Bayard Rustin: The Man Behind the March on Washington

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[2] all of our rights.

[3] Freedom now movement, hear me. We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington, to go by plane, by car, bus.

[4] 20 ,000 people black and white marched on the nation's capital.

[5] Nationalized this southern freedom struggle.

[6] It was really glorious.

[7] August 28, 1963, the March on Washington, lives in many of our minds as a single moment, a single voice, a single dream.

[8] I have a dream that one day...

[9] But what you probably don't know is there's a man standing behind Martin Luther King, Jr. as he's making this speech, just a few feet to his right.

[10] He's tall, thin, wearing thick, black -framed glasses.

[11] And this moment would never have happened without him.

[12] His name...

[13] Byard...

[14] Byard Rustin.

[15] I'm Ramtin Arablui.

[16] I'm Randab D 'Fattah.

[17] And in this final episode of our Imagining New World series, The Man Behind the March on Washington.

[18] Bard would sing add a demonstration in the shower, standing over the stove suddenly.

[19] So it was very much a part of who he was.

[20] This is Walter Neagle.

[21] And that voice singing was Bayard Rustin.

[22] I met Byrd Reston in mid -April of 1977.

[23] Just so happened we were on the same street corner waiting for a light to change.

[24] And we looked at each other and suddenly lightning struck.

[25] I was actually on my way to a new stand in Times Square.

[26] I had decided to leave New York, so I was on my way to pick up a San Francisco Chronicle to look at the job market and the apartment market.

[27] And I did pick up the paper that day, but I never quite made it to San Francisco.

[28] Walter and Byrd were partners until Byard's death in 1987.

[29] And Walter still lives in the same apartment in New York, where he lived with Byard all those years ago.

[30] I find it very comforting.

[31] I never feel really that Byrd's very far away.

[32] It's also where Bayer did so much of the planning for the March on Washington back in 1963, which you could say was his crowning achievement.

[33] But here's the thing about big historic moments.

[34] The reality of what happened rarely lines up exactly with our perception of what happened.

[35] Things get left out.

[36] Tensions are downplayed.

[37] But all of those complicated details, those are what make the story human.

[38] What makes the whole thing seem more impossible and more amazing that it actually happened.

[39] The march on Washington was the largest march the nation's capital had ever seen up to that point.

[40] And Byrd Rustin was responsible for organizing it.

[41] 250 ,000 people from all over the country coming to Washington, D .C. on a single day.

[42] Beyond that one event, his influence on the civil rights movement and on Martin Luther King Jr. in particular was here.

[43] huge, though it often goes overlooked.

[44] He was the strategist, the organizer, the person who imagined a different way forward and a better world, despite the many obstacles he faced.

[45] And through it all, he sang.

[46] After a talkie gate, a woman came up to him and said, you know, oh, Mr. Reston, you came and you spoke at my college in 1940s, and you were wonderful, you changed my life.

[47] And he said, oh, well, he said, what did I talk about?

[48] And she paused and said, well, I don't really remember.

[49] But you sang, nobody knows the trouble I've seen.

[50] So that was what stayed with her.

[51] At the end of the song, it ends saying glory, hallelujah, which is a way of saying I overcame.

[52] When we come back, we're going behind the scenes of the march on Washington with those who lived to tell the story of how the march came together and the man at the center of it all, Bired Rustin.

[53] This is Natasha Shipman from Candler, North Carolina, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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[57] Did you know that the song Tainted Love was a cover?

[58] Or that Falakuti created the sound of Afrobeat in Los Angeles?

[59] L .A. is a music capital for sure, but a lot of people don't know how much soul was grown here.

[60] That's why we're telling eight brand new stories about the music you think you know.

[61] This season on Lost Notes.

[62] From KCRW, part of the NPR Podcast Network.

[63] Part 1.

[64] A Group of Angelic Troumakers.

[65] Since the beginning of this nation, we have attempted to make a moral and psychological analysis of prejudice, the economic and social degradation to which it has led, and I'm afraid we are still doing so.

[66] You can never whip these buds if you don't keep you in them separate.

[67] You've got to keep your white and the black sector.

[68] In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement was heating up.

[69] Siddins, boycotts, and marches were consuming cities across the south.

[70] A movement that was beginning to spread to northern cities too.

[71] To be detrimental to your safety to continue this march, and I'm saying that this is an unlawful assembly, this march will not continue.

[72] Seeing this, a man named A. Philip Randolph.

