[Note:
James Creegan died in 2023. His obituary can be found here: James
Creegan: A Marxist maverick. This
article originally appeared in the online journal Portside on March 17, 2016, https://portside.org/2016-03-17/rebel-who-came-cold-tainted-career-bayard-rustin. Creegan’s exploration of Rustin, the man
and the myth, is even more timely today then when it was first written in light
of the Netflix biopic 'Rustin' from 2023 starring Colman Domingo and produced by the Obamas. Jim would have
appreciated the irony of our republication of the article exactly 9 years after its
initial publication on St. Patrick’s Day.]
The
Rebel Who Came In From the Cold: The Tainted Career of Bayard Rustin
By James
Creegan
 |
| Rustin (left) pictured with Rev Bernard Lee and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1964 |
In 2013,
Bayard Rustin, who died in 1987, was posthumously awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, along with Bill Clinton and others. On that
occasion progressive radio and television journalist Amy Goodman devoted part
of her syndicated broadcast, Democracy Now!, to Rustin's life and legacy. She
introduced Rustin as "a minority within a minority, who tirelessly
agitated for change, spending nights, days and weeks in jail opposing US policy
at home and abroad-a gay man fighting against homophobia, and a pacifist
fighting against endless war."
A guest
on the program was John D'Emilio, who writes in the introduction to his 2003
biography, Lost Prophet that Rustin:
wished
more than anything else to remake the world around him. He wanted to shift the
balance between white supremacy and racial justice, between violence and
cooperation in the conduct of nations, between the wealth and power of the few
and poverty and powerlessness of the many. [1]
A widely
acclaimed documentary chronicling Rustin's career, Brother Outsider,
by Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer (2003), also celebrates Rustin as a forgotten
hero and visionary of the civil rights and peace movements. This high praise is
certainly warranted in relation to the earlier parts of Rustin's life. But, as
we shall see, such encomiums either leave out or tend to downplay the far less
laudatory later chapters of his biography.
Young,
Black and Angry
Although
never a campaigner for homosexual rights, Rustin was unapologetically gay in
private life, several times hitting back against the attempts of politicians -
from Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond to black Democratic congressman Adam Clayton
Powell -- to slime him for his sexual orientation. He was also a determined
anti-racist fighter from an early age. He first protested against racial
segregation as a high school student in his native Westchester, Pennsylvania,
where he refused to sit in the balcony reserved exclusively for blacks in a
movie theater. He went on briefly to join the Young Communist League in his
adopted home of New York City. He was active in the CP-led campaign to free the
nine Scottsboro Boys, falsely accused of rape and sentenced to die in Alabama's
electric chair. Rustin became disillusioned with the CP when it downplayed
civil rights agitation after Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, on the rationale
that fighting for black rights would hinder the American war effort.
Rustin
then fell under the influence of the radical clergyman A. J. Muste, who headed
the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and of the American Socialist Party of Norman
Thomas. His chief mentor soon became the black Socialist labor leader A. Philip
Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin at this time
became a principled pacifist, dedicated to a Ghandian philosophy of non-violent
agitation for social change. He spent nearly two years in federal prison during
World War II for refusing, as a conscientious objector, to serve in the army.
Rustin
was also a founder of the civil rights movement. He headed an early version of
the Freedom Rides to protest southern Jim Crow laws in 1947, and refused to
take his appointed seat on a segregated bus in North Carolina eight years
before Rosa Parks did the same in Alabama. For this offense, he did twenty-one
days on a chain gang. Rustin helped Martin Luther King to organize northern
support for the Birmingham bus boycott in 1956. In an era of
near-universal homophobia, King became nervous about being publicly associated
with Rustin due to the latter's earlier arrest on a "morals" charge
in California (he was discovered performing oral sex in the back seat of a
car), and for a time took his distance, relegating Rustin to a much less
visible background role in the movement. But Rustin and King came together once
again for the 1963 civil rights march on Washington. Rustin was the leading
organizer of that quarter-million-strong outpouring for racial and economic
justice. The march is widely regarded as the crowning achievement in the career
of a black leader of exemplary dedication and self-sacrifice, of formidable
intellectual and oratorical gifts, and organizing skills unmatched by anyone in
the civil rights struggle.
