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With his charm, charisma, and musical talents, Bayard was a star, I a foot soldier. After Pearl Harbor, we and a half-dozen other young FOR staffers redirected our energy into fighting racial injustice, including the treatment of interned Japanese Americans. We marched at British consulates to protest Gandhi's imprisonment. In 1943 in Chicago, we participated in one of the first sit-ins, 17 years before the landmark lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. Thirteen years before Rosa Parks sat in the front of a bus in Montgomery, I had taken a seat in the back of a bus in Virginia and for the same reason—to protest Jim Crow.
Rustin's spiritual and political pilgrimage was similar to mine, except for his brief involvement in the Communist party in the late 1930s. He soon quit when he realized that the party's "primary concern was not with the black masses," but with promoting Moscow's expansionist objectives. We both opposed America's entry into World War II. He refused to accept alternative civilian service and was sentenced to the penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, where my brother was also serving as a conscientious objector. While there, Rustin fought racial segregation and mail censorship, and taught courses in English and music.
After Hiroshima, our paths separated, but our convictions developed along parallel lines. He resumed his for work, and I spent three years in postwar relief work in Europe. On return, I followed the movement but was not an activist. We both moved away from our earlier utopian views and embraced a just-war approach. Viewing the Soviet Union as a threat to justice, freedom, and peace, we became Niebuhrian anticommunists.
In significant respects, as documented in Jervis Anderson's narrative, Rustin, a black aristocrat and Harvard intellectual, was a trailblazer for, and later a close adviser to, Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the springboard for King's nonviolent crusade. Rustin also organized the 1963 march on Washington where King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
Anderson sketches a convincing portrait of Rustin as a complex, almost enigmatic man, driven by his ideals of peace and justice and tormented by inner tensions that were almost his undoing. Intelligent, articulate, engaging, and with a fastidious British accent, he appealed more to artists and intellectuals than to the larger public. From youth, he was a promiscuous homosexual, and in 1953 he was arrested and jailed in Pasadena on "a morals charge" after police found him with two young men in a car. His mentor A. J. Muste, head of the for, had been fully aware of Rustin's sexual preference but felt compelled to fire him after the Pasadena incident for publicly embarrassing the organization. In a contrite response, Rustin said that while sex was a very real problem, the deeper issue was his selfishness and pride. He begged for forgiveness.
Despite his acknowledged flaws, Rustin continued to devote his considerable talents to the cause of justice and freedom, hanging his hat at the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a rights organization named after the man who had organized the sleeping-car porters. In the 1960s, Rustin became increasingly critical of radical pacifists who opposed U.S policy in Vietnam. He was troubled by King's angry 1967 speech at Riverside Church accusing Washington of being "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Joining Ralph Bunch, Roy Wilkins, and other black leaders, he criticized King for linking the civil-rights struggle to the peace movement, to the detriment of both. In 1972, he supported the hawkish Hubert Humphrey over the dovish George McGovern for the Democratic presidential nomination.
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