[73] Who was at the forefront of the civil rights movement, called a meeting with a few people he trusted.

[74] My name is Norman Hill.

[75] Norman Hill, then the National Program Director of the Congress of Racial Equality, was one of them.

[76] Myself, Byrusting, Tom Khan, and was executive director of the lead for industrial democracy.

[77] Norman and Tom Khan were young and relatively new to the activism scene.

[78] But Byrd and Randolph had been working together for a long time, planning marches and speaking across the country.

[79] Randolph said it's time to march again.

[80] For decades, he'd been dreaming of putting together a big march.

[81] A massive march, directed toward and on the nation's capital.

[82] I have longed forth for you for opportunity for black workers.

[83] A march for jobs.

[84] And for economic progress.

[85] For all people.

[86] A. Philip Randolph.

[87] came up in the labor movement of the early 1900s, reading Marx and calling himself a socialist.

[88] He firmly believed that a decent, well -paying job would lead to social and political freedom, especially for black people.

[89] Thing is, the time never seemed quite right for that kind of a march.

[90] Not everyone agreed with the vision of racial progress through militant struggles for economic independence.

[91] But now, in the early 1960s, with the country's attention fixed on the civil rights movement, might be the perfect time.

[92] And he knew the men he'd called together shared his vision.

[93] Randolph said to Tom Kahn, by and rustin and myself, come back to me with a plan for organizing the march.

[94] And so we, the three of us, met several times.

[95] For hours, they bring.

[96] trying to imagine what this march would be, what its goals were, who would come, and how they would market it to the world.

[97] Norman Hill could hardly believe he was in this room planning what could become the largest march in American history with Bayard Rustin of all people.

[98] I heard Byrd Rustin speak at the University of Chicago.

[99] Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable.

[100] I was 26.

[101] The only weapon we have is our bodies.

[102] I was impressed by his intellect, his charisma, his commanding presence.

[103] And I came to him after he completed his address, asking what I could do to help.

[104] The rest, as they say, was history.

[105] It was the beginning of a career in activism for Norman.

[106] But what he didn't know was that decades' early, Earlier, when Byard Rustin first arrived in New York, he'd also stumbled into a life of activism.

[107] Now every train to Washington brings its cargo of experts to join the Great Assault on the Depression.

[108] Economists, sociologists, statisticians, agronomists, idealists, world savers.

[109] Each with a pet panacea, a surefire system to save the country.

[110] It's now the 1930s in the middle of the Great Depression.

[111] and Bayard, who is experiencing the feelings and the awareness that he was gay, that he was attracted to men, decides to move to New York City.

[112] He thought it would be a safe place to be both racially and in the context of a city to explore his sexual desires.

[113] Bayard moved in with his aunt in Harlem.

[114] Harlem at that point is by far the largest African -American community in the United States.

[115] It was a big change from the small town in Pennsylvania, where he'd grown up.

[116] You know, he could walk along 125th Street in Harlem and see major theaters and black -owned businesses and see women and children completely occupying the streets and the sidewalks.

[117] By the way, this is John DeMilleo.

[118] I published a book titled Lost Profit, The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

[119] So who was Bayard Rustin going to be in this new world?

[120] Initially, he thought his future was on the stage.

[121] After all, he'd been singing since he was a kid.

[122] So...

[123] He looked for work in the arts and theater and music.

[124] He spent a lot of time at a club called Cafe Society.

[125] Around the same time Billy Holiday was there, where he had a regular gig.

[126] He even performed in a musical on Broadway with Paul Robeson.

[127] But I think in the end, the power of the call to social justice and the deep political activists, of the Great Depression decade pointed him ultimately in that direction.

[128] The world was at war.

[129] The U .S. economy was recovering.

[130] The labor movement was strong and the communist movement was growing stronger.

[131] So as his ambitions to perform faded, Bayer threw himself into the activism scene.

[132] And for a short time, associates himself with the Communist Party, which was one of the few organizations, at that time that wasn't primarily black that openly supported racial justice.

[133] But he soon decided to leave the party.

[134] It was headed in a direction he wasn't comfortable with, becoming more aligned with the Soviet Union.

[135] Rustin would always say that he learned a lot from his time working with American communists, and that he brought those lessons, particularly the fight for economic justice, with him throughout his life.

[136] And then he came across a voice that changed everything for him.

[137] I regard myself as a soldier, though a soldier of peace.

[138] I know the value of discipline and truth.

[139] It was the voice of Mahatma Gandhi.