It is
the years up to and including 1963 that the devotees of Rustin's memory prefer
to emphasize. We would, however, be unfaithful to the historical record if we
were to ignore a less uplifting sequel. From the time that the administration
of Lyndon Johnson embraced major parts of the civil rights agenda, Rustin
pursued an increasingly rightward trajectory. The principled pacifist ended up
supporting (with occasional qualms) the Vietnam War and promoted the
intensification of the nuclear arms race; the champion of black rights
apologized for the intervention of the South African apartheid régime in the
Angolan civil war in the 1970s. It can be said without exaggeration that Rustin
ended his life as a neo-conservative.
In
Transition
To
understand this transformation, it is necessary to introduce a figure
absent from Amy Goodman's tribute and Brother Outsider, and
mentioned in only a few lines of D'Emilio's biography. His name was Max
Shachtman.
A
writer, speaker and politician of great energy and outstanding gifts, Shachtman
first came to prominence on the American left as a follower of Leon Trotsky. He
broke with Trotsky, however, in 1940 over the question of whether the Socialist
Workers Party (the American Trotskyist group) should continue to defend the
Soviet Union in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler pact. Trotsky argued that the
USSR was worthy of defense despite the pact and horrors of Stalinism.
Shachtman, on the other hand, maintained what he called a third-camp position,
equidistant from Stalinist totalitarianism and western imperialism.
Yet
Shachtman did not remain for very long in the third camp. Throughout the 40s
and 50s, he moved steadily to the right, ultimately coming to see Stalinism as
the greater evil, and adopting an increasingly friendly attitude toward the US
and its cold war allies. On the home front, Shachtman concluded, after
unsuccessful attempts to organize socialist groups independent of the two major
parties, that the Democratic Party was the main arena in which socialists
should work. Within the party itself, he looked to labor officialdom -- at
first in the person of the head of the United Auto Workers, Walter
Reuther -- as the principal vehicle of the leftward Democratic realignment that
he proclaimed as his objective. But opposing groupings within the Democratic
Party and AFL-CIO fell out over the Vietnam War in the 1960s, resulting in the
temporary departure of Reuther and the UAW from the labor federation to protest
the leadership's support for the war. Shachtman, on the other hand, cast his
lot with organized labor's pro-war right wing, headed by George Meany, and with
the Democratic Party mainstream of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.
Rustin
was Shachtman's main liaison with the civil rights movement, and, along with
his aging mentor, A. Philip Randolph, followed a political path that coincided
in all major respects with that of Shachtman. Rustin's admirers can hardly
ignore his pro-establishment drift, but tend to portray it as a pragmatic
decision to remain silent on Vietnam in order not to jeopardize his civil
rights and social welfare agenda. But Rustin did not merely fail to speak out
against the war. He was also extremely vociferous when it came to condemning
the Black Power movement, anti-war mobilizations and the New Left.
The
watershed moment in Rustin's career occurred at the 1964 Democratic National
Convention in Atlantic City. The convention took place during the Freedom
Summer, when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was
mounting an intensive voter registration drive in the South, in the course of
which three civil rights workers -- Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney -- met their
deaths at the hands of Mississippi racist vigilantes, acting in collaboration
with local police. The newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)
elected a group of delegates to Atlantic City to challenge the
credentials of the regular all-white delegation, which had been selected by a
process barred to blacks. As the devastating testimony before the credentials
committee of Fannie Lou Hamer, a middle-aged black sharecropper, concerning the
reign of terror against black people in her state, was broadcast on national
television, Lyndon Johnson scrambled to make the MFDP challenge disappear.
Johnson continually invoked the bogey of a victory of his far-right opponent,
Barry Goldwater, in the November elections to bring MFDP sympathizers into
line. His two principal lieutenants in this fight were future vice-president
Hubert Humphrey, and UAW chief Walter Reuther. (In taped phone conversations
that have recently become public, we can hear Johnson handing out marching
orders in his almost daily phone calls to Reuther, and the auto workers'
president responding with fulsome flattery.)
Finally,
the challengers were offered a compromise under which the state's full Jim Crow
delegation would be seated at the convention, and the MFDP would be apportioned
two at-large delegates, not self-selected but handpicked by the Democratic
leadership-a move designed to keep Hamer from speaking on the convention floor.
