Remembering Bayard Rustin with Pride

Rustin (left) and Malcolm X (center) at a 1962 debate at Howard University

By Chris Lombardi

Walter Naegle, 58, smiled as he waved toward the living room of his Penn South apartment, talking about the love of his life.

In 1963, he said, “Bayard [Rustin] was the first tenant of this apartment.” In those early days, he added, from the east-facing bedroom you could still see the Empire State Building from Eighth Avenue.

“This is where he lived during the early days of the civil rights movement,” said Naegle. And then, without missing a beat, he added, “And this is the apartment that was wiretapped by the FBI.”

When he moved into Chelsea, Rustin was already a key player in that movement; after the March on Washington that August, he became internationally famous and would remain so until his death in 1987. Rustin was also, however, in some ways a typical Chelsean before there was such a thing: Urbane, intellectual, a dancer and singer of Victorian songs, Rustin knew who he was and rarely tried to hide it, not without cost.

For the most part, Chelsea learned to embrace him, even when his politics shifted to the right. And while Rustin declined to join the gay rights movement in its beginnings, toward the end of his life he joined in, speaking at city hearings, working with black churches and speaking at his first and last Washington gay rights march.

Still, the mix of socialism, nonviolence and homosexuality that characterized Rustin’s life and work has slowed recognition of his crucial role in the civil rights movement, despite a well-reviewed 2003 PBS documentary on his life, “Brother/Outsider.” Even the Chelsea high school that bears his name bears little mention of the man whose work, some say, helped to make most other social change movements possible.

I suppose that’s what you need to do

Born in 1912 in West Chester, Pa., at a time when Klan members marched down its main street to applause, Rustin was raised a Quaker by a single mother, who reacted matter-of-factly when he told her he liked “spending time with men” at high school parties, Rustin recounted years later. “I suppose that’s what you need to do,” she told him.

What the young Quaker needed to do, it seemed, was to move to New York and attend City College, supporting himself by singing in a jazz quartet and working for justice. After a flirtation with the Young Communist League at City College, he left it in 1941 after he met the venerable pacifist A.J. Muste, who became for Rustin the father he had never had. He joined the staff of Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and began traveling all over the country and the world, from newly decolonized Kenya and Tanzania to Oklahoma, exploring these questions with “many like-minded people.”

One of those people was Davis Platt, a young man from the Philadelphia suburb of Paoli, who now lives on 28th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. In 1941, Platt told Chelsea Now, he went to a conference at Bryn Mawr because “a woman friend told me, ‘You just have to meet this man’…. And he was extraordinary.”

Soon Platt knew which of the three colleges he’d been accepted to would be his choice: Columbia University, just down the block from was F.O.R.’s offices. “We would have lunch together quite often,” he said. In 1943, when Rustin went to prison for two years after burning his draft card, Platt wrote love letters to the prison, using code so the prison authorities in Kentucky wouldn’t know. “I would write as a woman,” Platt said later. While Platt left Rustin in 1947, tired of Rustin’s other lovers, “I never stopped believing in him,” he said.

A reclining Rustin in New York in the early 1970s

Soon afterward, Rustin traveled to India, hoping to meet Mahatma Gandhi and learn about Gandhi’s principles of active nonviolent resistance: not passivity, not simple refusal to go to war, but throwing one’s body in the machinery of war and oppression.

“We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers,” he wrote upon his return. “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”

That year, in the first of many “Freedom Rides” through the South, Rustin was arrested for refusing to get off a whites-only bus, eight years before Rosa Parks’ similar action in Alabama. He became editor of “Liberation Magazine,” along with several other famed pacifists who, like him, were gay but didn’t talk about it: Barbara Deming, later a feminist icon, and David McReynolds, who would come out on the pages of the national WRL magazine 20 years later and become the first openly gay U.S. presidential candidate in 1980 (as candidate of the Socialist Party).

McReynolds, who spoke to Chelsea Now last week from his East Village apartment, said that neither he nor Rustin were “in the closet” when they met in 1949, but that didn’t mean they weren’t conflicted.