[140] The mystery man of India dressed as he said he would be, just his loincloth, even in the chilly climes of Europe.

[141] For Rustin in the 1930s, at a time of intense racism in the United States, the idea that a man of color was leading a movement against the world's largest empire was completely inspiring and, you know, awe -provoking.

[142] Bayard immersed himself in interviews and articles about Gandhi.

[143] and then experienced almost you could describe it as a conversion to nonviolence.

[144] He had grown up with the idea of nonviolence around him.

[145] His grandma, Julia Davis Rustin, who raised him as her own child and who he loved deeply was a Quaker.

[146] Julia was, I would say, the primary influence on Bayard, certainly in his childhood.

[147] Later in life, Bayard would say, my activism did not spring from being black.

[148] Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. And Gandhi just took things to the next level for Byard.

[149] He believed an empire had been torn down and a nation changed with little more than words and peaceful protest.

[150] That was revolutionary for him.

[151] And Gandhi's voice would ever be.

[152] echo through Bayard's activism for the rest of his life.

[153] I can see that in the midst of death, life persists.

[154] In the midst of untruth, truth persists.

[155] In the midst of darkness, life persists.

[156] All right, so back to 1963.

[157] Norman, Byard, and Tom Khan have finally figured out what they're going to show to A. Philip Randolph.

[158] Here's how Bayard described their vision for the march in his notes.

[159] January 1963, the 100 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation have witnessed no fundamental government action to terminate the economic subordination of the American Negro.

[160] Negroes seek as an integral part of their own struggle as a people, the creation of more jobs for all Americans.

[161] Therefore, the project described below must be a massive effort involving coordinated participation by all progressive sectors of the liberal, labor, religious, and Negro communities.

[162] And we developed a two -day proposal.

[163] We envision a two -day action program divided as follows.

[164] The first day was to be sit -ins in the congressional offices of those who were opposed to civil rights legislation.

[165] The second day was to be a mass demonstration.

[166] And these were their two main objectives.

[167] A, the project should call for action by the President and Congress listing concrete demands.

[168] B, we should emphasize the theme that no worker in America is generally free.

[169] We now demand a program of action in 1963 that will ensure the emancipation of all labor, regardless of color, race, or creed.

[170] In other words, jobs and economic justice were going to be the focus of the event.

[171] And we presented this plan to A. Philip Randolph.

[172] To their relief, Randolph liked the plan.

[173] It was decided they would host a march on Washington that summer.

[174] So now, all that was left to do was, you know, pull off the most ambitious protest in American history in just a few months.

[175] And that's when Randolph, turn to Bayard.

[176] Here's how Bayard remembers what happened next.

[177] Mr. Randolph asked me if I would set up the logistics for the march, which I immediately began to do, and to get every agency in America, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, intellectuals, labor movement, everybody involved, and to contain it so was intensely nonviolent.

[178] And Mr. Randolph gave me the right to see that that market.

[179] When we come back, the clock begins ticking, and Bayard begins to organize.

[180] Hi, this is straight calling from Toronto, and you're listening to the Thurline for NPR.

[181] Christian nationalists want to turn America into a theocracy, a government under biblical rule.

[182] If they gain more power, it could mean fewer rights for you.

[183] I'm Heath Drusen, and on the new season of extremely American, I'll take you inside the movement.

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[187] Part two, a sword that heals.

[188] It's 1948, and Bayard Rustin has just boarded a ship to India.

[189] which by this point has gained independence from the British Empire.

[190] Over the last decade, since he first got involved in activism, Bayard had built up a name for himself in activist circles.

[191] As the nation's youth put aside the ways of peace and turned to war, we would gain the inevitable triumph.

[192] He'd spent three years in prison for refusing to fight in World War II as a conscientious objector.

[193] While in prison, Bayard kept protesting.

[194] organizing inmates and rallying to end segregation in the prison.

[195] But that landed him in solitary confinement, which took a toll.

[196] The photograph that was taken of Rustin when he first went to federal prison shows a very calm and relaxed face.

[197] And then when they transferred him to a more secure prison after his protests and all, and they take another photo of him.

[198] him.

[199] You can see on his face the pain that it was causing and what it's done to him.

[200] He almost looks like a different human being.

[201] His eyes are sunken, his cheeks hollowed out, and his brows seemed to be arched in anger, or maybe pain.

[202] He was down, but not out, and after leaving prison, he jumped right back into activism, traveling across the country giving lectures, organizing workshops, spreading the gospel of nonviolence.

