built up a huge network of contacts between the various civil rights groups and peace groups like CORE, NAACP, SCLC and the emerging SNCC. Each of these groups saw themselves as being the prominent voice of their people, so Bayard Rustin had to weave through the various personalities to accomplish consensus. After the Montgomery bus boycott he was instrumental in drawing up the charter of SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) which Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of. Bayard Rustin was the main organizer of the very memorable 1963 March on Washington. He successfully coalesced all the old and new civil rights groups to unify for this as well as the over two hundred thousand attendees. Bayard Rustin travelled extensively for peace groups – to Europe, India, and Africa. As mentioned, Bayard Rustin was a complicated man; even though born in Pennsylvania he cultivated a pronounced British accent and was a snappy dresser. He was also gay which accounts for some of the antagonism he felt from some of the civil rights groups, more so those based in the southern United States. But he experienced no such condemnation from Martin Luther King. For many reasons, Bayard Rustin was under surveillance from the FBI (he did have some affiliations in his younger days with the communist party). This was at a time when black people were being prevented from voting in southern states and when they were being lynched, but the FBI was more interested in persecuting potential communists. This biography gives us many personal insights into who Bayard Rustin was and his relationship to many different people and activist groups. I would not go so far as to say the book is fawning on him, but I got the impression that Bayard Rustin was somewhat of a snob. But a very talented and gregarious one!

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-12 00:00:00 Garry Stutsel 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.