The Johnson team pulled out all stops to force upon the MFDP an offer that most
members of the delegation deemed a betrayal of their purpose. Reuther made
a point of telling the MFDP legal counsel, Joseph Raugh, that his firm's
principal client, the UAW, would take its business elsewhere if he did not join
in urging the compromise upon the MFDP. Raugh capitulated, but failed to
persuade the delegation, which ultimately rejected Johnson's offer. During
protracted and stormy debates among the delegates, it soon became apparent that
the president's men had another important ally, Bayard Rustin, who strenuously
urged acceptance. In exasperation, one SNCC member shouted, "You're
a traitor, Bayard!"[2]
In an
article, "From Protest to Politics", in Commentary the
following February, Rustin laid out the main lines of a political approach that
was to separate him from the radicalism that emerged from the civil rights
movement in response to the freedom summer and disillusionment with the
Democrats. Rustin argued that the main barriers to black progress in the future
would consist less of legal discrimination than economic disadvantage. The
remedies-jobs programs, housing construction and aid to education-could not be
obtained by the confrontational tactics - like lunch-counter sit-ins and
freedom rides - employed to fight de jure segregation. They
rather required large-scale intervention on the part of the federal government.
The main force favoring such things was organized labor, and the principal
tactic was pressure within the Democratic Party to expand Johnson's War on Poverty
and break with the Dixiecrats. It never seems to have entered Rustin's mind
that the fight for economic equality might, like the struggle against
segregation, be driven forward by non-electoral means, such as King hoped
to employ in the Poor People's Campaign he was planning at the time of his
assassination. There was also no mention at all of the firestorm that was
consuming government funds initially earmarked for the War on Poverty,
and driving the country's youth, black and white, in ever-growing numbers away
from the Democratic Party: the war in Vietnam. Along with the civil rights
bills that Johnson pushed through Congress, he also introduced the Gulf of
Tonkin resolution, authorizing what was soon to become a massive aerial assault
on North Vietnam.
The Test
of Vietnam
Rustin
was aware that he could only remain on the fair-weather side of the political
coalition to which he had hitched his wagon by dissociating himself from anyone
in the emerging anti-war movement whose differences with the Johnson
administration transgressed its fundamental cold-war framework. Thus, when
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issued a call for an anti-war
demonstration in Washington in the spring of 1965, and welcomed all who opposed
the war, Rustin and his co-thinkers instantly understood that such a
non-exclusionary policy would allow the participation of groups that were
calling for the total and immediate withdrawal of US troops, not to mention
those who openly supported the victory of the Viet Cong. Rustin thus
added his voice to the anti-SDS red baiting chorus that preceded what turned
out to be a march whose attendance of 25,000 greatly exceeded the expectations
of organizers, and inaugurated the era of mass anti-war demonstrations.
Rustin's signature appeared along with those of Socialist Party head Norman
Thomas and A.J. Muste on a statement warning people away from the march.
According to Kirkpatrick Sale in his history of SDS, "...this group managed
to get the New York Post to run a prominent editorial on the
very eve of the march featuring this statement and going on to issue warnings
about `attempts to convert the event into a pro-Communist production' and `a
frenzied, one-sided anti-American show.' "[3]
Rustin's position on the march led to a rift with two other anti-war pacifists
with whom he co-edited Liberation magazine, Dave Dellinger and
Staughton Lynd. In an article in the magazine, Lynd accused Rustin of
advocating a "coalition with the marines." Rustin resigned from the
editorial board shortly thereafter.
It was
not a betrayal of Rustin's integrationist and pacifist principles to oppose
those sections of the radicalizing black movements of the 60s that rejected
non-violence and embraced one or another variety of black separatism. Rustin
famously debated Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. But Rustin also proved to be
a determined foe of the efforts of even those who espoused nonviolence and
racially integrated struggle-such as that advocated by Martin Luther King and
his close adviser, James Bevel-against the Vietnam War. When in 1967,
King made the momentous decision to speak out against the war at Riverside
Church in New York City and join an anti-war march at the United Nations,
Rustin was prominent among those who urged King against taking this step.
Apparently, the famous photograph that weighed so heavily in King's decision -
of a young girl running from a US-torched Vietnamese village, her face
contorted with pain and her naked body seared with napalm-did not have a
similar effect on Rustin.