[203] And by the time he arrived in India, he had earned the nickname Mr. Nonviolence.

[204] This is after, sadly, the death of Mahatma Gandhi, so Rustin never got to meet him.

[205] But he was able to walk the streets Gandhi walked and meet the people he'd fought alongside, soaking up the philosophy of nonviolence in the place where it had been turned into action and succeeded.

[206] Bayard was determined to bring it to the civil rights movement back in the U .S. sit -ins, boycotts, marches, those would be the hallmarks of this philosophy and action.

[207] One of the interesting things about this trip is that at that point, post -independence, many of the core activists in the non -violent movement are feeling a bit disillusioned because rather than nonviolence being at the top of visibility, it's nationalism that seems to be motivating many people.

[208] And nationalism contains within it the possibility of violence against those who disagree with you.

[209] Bayard came up against the reality that the Gandhian movement wasn't entirely nonviolent.

[210] He reflected that it was, quote, nonviolent in its means, but essentially violent in its ends.

[211] which was nationalism, end quote.

[212] We tend not to realize from the outside that all social movements, no matter what the identity, experience internal disagreements, that people have different agendas and different approaches.

[213] Attention that Bayard would also face in his pursuit of a nonviolent future.

[214] Never be stated in terms of black and white.

[215] He debated Malcolm X. If you try and keep us here a deep our will and enforce segregation upon us, you're going to have violence.

[216] You're going to have it whether you like it or not.

[217] And he lost the debate.

[218] The whole world is looking down on Uncle Sam because Uncle Sam is the earth's leading hypocrite.

[219] I am merely pointing out that if you do not have an adequate program and if you do not rely upon the progressive allies, you throw yourself open to being utilized.

[220] Rustin has this almost utopian idealism.

[221] This is the world that we're aiming for.

[222] And as human beings, with our moral sense, we can move in that direction.

[223] The thing is, utopian idealism can be read as foolish optimism, or even as a stubborn denial of reality.

[224] Like, think about it.

[225] If every American had objected to fighting in World War II, would the outcome of the war have been different?

[226] Was violence necessary to prevent a greater evil from arising?

[227] Does it always have to be in either or?

[228] However you read it, this dedication to nonviolence is what kept Byrd going.

[229] They wanted us to talk about violence so they could destroy us.

[230] So long as we were adhering to nonviolence, they could not destroy us.

[231] Spring, 1963.

[232] Bayard has assembled a team of people to begin organizing the march.

[233] Many of them are in their 20s, hungry for a chance to jump into the thick of things.

[234] He made us feel like we were players in history and that he took us seriously.

[235] Michelle Horowitz is on the stand for the march.

[236] I'm Michelle Horowitz, and I was the transportation director.

[237] of the March on Washington, and also I assisted Byrd generally during the march.

[238] Rochelle, who's White, met Byrd a few years earlier.

[239] She'd been inspired to go all in in the movement after working alongside him on a boycott campaign.

[240] Byard, who was smoking about eight cigarettes at a time, took the time to either sing with his incredible voice or lecture us on the history of the civil rights movement and of black people in the United States.

[241] So he had us reading things all the time.

[242] Rochelle was just 22 when she joined the march as an organizer and wasn't sure she was the right fit for transportation director.

[243] I was the person who on four previous marches had lost my bus.

[244] I went, I marched, I couldn't find my bus.

[245] But she stuck with it for one simple reason.

[246] Because Bayer told me I could do it.

[247] I mean, that's the whole.

[248] Okay.

[249] Transportation Director maybe doesn't sound all that glamorous.

[250] But think about it.

[251] It was a really important job because how do you get 200 ,000 people, the number of people they hoped would come to one place?

[252] Not to mention, once they're there, you have to make sure they've got food, access to bathrooms, a clear agenda for the day.

[253] Basically, all the things that Fire Festival didn't do.

[254] I was on the road, mainly traveling to various cities, organized and coalitions for the march.

[255] We went from February to June, convincing, cajoling people that this really should take place.

[256] They had to communicate a vision, a story about the march that made sense to people.

[257] Byard would tell us to visualize and fall through it the whole day.

[258] You know, from the time a participant woke up in the morning until they went to Washington until they left.

[259] It took a few months, but they finally had enough buy -in from different groups to set up a meeting between the heads of the civil rights movement, aka the Big Six, A. Philip Randolph, who you've already met, Roy Wilkins, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of the Color of People, Whitney Young, leader of the National Urban League, James Farmer, of the Congress of Race Equality, John Lewis, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Martin Luther King, Jr. President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

[260] But before they met, Byrd made some tweaks to the March proposal.