McReynolds, who found Rustin to be “extraordinary,” said the gay community of that time is hard to evoke, and suited neither his temperament or Rustin’s. “You’d go to parties and they would talk about ‘she’ and ‘her’ and you’d realize an hour later they were talking about men. It was an exciting time, in a way, but…”

The debt is monumental

In 1953, Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, Calif., on a “morals” charge after police had found him in a car with two younger men. McReynolds, then a student at UCLA, visited him in prison. “He was broken, because he knew he was wrong, that it was stupid,” said McReynolds.

After the arrest, A.J. Muste fired Rustin from F.O.R. Deeply hurt by his surrogate father’s rejection, Rustin began to work with the secular War Resisters League (WRL), and with A. Philip Randolph, whose determination to link the struggles of labor and blacks made sense to him. And after 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” policies unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, Rustin began to combine his nonviolence training from India with his organizing skills to shake that steel wall until it crumbled.

Rustin went down to Montgomery, Ala., to help Martin Luther King, Jr. manage the bus boycott that followed Rosa Parks’s famous act. He mentored the 25-year-old minister in how to apply the principles of mass nonviolent action to 42,000 people, and the result is in schoolbooks—or some of it, at any rate.

After 1955, McReynolds pointed out, “that’s where the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley comes from. That’s when the peace movement, the gay liberation and the women’s movement…. The debt owed to Montgomery is monumental.” Rustin soon moved from Montgomery to travel and spark similar mass actions elsewhere.

Velma Murphy-Hill, who spoke to Chelsea Now last week from her Penn South apartment, said she met Rustin at a youth conference in 1958. She remembered him as a “really dynamic speaker,” but also remembered his style, which, after Montgomery, was already being noted in the press. Six-foot-one, with deep eyes and long lashes, he struck her as far more comfortable in his body than more formal “Negro” leaders like her own husband, Norman.

“In his own way he was beautiful,” said Hill, her voice half a laugh. I remember being on the beach or something with him, and the sun was shining on his body…gorgeous. He didn’t really know he was so beautiful.”

At that time, Rustin was only well known among other organizers, even though he had been so key at Montgomery. Once he moved to Penn South, though, word got out and people began to gather. One was his then-neighbor Eleanor Holmes Norton, now a Congressmember from Washington, D.C., who worked with Rustin on the 1963 March for Jobs, Freedom and Justice.

Only “the best organizer on the planet,” as Norton called Rustin, was trusted by King to get hundreds of thousands of people to Washington. Rustin turned almost immediately to Velma Murphy-Hill and her husband Norman Hill, who had just started graduate work at the University of Chicago. “We’re having a march on Washington,” he said.

“What can I do to help?” Norman Hill remembers asking Rustin.

“Organize Chicago,” Rustin replied.

With the help of the newly radicalized local chapter of the NAACP, he did just that. “I got so involved,” said Norman Hill, “I ended up dropping out of graduate school and joining the movement.”

Velma Hill added that the way Rustin worked changed her work, and that of the civil rights movement, forever. “Bayard taught us that you gotta develop coalitions, be smart and understand institutions,” said Velma Hill. “Black people—historically, black organizations—were not doing coalition politics.”

After the iconic, 250,000-strong March, remembered now for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, word was out about Rustin, the gay leftist no longer so deep in the shadows. And despite the efforts of Strom Thurmond, who denounced Rustin as a “pervert” on the Senate floor, both Randolph and King stood behind Rustin this time, and his star began to rise among Washington’s powerful.

After 1965, Rustin decided that the period of active protest was over, and it was time for more old-fashioned politics. With the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act passed, the place to fight for the “Great Society” was in Congress, not the streets.

Rustin’s shift “from protest to politics” stressed as many as it cheered. To his more radical supporters, Rustin’s shift stopped a powerful movement in its tracks. And Rustin’s later, cautious writings about the Vietnam War grieved colleagues like Norton and his WRL colleague McReynolds, who told Chelsea Now that he felt he understood why.

“I think when your airplane is turned around mid-flight and turned back to Dulles International because the president wants to talk to you—what would you do?” said McReynolds, “There’s no way in which a bastard child, a queer guy, a felon, an ex-communist would not be tempted by this sudden access to total respectability and power.”

