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Have you ever heard of Bayard Rustin?
Bayard? No. No.
Have you ever heard of James Baldwin?
Yes, that name sounds familiar but I couldn't tell you anything.
Have you ever heard of Bayard Rustin?
No sir.
Do you know who James Baldwin is?
I feel like I've heard the name before.
I feel like, I don't know anything personally, but I know it came up in my National Gov class.
What about Bayard Rustin?
No.
Bayard Rustin was born a freeman in Westchester, Pennsylvania
on March 17 1912. He grew up
with out his father in his life and his mother Florence was
only 16 years old when she gave birth to him.
He believed she was his sister.
His quaker "values" were adapted from his grandparents,
Janifer and Julia Rustin, which he stated in his own words,
"were based on the concept of a single family
and the belief that all members of that family are equal."
Twelve years later on August 2, 1924
writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin was born to
Emma Berdis Jones. Baldwin did not know his biological father
but was the grandson of a slave. He was raised in Harlem, New York
and the eldest of nine children who grew up in poverty
while also developing a troubled relationship with his tough,
religious stepfather. As a child,
he found a way to escape his circumstances.
As he recalls, "I knew I was black, of course,
but I also knew I was smart. I didn't know how I would use my mind, or even if
I could,
but that was the only thing I had to use."
He was a trailblazer. He was one that really brought focus through his
work, on what it meant to be black and the struggles of black people.
He was very honest
and it was very sincere. He didn't mince words in his place.
He was very direct. He really confronted the establishment.
He challenged people that think and
that's what is work really means to a lot of people today.
When you look at some of the plays
that we have now, it really raised a social consciousness of America.
What I can say about James Baldwin is that I think that
in addition to his
incredible writing abilities
he became at a critical time
really one of the major spokesman for the
black civil rights movement in the
United States. Really there was no one
who would play a bigger role in my opinion, in influencing
the
sixties other than perhaps Doctor King himself.
Both Rustin and Baldwin were born to young mothers
who did not have relationships with their biological fathers.
It was the influence of the elders of the family
that were strong and eventually gave each man the willingness to change their
circumstances.
The foundation of the equality as taught to Rustin by his grandparents
and the struggles Baldwin encountered with his stepfather,
provided them a blueprint to build a life on their personal beliefs.
Around the age of fourteen,
Baldwin was spending the majority of his time in local libraries
and had finally discovered his passion for writing.
During this part of his life, he became a preacher just like a stepfather.
Baldwin was a preacher for three years
and he didn't realize it then, but what ultimately fueled him as a writer
was dealing with his personal anguish, despair
and the beauty of being a preacher.
Ready to move on in the early 1940s,
he would abandon his religious faith and focus fully instead on his passion for
literature.
Baldwin knew once he left the pulpit he must also leave home,
so at the age of 18 he received a job working for the New Jersey Railroad.
Baldwin once wrote, "If the concept of God has
any use, it is to make us larger, freer, and more loving.
If God can't do that, it's time to get rid of him."
Baldwin once visited Elijah Muhammad,
founder of the Nation of Islam, when he was invited to have dinner at his home.
Baldwin described Elijah Muhammad as single-minded and uncalculated in his
thoughts.
Elijah Muhammad believed that Baldwin had been too exposed to white
teachings, never receiving true instruction.
Elijah Muhammad inquired about Baldwin's religious beliefs,
Baldwin replied, "I left the church 20 years ago and haven't joined anything since."
Elijah asked, "And what are you now?" Baldwin explained,
"I? Now? Nothing. I'm a writer.
I like doing things alone."
The New Jersey Railroad job was short lived
and Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked as a freelance writer
working primarily on book reviews. While freelancing, he caught the attention of
the well-known novelist,
Richard Wright. Although Baldwin had not yet finished a novel,
Wright assisted him with securing a grant in which you can support himself as a
writer.
James Baldwin would become aware of his homosexuality
in 1948.
The disgust he felt by the amount of prejudice
against both blacks and homosexuals in the United States
drove him to relocate to Paris in his mid-twenties
where he would spend virtually the rest of his life.
Teenage Rustin wrote poems and played football for his high school
and according to lore, during a staged impromptu sit-in at a restaurant,
his white teammates were served, but not him.
Around this time he explained to his grandmother that he enjoyed the company of young men
rather than girls.
His grandmother's response was,
"I suppose that's what you need to do."
Mr. Rustin was openly gay, at a time
in our community,
where it was taboo. It was like all the way
unacceptable.
