Black, gay rights linked in history

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 2/13/2004

THOSE African-American ministers in Massachusetts who deny any link between the black civil rights movement and the movement toward same-sex marriage are running back into a dank closet of yesteryear. These ministers who want to stuff today's gay and lesbian couples into separate and unequal compartments of commitment have forgotten how the civil rights movement forced Bayard Rustin, one of the movement's greatest theorists, to make himself invisible because he was gay.

During the Montgomery bus boycott, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was constantly worried about Rustin's presence in the movement, especially among ministers "among whom tolerance for homosexuals was shunned as the wedge of evil," wrote Taylor Branch in "Parting the Waters." On one occasion, King invited Rustin down to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for a strategy session.

But King's "desire to hide Rustin from practically everyone was so strong that he asked him to fly into Birmingham instead of Montgomery. Bob Williams met Rustin there and put him face down in the back seat of his car. King's instructions were that Rustin was not to raise his head until the car was parked safely at the Dexter parsonage."

Rustin paid his dues in the movement. He was arrested off a freedom ride in 1947 and put on a chain gang. He was jailed and lost some front teeth in a beating in New Orleans. A true disciple of Gandhian nonviolence and Quaker pacifism, Rustin reacted to a man who threatened to beat him with a stick by handing the man an additional stick. Rustin invited the man to commence the beating. The stunned man ran off to beat someone else.

But his sexual orientation resulted in beatings on his persona. He was kicked out of one group after he was arrested on morals charges in 1953 with two other men in the back of a car in Pasadena, Calif. During a point in 1959 where King's Southern voter registration drives were faltering, he wanted to hire Rustin to be the publicist for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But the hiring was postponed indefinitely when King also brought up that he wanted to quell friction between the SCLC and the national NAACP, headed by Roy Wilkins.

"King wanted to bargain with Wilkins," Branch wrote, "but the SCLC preachers were quick to point out that he would reduce his leverage if he hired Rustin, whose background was well known to Wilkins. As always, it seemed, one of King's goals was hostage to another."

In 1960, Adam Clayton Powell held King hostage with Rustin. King threatened to picket the Democratic National Convention. Powell, the New York congressman, wanted no distractions as he was aiming to be the first African-American to chair a major congressional committee. Powell sent a message that if the picketing were not called off, he would tell the media that King was having an affair with Rustin. Soon afterward, King, despite his "loyalties of principle and personal feeling for Rustin," sent an emissary to tell Rustin that he was too much a liability to have further direct contact with King.

Yet Rustin's skills were so valuable the debate of who would organize the 1963 March on Washington revolved around him. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP still did not want Rustin. King lauded Rustin's skills but worried about his "liabilities." A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader who went back two decades with Rustin, agreed to lead the march only if Rustin could be his deputy.

"You can take that on if you want," Wilkins told Randolph, "but don't expect me to do anything about it when the trouble starts." Senator Strom Thurmond did try to start trouble by taking a J. Edgar Hoover wiretap and blasting Rustin for sexual perversion on the Senate floor. The attack was ignored by the media. Rustin went on to organize one of the greatest events in US history, from transportation and crowd control of the 250,000 people to cooling tempers backstage as arguments erupted among the speakers. Rustin even ran the volunteer cleanup after King sent them home with "I Have a Dream."

When Wilkins personally told Rustin that he did not want him organizing the March on Washington because of his past, Rustin challenged Wilkins by saying, "If you stand up and have some courage, it will do no damage." Without Rustin, the March on Washington might not have crystallized into a symbol of the nation's courage. Had the black ministers and politicians of yesterday accepted Rustin all along, the civil rights movement might have made even more progress than it did.

Rustin was living proof that there was a link between the black civil rights movement and homosexuality. Unfortunately, it was a link that should never be repeated. If today's ministers stood up with courage to acknowledge their link to the cause of gay civil rights, they will find out that it will do no damage. They might find out that it will give them even more allies in their own fight for equality in America.