On the other hand, the change made sense to Velma and Norman Hill, as a return to the focus on labor inspired by Randolph. “[Randolph and Rustin] saw the trade union movement as a major force in American society, in our quest for a society in which racial and economic justice would prevail,” said Norman Hill. “And he [Rustin] saw that the political status of blacks was linked to their economic well being.”

Together, still flush with hopes for the Great Society, the Hills and Rustin helped create the 1966 “Freedom Budget for All Americans.” Much of what was said in those meetings, said Velma Hill, is quite current now. Their budget focused on “generating jobs around the unmet needs of all Americans, like housing,” she said. “And we talked about getting together a group of economists to see how much money it would take to get a real health care system for everybody.”

San Francisco can wait

One the spring day in 1977, all Walter Naegle wanted at Times Square was a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. He’d been in New York for seven years after fleeing the draft board in his hometown of Succasunna, N.J. Now, eight years after Stonewall, he’d heard all about San Francisco and wanted to look for jobs there.

But that day, he saw an elegant six-footer with tawny skin and a shock of white hair. “Our eyes met,” Naegle told Chelsea Now, “and we started talking. I got my Chronicle, but I never made it to San Francisco.”

Naegle soon moved into Penn South, where he and Rustin remained together until Rustin’s death 10 years later. In those years, Rustin returned to some of his pacifist roots. He toured Asia with refugee agencies and in 1985 went back to India with Naegle for the War Resisters International’s triennial conference. “It was a chance for him to reconnect with so many people he hadn’t seen in 20 years,” said Naegle.

Asked how many of the Asian antiquities in the couple’s apartment had been picked up in India, Naegle laughed. “Some... but mostly it was a matter of traveling to the Tupper Galleries on East 25th Street.” A serious collector, Rustin also loved to go to Chelsea’s former flea market at 26th and Sixth Avenue on Sunday afternoons. He and Naegle enjoyed the area’s mom and pop stores, and its diversity of cuisine.

Rustin also discovered a new cause entirely, one he had never taken up before: the rights of gay people. In the 1980s, as a new illness called AIDS was just being understood, Rustin began to work his contacts in New York’s black churches, piercing the silence to see the toll among gay men and drug users in the black community.

And he came up with his own version of gay marriage by adopting as his son the lover who was 37 years his junior. “We had to have someone from the state come in,” said Naegle. “She had to make sure I wasn’t exploiting a helpless old man, or he a vulnerable young guy…. By the end, she knew the situation, I think, but maybe because Bayard was well known, no one questioned it.”

In 1986, as New York City Council’s first gay rights law came under threat, Rustin was finally ready to speak on the issue in public.

“There was a lot of heat around the bill,” said Andy Humm, who was then leader of the New York Coalition for Gay Rights. “Some kind of deal had been cut with [then-Mayor Ed] Koch: ‘Let’s pass it now and weaken it later.’” The bill, which barred discrimination in housing, had an exemption for two-family houses; the amendment would have expanded the exemption to four-family homes.”

Speaking before Mayor Koch after the amendment passed, “Bayard spoke about housing as a civil rights issue,” said Humm. “Koch said, ‘I got a real education today,’ then vetoed the bill.”

That year, Rustin marched for gay rights for the first time in New York, and wrote in the essay “From Montgomery to Stonewall”: “The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it’s the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated.”

This year, 20 years will have passed since Rustin’s 1987 death from cardiac arrest after surgery. There are two New York City high schools named after him, including the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex on West 18th Street in Chelsea. At the dedication of the latter, activist and writer Andy Humm told Chelsea Now, “Walter was even there but was never acknowledged. Neither was Rustin’s sexuality. What do people know about him?” Humm asked incredulously.

The film documenting Rustin’s life, “Brother/Outsider,” was meant to be shown in schools, but far fewer than expected have chosen it. “I think because of the gay content,” said Naegle.

Velma Hill told Chelsea Now that she hates how Rustin seems too often forgotten. Too many people, she and her husband Norman said, think that the civil rights movement was solely run by Dr. King—and is irrelevant to the present.

“The story of Bayard is the story of someone who brought about change in American society,” said Norman Hill. “He belongs up front, too.”