Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
The Rebel Who Came In From the Cold: The Tainted Career of Bayard
Rustin
James Creegan
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Portside
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 Gandhian 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 and
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 Rauh, 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. Rauh 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 Commentarymagazine, 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.
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
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].
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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