Know Your Civil Rights Leaders: Bayard Rustin

In front of 170 W 130 St., March on Washington, (left to right) Bayard Rustin, Deputy Director, Cleveland Robinson, Chairman of Administrative Committee / World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez. (1964)

Bayard Rustin — an American hero.

“Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) On can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it.”

Rustin is credited with introducing Martin Luther King Jr., and others engaged in the struggle for civil rights, to Gandhi’s philosophy of militant non-violence.

It is noteworthy that Rustin’s activism on behalf of civil rights was grounded in a broader matrix of ideological principles, and his activism found varied outlets. Indeed, Rustin was the peripatetic organizer who over a lifetime of activism would gravitate to whatever struggle emerged for peace, democracy, or racial justice. In 1946 he travelled to India to meet with Gandhi intellectuals, stopping in Britain to address various pacifist groups. Then he worked for several years in a campaign against America’s development of nuclear weapons and its programs for war preparedness.

Bayard Rustin and Dr. Eugene Reed at Freedom House / World Telegram & Sun photo by Al Ravenna. (1964)

Soon after the abortive Journey of Reconciliation he travelled to Paris and Moscow with David Dellinger and other pacifists. In Paris he learned about the emerging anticolonial struggles in Africa, and in 1952 travelled to Africa on a mission sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Friends Service Committee, with the purpose of linking American pacifist movement with leaders of West African independence. After a humiliating arrest for a homosexual incident in 1953, he was ejected from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. But a year later he was appointed executive secretary of the War Resisters League, a position that he retained for 12 years, though he was frequently “released” to work with the evolving civil rights movement.

In a 1986 essay titled “From Montgomery to Stonewall,” Rustin wrote: “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.”

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Wow.

President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the White House, Washington, D.C., 1977 Apr. 5.

I have no recollection of this at all. Not only did Jimmy Carter’s administration end with the Iranian hostage crisis but it began with an American hostage crisis.

On March 9, 1977 (less than two months into the new Carter administration) “three buildings in Washington, D.C. were seized by 12 gunmen. They were held responsible for taking 149 hostages and the death of two people. After a 39 hour standoff all hostages were released from the District Building (city hall) – now called the John A. Wilson Building, B’nai B’rith headquarters, and the Islamic Center.”

The leader of the siege was former national secretary of the Nation of Islam, Hamaas Khaalis. Khaalis, born Ernest McGee in Indiana, had a beef with the Nation of Islam and, in 1958, set up “a rival orthodox Islamic organization, the “Hanafi Movement.”

The siege was not undertaken for any noble goal but to further Khaalis’ need for personal revenge after members of his family were murdered, he believed, by members of the Nation of Islam in furtherance of the 20-year feud, although the excuse was the opening in a Washington, DC cinema of Moustapha Akkad’s 1977 Hollywood film The Message about the life of the Prophet Mohammed.

What is significant to me is who stepped up to the plate and brought an end to the siege.

A large part of the negotiations were the three Muslim ambassadors, who “read to the gunmen passages from the Koran that they said demonstrated Islam’s compassion and mercy. They urged the gunmen to surrender. These ambassadors relied on their religious faith for compassion and tolerance.

An interesting side note is Marion Berry’s name popping up. He was in the City Hall that day and was shot after he inadvertently stepped out of an elevator into the middle of the action. Voting for Berry after the siege “was seen as a rebuke of the killers/kidnappers.” This certainly accounts for his continued success as a politician despite some rather large personal problems.

Events make more sense when you get some context.

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George Catlin (1796-1872)

"Wi-Jun-Jon - The Pigeon's Egg Head Going to Washington : Returning to his home" (Two views of Wi-jun-jon, first, on his way to Washington wearing traditional Native American dress and carrying a calumet, then, on his return to his village wearing a uniform with top hat and carrying a fan and an umbrella. Pubd. by Currier & Ives, between 1837 and 1839. Artist, George Catlin

(SAAM) George Catlin (1796-1872) journeyed west five times in the 1830s to paint the Plains Indians and their way of life. Convinced that westward expansion spelled certain disaster for native peoples, he viewed his Indian Gallery as a way “to rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs.”

Catlin was the first artist to record the Plains Indians in their own territories. He admired them as the embodiment of the Enlightenment ideal of “natural man,” living in harmony with nature. But the more than 500 paintings in the Indian Gallery also reveal the fateful encounter of two different cultures in a frontier region undergoing dramatic transformation.

When Catlin first traveled west in 1830, the United States Congress had just passed the Indian Removal Act, requiring Indians in the Southeast to resettle west of the Mississippi River. This vast forced migration—as well as smallpox epidemics and continuing incursions from trappers, miners, explorers, and settlers—created pressures on Indian cultures to adapt or perish. Seeing the devastation of many tribes, Catlin came to regard the frontier as a region of corruption. He portrayed the nobility of these still-sovereign peoples, but he was aware that he painted in sovereignty’s twilight.

By the late 1830s and 1840s, Catlin began displaying the Indian Gallery in eastern capitals and in Europe, an advocate for the Indian way of life. Yet the challenge of keeping his collection together and making ends meet led him to questionable strategies. He courted audiences by presenting real Indians enacting war dances. In effect, Catlin created the first Wild West show, with all its compromising sensationalism and exploitation.

The wikipedia entry for George Catlin has lots of good links.

Campfire Stories here if you can get in.

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