[261] He changed the mission statement to include two goals.

[262] Jobs and freedom.

[263] Freedom meaning racial justice.

[264] President John F. Kennedy was working on a civil rights bill, and Rustin figured the Big Six wouldn't want to take attention away from it, especially since Kennedy had already made it clear he opposed the march.

[265] He indicated that there might be violence.

[266] Which would step back, the calls are still rights.

[267] And Bayard made another tweak.

[268] He reduced the event from two days to one.

[269] We thought it was a sellout, but they were right.

[270] He presented this revised proposal to the Big Six, and they were on board, except Roy Wilkins of the NACP had one condition.

[271] He didn't want Byard, a gay former communist, to be the top organizer of the march, so it was decided that Randolph should chair them.

[272] March.

[273] He said it would do so in one condition that he'd be given the right to name his deputy to do the day -to -day organizing of the march.

[274] And he named Byrd Rustin.

[275] In effect, Byard would still be running things, just out of the spotlight.

[276] He had gigantic to -do lists on yellow pads, and we all had to -do lists of what we should do.

[277] It was a lot of work, so they asked groups participating in the march to send representatives to help them with the organizing.

[278] The call came out from the headquarters, Courtney Cox, and I were the two people designated Bessnick for the student -unviolent coronary committee.

[279] Bayard said to me, there are two young women from Mississippi in New York.

[280] They need a place to live.

[281] Can they live with you?

[282] So, of course, yes, they did.

[283] Somehow we ended up moving in with Rochelle in her one -bedroom apartment.

[284] Dora and I slept on a living room sofa.

[285] Like foam rubber with bolsters that Joyce had just moved into.

[286] Joyce Ladner had grown up in the heart of the Jim Crow South, where the oppression of Black Americans was at its worst.

[287] There was always the omnipresence of terror in the air.

[288] People were being shot.

[289] People were being killed.

[290] Mecca Evers had been slain, one of my civil rights mentors.

[291] Fifteen minutes past midnight, Evers got out of his car beside his home in a Negro residential area.

[292] In a vacant lot about 40 yards away, a sniper fired a single shot from a high -powered rifle at Evers' silhouette.

[293] The bullet hit him in the back, crashed through his body, threw a window into the house.

[294] And of course, I went to work with Rochelle up in Harlem.

[295] We got on the train.

[296] And I've never, I've heard everything about Harlan since I was in high school, I guess.

[297] And it was just amazing to see this huge place with all these black people.

[298] It was fantastic.

[299] I loved it.

[300] Michelle introduced me to buy it.

[301] The first thing I noticed was his accent.

[302] He had this kind of clipped British accent.

[303] I don't know where it was from at the time.

[304] Now, no one is going to pay any attention to the job problem.

[305] like frankly, merely because Negroes are without job.

[306] It was an accent he made up as a child.

[307] This is not because people are devilish, but because of Negroes have been without things for so many hundreds of years.

[308] Who is really moved by Negroes being without things?

[309] He had a stutter, he told me, when he was growing up, and also his father had abandoned his mother.

[310] And his father was Jamaican.

[311] So at some point in his life, he made up this accent.

[312] It's really sad and poignant.

[313] In later life, he used the accent when he was uncomfortable or when he was asserting himself.

[314] When, however, the white unemployed join the Negroes in creating social dislocation in the interest of job.

[315] Something will happen.

[316] The march was announced to the world in early, June of 1963.

[317] It was scheduled to take place on August 28, 1963.

[318] And then, the organizing sped up.

[319] We worked six days a week.

[320] Day and night, engaging in outreach to as many groups and people as we could.

[321] Folding letters, mailing out mailings, calling them people on the phone.

[322] Because remember, we didn't have social media.

[323] We used memorabilographic stations.

[324] We used telephones.

[325] It was like the dark ages.

[326] Word began to spread, and they could tell people were interested in coming.

[327] Only problem was...

[328] We didn't know how many people would come.

[329] So they were feeling their way through the dark, trying to plan travel, food, lodging, around maybes and what -ifs.

[330] I think I calculated that they were going to be about 90 ,000 people there based on the number of buses that I knew had been charted, planes, and trains.

[331] And I was depressed.

[332] I thought, oh, my God, we were supposed to have 200 ,000.