Rustin attended Wilberforce University in Ohio
and Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania
which both are historically black schools which we now refer to as HBCU's.
In 1937 he moved to New York City
and studied at City College of New York. He was briefly involved with the Young
Communist League in the 1930s,
before he became disillusioned with its activities and quit.
The FBI would brand him as communist. Then brand him as gay.
So you know that's a hell of a branding.
And as a radical, so that's even worse.
In his personal philosophy,
Rustin combined the Quaker religion,
the non-violent resistance taught by Mahatma Gandhi,
and the socialism espoused by African-American labor leader
A. Philip Randolph. During WWII he
worked for Randolph, fighting against racial discrimination in war-related hiring.
Upset when the March on Washington was called off in 1941,
Rustin met A.J. Muste, a minister and
labor organizer and joined Rev. Muste's
Fellowship of Reconciliation. When FOR members in Chicago launched
the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942,
Rustin traveled around the nation speaking out about civil rights.
Two years later, he was arrested for failure to appear before his draft board
and for refusing alternative service as a diligent objector.
Rustin was sentenced to three years in jail,
but ended up serving only 26 months.
His desegregation protests
and open homosexuality forced authorities to transfer him to a higher
security prison.
Bayard once quoted, "Today, blacks are no longer the litmus
or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in
every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from
racial discrimination.
The new "***" are gays... It is in this sense that gay people are the new
barometer for social change.
The question of social change should be formed with the most vulnerable group in mind:
gay people."
Rustin received punishments several times for his beliefs.
He refused to register for the WWII drafts
and was jailed for two years. He took part in the protests against the
segregated public transit system
in 1947, where he was arrested in North Carolina and sentenced to work on a
chain gang for a few weeks.
Chain gangs where prisoners. As a punishment,
they were chained together and forced to do substantially
challenging labor. Rustin was arrested on a morals charge for engaging in
homosexual activity in public in 1943
and was jailed for 60 days. He, however, continued to live his life
as an openly gay man. Organizing human rights protests began in the
1950s for Rustin.
He played an important role in organizing and coordinating a march
Aldermaston, England, in which 10,000 protesters demonstrated against
nuclear weapons.
The meeting of Rustin and the young civil rights leader,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also took place in the 1950's
and he began working with King as an organizer and strategist
in 1955. He taught King about Gandhi's philosophy
of non-violent resistance and advised him on the tactics of civil disobedience.
Rustin assisted King with the boycott of segregated buses
in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956.
Baldwin wrote novels and essays.
His novel, "Giovanni's Room" received much controversy
due to its depiction of homosexuality and the love relationship shared between
two men.
Some of his essay writings included
"The Hard Kind of Courage, Nobody Knows My Name
and The Fire Next Time." Living in a different country gave Baldwin a
perspective on the life he'd left behind
and a sole freedom to seek and perfect his craft.
In a way, Baldwin's excursions brought him closer to the social concerns
of New America. In 1957,
Baldwin was overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to the events and times,
that he returned to the United States to participate in the Civil Rights Movement
alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
Ultimately Baldwin would become one of the most prominent figures of the Civil
Rights Movement.
Discrimination, be it racial or *** would be a recurring theme in his work.
More precisely, he would seek to show the isolation of blacks in society,
but also the loneliness of many regardless of color,
which according to him resulted from ambiguities
inherent in one's being. Traveling throughout the South,
he began work on an explosive work about black identity and the state of racial
struggle.
Though at times he was judged for his pacifist
stance, Baldwin remained an important figure in that struggle throughout the
1960s.
We had a lot of intellectual giants in those days, he obviously was one.
He was part of our black intellectual
elite.
He very intellectually talked about the black
struggles and problems.
Him and a guy named A. Philip Randolph,
He was head of the sleeping car porters, or whatever it was,
so they were involved in that union of
organizing sleeping car porters. The porters were all black on trains.
They organized them and put them into a union.
And he was a part of that. Brilliant man.
In 1965, Rustin and his mentor Randolph co-founded the
A. Philip Randolph Institute, a labor organization for African-American trade
union members.
Prior to this stage of their lives, there were many struggles of civil rights
dating back
from 1890 to the 1920s when lynchings were taking place most frequently in the
Southern United States.
Now many of the newspapers, the black newspapers, every week they reported how many
blacks had been lynched.
The lynchings were common. And
it symbolizes what
was really the worst possible behavior of that time.
The treatment of people.
Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks
and 1,297 whites being lynched between
1882 and 1968.
This is an American century. The world will belong to us.