Facing
Right
As the
Vietnam war loosened the grip of anti-Communist ideology, and the student and
minority movements of the 60s became increasingly radicalized, several
"democratic socialists" who had previously operated within the
cold-war framework - such as Michael Harrington and Norman Thomas - expressed
some misgivings about their political past. Bayard Rustin was not among them.
In the final decades of his life, he moved even further to the right. As early
as 1966, he had joined Norman Thomas in the Committee on Free
Elections in the Dominican Republic, a CIA front group aimed at legitimizing
rigged elections in 1966 to prevent the return to office of Juan Bosch, a
reformist president effectively ousted by the invasion of 42,000 US troops in
the previous year.
By this
time, Rustin had become co-director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, funded
mainly by George Meany and the AFL-CIO leadership, and an election monitor for
Freedom House. In 1972 he became a co-chairman of the virulently anti-Communist
Social Democrats, USA, previously headed by Max Shachtman. In 1976, he joined
with Paul Nitze to found the Committee on the Present Danger, which advocated a
nuclear arms buildup against the USSR. He was a fervent supporter of
Israel and a regular contributor to Commentary magazine,
edited by one of the founders of neo-conservatism, Norman Podhoretz.
Anyone
who doubts just how far to the right Rustin had moved would do well to have a
look at an article that appeared in the Commentary of October,
1978, which he co-authored with future Reagan appointee, Carl Gershman.
Entitled "Africa, Soviet Imperialism and the Retreat of American
Power", the article blasts the Carter administration for taking a
complacent attitude toward the Soviet and Cuban aid to the People's Front for
the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which had led the independence struggle
against Portugal. They argued that Carter, paralyzed by the Vietnam syndrome
and fearful of undermining détente, was allowing the Soviet Union to gain a
foothold in Africa, and urged greater aid to the anti-Soviet UNITA. Headed by
Jonas Savimbi, UNITA guerillas had posed as independence fighters while
secretly colluding with the Portuguese. Rustin and Gershman had this to say
about the fact that UNITA was also aided by a South African intervention force:
And if a
South African force did intervene at the urging of black leaders. to counter a
non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political
judgment is this immoral?
The
authors also worry lest the administration become overly fixated on the rights
of the black African majority:
...the
suppression of blacks by whites is not the only human rights issue in Africa.
Virtually all governments in Africa are undemocratic to one degree or another,
but nowhere does democracy have less chance of evolving than in the kind of
totalitarian party dictatorships which the Soviet Union is in the process of
trying to implant in Africa. Not to resist this development, but to concentrate
solely on the black-white problem, undermines the moral credibility of the
administration.
We see
in this passage an early formulation of the distinction between authoritarian
and totalitarian régimes, popularized by Reagan's UN ambassador, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, as a rationale for supporting the Nicaraguan contras and the
death-squad government of El Salvador (which Kirkpatrick said was only
authoritarian, as opposed to Communist-totalitarian). This article is
unmentioned in D'Emilio's biography.
Principles
of Convenience
It is
easy to determine if one is acting on principle when doing so entails defying
the established order and enduring the kind of sacrifice and marginalization
that Rustin experienced in his younger years. However, when one's principles
happen to coincide with those of the powerful, and their espousal confers
status and material rewards, disentangling the threads of opportunism from
those of genuine belief becomes a lot harder. Admirers point out that, even in
his later years, Rustin maintained a strong commitment to racial justice
and social equality. And his political thinking did display a certain internal
logic: if "Communist totalitarianism" was worse than western racism
or imperialism, one could conclude that the latter should be supported as the
lesser evil. Rustin's final neo-conservatism indeed represented the end-point
in the evolution of a definite strand of social-democratic thought and
practice, represented above all by Max Shachtman and his Social Democrats, USA.
Yet it
is also not unfair to say that this political tendency epitomized the devil's
bargain offered up by the more liberal and enlightened custodians of the
American empire in its heyday: a certain commitment to social reform at home in
exchange for support of the global régime of private property, and its defense
against all those forces that seriously threatened it, be they Stalinist
governments, left-nationalist reformers, or national liberation movements-all
conveniently amalgamated under the rubric of the "Communist menace."