This core American fascism as Roosevelt
termed them, must be laughing as labor beating out its own brains.
No wonder they could pass out a few papers
and the *** people, in slavery of one kind
or another. Feudal or industrial for the 300 odd years
of our lives on this continent, forgetting their civil war struggle.
Forgetting the lessons of reconstruction. Again betrayed
by a coalition of industrial finance republican barrens
and southern bond plantation owners.
And their reward? Lynching. The trend six
to Peoria, to Virginia, to Georgia
to Alabama, to anywhere, where a black face
dares to answer back. Anywhere, where
a brown body dares to walk in dignity.
Lynchings reinforced power reversal
and were public demonstrations of white supremacy.
In the 1950s the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum.
Membership in the NAACP increased in states across the country.
The NAACP achieved a significant US Supreme Court victory
in 1954 with the ruling that segregated education was unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court's decision on Brown v. The Board of Education
called for the desegregation of schools throughout the nation.
The Little Rock school board complied with the courts
and submitted a plan for gradual integration in May of
the following year. The board approved. Nine black students
nicknamed "Little Rock Nine" entered Little Rock Central High School
in September 1957.
Anywhere that young people
desegregated a school, it was not an easy task.
Just physically, it was not easy
because you just didn't go in. There was
taunting physically and I think that was what you would
call bullying. Whites were
mean. The kids were mean. They'd hit you, they'd pull the girl's hair. They'd spit on
you. They'd do all these things and often times there was no recourse.
My brother tells the story that ever day when they got off the bus,
they were bussed from their neighborhood to the white school. They got off the bus
doing this. They had to fight every day.
My family moved in the
early 50s to our neighborhood, which was a former Jewish community. We were the
first black family.
And within a year, all the white people moved out.
They sold it cheap, they just left
you know because they couldn't conceive of living next door to a black person.
Ok. So that was my upbringing. What I saw
as well during that period, or a little earlier I should say, elementary schooler Emmett Till
was killed. And I felt in danger,
as a young child.
A 1955 lynching that
sparked public outrage about injustice was that of
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago.
I remember personally being extremely
upset and shocked about it.
Looking back I'd say that it's something
akin to the way I felt about the Trayvon Martin incident with Zimmerman.
Spending the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi,
Till was killed for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a white woman.
Till had been badly beaten, one of his
eyes gouged out and he was shot in the head before being thrown into the
Tallahatchie River,
his body weighed down with a 70-pound cotton gin fan
tied around his neck with barbed wire.
His mother insisted on a public funeral with
an open casket, to show people how badly Till's body had been disfigured.
News photographs circulated around the country,
and drew intense public reaction. People in the nation were horrified
that a boy could have been killed for such an incident.
The state of Mississippi tried two defendants,
but they were speedily acquitted.
I had seen first hand, how
blacks were treated
and the really, very disgusting
reactions of
of white men.
In the 1960s the Civil Rights Movement attracted students to the South
from all over the country to work on voter registration
and other issues. The intervention of people from
outside the communities and thread of social change
aroused fear and resentment among whites.
During this period, blacks faced legal discrimination from both
businesses and government. Jim Crow laws prevented blacks from being serviced
or from even entering certain businesses.
Protests in several states were organized over the years,
some became violent at the refusal to disperse by the demand of white
authorities.
On June 11, 1963 President John F. Kennedy announced his
plan to push for civil rights legislation
Later that evening, Medgar Evers,
the popular civil rights activists from Mississippi
was murdered.
Rustin was a key figure in the organization of the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom
where King delivered his legendary, "I Have a Dream" speech.
Bayard Rustin, his contribution
at the moment of that March
is inestimable. He got it together.
He was the actual brain behind the movement.
Nearly 200,000 people flooded the city
for one of the largest demonstrations for human rights.
All representatives of society were there at that March.
Church, state, labor union, political advocacy
The whole... we discovered the term
"grass roots." Grass roots means cultural. The whole
cultural volume of us.
Jobs is a big thing,
same as it is now.
So naturally everybody supporting to get jobs, you know.
Shoot, everybody need a job whether you are a nationalist, or whether you
integrations, or whether you was just a dumb
guy. You know, you were smart enough to know jobs.
Marchers linked arms as they marched down Constitution Avenue
to the Lincoln Memorial. Speakers at the March included Bayard Rustin,
Daisy Bates, John Lewis, Walter Ruether,
Floyd McKissick, Joachim Prinz, Whitney Young,
Josephine Baker, Roy Wilkins and A. Philliph Randolph.