It was this devil's deal that Shachtman and Rustin embraced with both arms. For
them, the coups that toppled nationalist reformers like Mossadegh in Iran,
Arbenz in Guatemala, or Bosch in the Dominican Republic because they threatened
to nationalize US corporate property; the massacre of an estimated million
Indonesians who supported the Sukarno government and the Communist Party,
or the hecatombs of Vietnam, were not too heavy a price to pay for the passage
of a civil rights bill or the funding of a government anti-poverty program.
Their politics were, in the end, virtually indistinguishable from those of the
so-called Scoop Jackson Democrats, named after the Democratic senator from
Washington State (aka the "senator from Boeing"), who favored both
the welfare state at home and militarism abroad. Moreover, they stood by
the bargain they had made even as it was becoming increasingly apparent that
the US government was having difficulty delivering guns and butter at the same
time, and would opt for the former when it came time to choose.
It would
also be much easier to ascribe the politics of Rustin's twilight-years to
belief alone if there had been no perks or material rewards-no rides in Hubert
Humphrey's limousine, no White House visits, no honorary degrees from
Yale and Harvard, and, above all, no reliance on regular paychecks from
George Meany and the AFL-CIO to fund the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which
Rustin directed. Perhaps he was able to preserve some shred of self-respect
from his radical past with the knowledge that-unlike Norman Thomas and others
who were paid directly by the CIA-he supported the Cold War out of continuing
loyalty to the labor movement (read: the right wing of the trade-union
bureaucracy). But regardless of where the money came from, the politics it
underwrote were the same.
Even
John D'Emilio, Rustin's sympathetic biographer, strongly suggests the existence
of an implicit quid pro quo:
...George
Meany, always a cold warrior, made support for the president an undebatable
proposition within the AFL-CIO. Had Rustin become too strongly identified with
anti-war forces, there was a risk he might have lost funding for the Randolph
Institute.[4]
And
further on:
George
Houser, who had worked closely with Rustin. thought he "just made a
practical decision that, `if I'm going to survive in this world, then I have
got to play a different game, because there's no place for me in just
maintaining contact with a small radical group. How do I manage myself?' I
think he made a conscious decision about that." [5]
And
finally:
Shizu
Ashai Proctor, a former FOR [Fellowship of Reconciliation] secretary whom
Rustin had thoroughly captivated in the 1940s, ran into him on a subway
platform in Manhattan. She hadn't seen him in many years but had followed his
career. Talking about old times and commenting on his current circumstances,
Rustin made a comment that, almost three decades later, remained engraved in
her memory. "You get tired after a while," he told her, "and you
have to come home to something you can count on." Well into his fifties at
the time of this encounter, Rustin had experienced a lifetime on the margins.
The Randolph Institute provided a secure political home, allowed a considerable
measure of autonomy, and gave him the opportunity to express his prodigious
energies. As America began to spin out of control because of the passions
unleashed by the war, Rustin chose to set himself firmly on a particular
ground, and he never reconsidered.[6]
If one
were to limit the definition of "selling out" to the drawing up of an
explicit contract stipulating the exchange of political utterances and actions
"x" in exchange for perks and sums of money "y", one would
be hard put to find any examples of selling out in the entire history of the
left. Political shifts are almost invariably accompanied by professed changes
of belief. The fact, however, that some views will lead to federal prison and
the chain gang, while others to the portals of power and a steady meal ticket
is a distinction that should not be overlooked in attempting to dissect the
motives of historical figures. As a man who fought black oppression and
suffered as a gay, Rustin appears to many contemporary progressives as an
attractive figure. And while his later choices should not prevent us from
appreciating his genuine contributions, neither should these choices be allowed
to slip down a memory hole in any rush to celebrate unsung heroes. One can
easily understand why Barack Obama views Bayard Rustin as an exemplary civil
rights leader. We on the left, however, should examine the past with a far more
critical eye.
[Jim
Creegan was chairman of the Penn State chapter of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) in the 1960s, lectured in philosophy in the 70s, he was a union
shop steward during the late 80s and 90s. He lives in New York City, now
unaffiliated but unresigned. His writings often appear in the Weekly Worker (UK).]
[1] John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet (Chicago,
2003), p.2
[2] Taylor Branch, Pillar of
Fire (New York, 1998), p.473
[3] Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New
York, 1974), p. 179
[4] John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet, (Chicago, 2003), p. 447
[5] Ibid., p.447
[6] Ibid., Pp. 447-448
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