Notable attendees included James Baldwin, Marlon Brando,
Jackie Robinson, Sidney Portier, Harry Belafonte,
Charlton Heston, Bill Russell, Sammy Davis Jr,
Bob Dylan, Ossie Davis, Marion Anderson,
Joan Baez and many more.
Integration had begun to take place,
but not everyone was pleased. In Birmingham, Alabama, 1963,
an explosion erupted at the 16th Street Baptist Church
killing four young girls; Addie May Collins,
Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair.
The bombing was in active white supremacy
aimed at putting a stop to the progress I've integration in public places.
This incident marked a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement
and prompted the push for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"...maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic first amendment privileges because
they have committed themselves to that, over there.
But somewhere I read, of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read,
of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read
of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read
that the greatness of America is the right to protest
for right."
Three years later, the news of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination
shocked the nation on April 4, 1968.
"We aren't going to let any injunction turn us around."
Senator Robert F. Kennedy informed a crowd in Indianapolis, Indiana of his
death during the campaign tour. Many
of which had not heard about his passing. "I'm only going to talk to you just for
a minute or so this evening because I have, some very sad news for all of you
and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love
peace
all over the world. And that is that
Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee."
Angered at the news of the assassination of King,
riots broke out in cities across the country;
Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
The White House ordered over 13,000 troops to guard the White House
and gain control of the crowds.
Rioting went on for days, evidence of the rebellions remained on some city
blocks for decades.
April 9th 1968,
King's funeral service was followed by a three mile procession
from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College
in Atlanta, Georgia. Saddened by the assassination of his friend
Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin returned to
St. Paul - de- Vence, France.
There he worked on a book about the adversity of the times.
Many responded to the harsh tone of the book
with accusations of bitterness but, even though Baldwin had captured much of the
anger of the times in his book,
he continued and always remained a constant advocate for universal love and brotherhood.
Rustin received numerous awards and
honorary degrees throughout his career including the Presidential Medal of Freedom
posthumously, from President Barack Obama.
His writings about civil rights were published in the collection
"Down the Line" in 1971 and in "Strategies for Freedom" in 1976.
He continued to speak out about the importance of
economic equality within the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the need for
social rights for gays and lesbians.
Bayard Rustin died of a ruptured appendix in New York City
on August 24, 1987, at the age of 75.
Bayard Rustin was the focus
of two films, one a biographical feature
titled "Out of the Past," and the other a documentary:
"Brother Outsider." Rustin once wrote
"The principal factors which influenced my life
are nonviolent tactics, constitutional means,
democratic procedures, respect for human personality
and the belief that all people are one.
James Baldwin would be internationally-recognized on numerous
occasions during both his lifetime and after his untimely death.
Barack called James Baldwin, "God's revolutionary mouth."
James Baldwin, man, we were so proud of him. He stood up for his people.
They're just delicious
and if you engage them and read them, you have enough food
to feed your soul, your spirit, you know?
Baldwin would succumb to stomach cancer exactly four months and 23 days
after Rustin at the age of 63
on December 1st 1987 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence
in southeastern France. He is buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale,
not far from New York City where many other artists and prominent figures
have been laid to rest. Baldwin's life and legacy has influenced
countless writers and friends.
In 2004 the United States Postal Service created a first class stamp in his honor.
He was inducted into the New York writers Hall of Fame
and named one of the top 100 greatest writers.
His influence reach the likes of famed poet and friend Maya Angelou,
Nikki Giovanni, Josephine Baker,
Amiri Baraka, Alex Haley, Dolores Kendrick,
Langston Hughes and Lena Horne.
Toni Morrison's New York Times eulogy entitled
"Life in His Language" reads "You knew,
didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it?
How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wilderness for me?
How strengthened I was by certainty that came from knowing
you would never hurt me?
You knew, didn't you, how I loved your love?
You knew. This is no calamity.
No. This is jubilee.
Our crown, you said, has already been bought and paid for.
All we have to do, you said, is wear it."
I can tell you that I stand on the shoulders of many people who came before me, because
I came after segregation and I was
afforded the benefits, of what the people before me in
Civil Rights and what they marched for, what they struggled for.
The signs were down, I didn't have to bus to a school.
I could go to my neighborhood school. You know, all those things were
afforded me an opportunity as an African-American male growing up
in DC. You know,
I am a native Washingtonian and proud of it.
So people like you
I stand on your shoulders.
But, I think that it's people like you who can take this
and tell the story and each other's story. Right.
But I also think it's people like you, who also know that
the journey isn't over.