[333] I depressed, Bired.

[334] But Rochelle had forgotten about all the people driving.

[335] arriving to the march themselves, or buying their own tickets to travel there.

[336] So in that sense, it was hard to plan.

[337] But they did their best.

[338] We got the subway system of New York City to run on rush our schedules.

[339] And they planned to have people with maps stationed along the turnpike to help drivers who got lost.

[340] They also reserved a whole lot of porta -potties and invested in a really good sound system.

[341] We paid what was a fortune in those days.

[342] $30 ,000, I think, got two unions to contribute the money.

[343] The United Auto Workers and the ladies' garment workers' union.

[344] People had to hear the speakers.

[345] Disagreements came up along the way.

[346] Some were minor.

[347] Byrd at one meeting announced that the National Council, I think, of Negro women, were preparing thousands of sandwiches, peanut butter, and jelly.

[348] And I joked, oh, peanut butter and jelly.

[349] Really, first time you ever got really angry, he said, Rochelle, it doesn't spoil.

[350] So we weren't going to have people sick on the morning.

[351] But other disagreements were more substantial, like the fact that no women were scheduled to speak at the march.

[352] My experience was that the women carried out a lot of the day -to -day work of the movement.

[353] And we met in churches at night for our mass meetings.

[354] I remember Mrs. Heimer.

[355] Lou Hamer, you know, speaking so articulately about the problems we were faced.

[356] But I don't remember her standing behind the pulpit saying those things.

[357] There were some preachers and said it was bad luck for a woman to cross the pulpit.

[358] There was still an era where male domination was accepted, you know.

[359] But everyone involved in the march from the top down agreed on one thing.

[360] The march had to be nonviolent.

[361] Anything less could spell disaster for the movement.

[362] Byrd, I think, knew from day one that he was going to ask the New York City black policemen to volunteer as marshals.

[363] And then he proceeded every day during the march to take a group of them out in the courtyard of the back of the friendship building and train them in nonviolent crowd control, holding hands and encircling people should there be a disturbance.

[364] We're nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us, but we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.

[365] And Richel says activists who had a more militant approach, like Malcolm X, were uninvited.

[366] Bayard knew that the march hinged on perceptions.

[367] Plenty of people were waiting for it to fail.

[368] So the crowd had to remain nonviolent.

[369] And the public face of the march also had to be non -threatening and wildly inspirational.

[370] Let us fight passionately and I'm admitting me for the bold of justice.

[371] It had to be Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bayard and Dr. King had first crossed paths eight years earlier during the Montgomery bus boycott.

[372] That was the day that we started.

[373] A bus protest which literally electrified the nation.

[374] They walked with God and they rode with God too, for they formed a tar pool that was a marvel of quick organization.

[375] The Montgomery bus boycott began in December of 1955.

[376] Previous protests in the Southwale in the South, about segregation on public transport had been conducted by a few people who would then get arrested.

[377] This time, an entire community was boycotting the buses.

[378] For Rustin, this was amazing.

[379] It's like, I've been working for 15 years to have something like this happen.

[380] I've been organizing and training in communities north and south and west to make this happen.

[381] And here it is happening.

[382] And so Rustin makes a trip down to Montgomery through connections he has from his activism, people that will introduce him to the person who's emerging as the leader, Dr. King.

[383] With Dr. King identified as the key leader, there is obviously concern for his safety.

[384] Imagine yourself as a black minister in the deep south in 1955, a deep south in which racial segregation is everywhere and built into the laws and the social practices of everyday life and in which violation of that can lead to physical violence directed at you.

[385] And so members of the community who are part of the organizing effort, 24 hours a day are guarding his house and his family members armed against the possibility of intrusion or violence by a white mob.

[386] And then Rustin arrives.

[387] They begin their discussions about, strategy and tactics, and Rustin is explaining more about Gandhi and nonviolence, and he informs King that if you are going to adopt this principle of absolute nonviolence, you cannot have armed guards outside your home.

[388] It's simply inconsistent and is delivering the wrong message.

[389] Dr. King consults with the people he's working with.

[390] He consults with his wife, Coretta, Scott King, and they make the decision that, in fact, Bayard Rustin is right.

[391] And now that I am moving towards this adoption of Gandhian philosophy, I cannot use weapons in any way at all.

[392] I think it was a very important moment.

[393] moment in Dr. King's evolution as a leader in this movement.

[394] And it was done in a very quiet and non -assertive way by Byard.

[395] Bayard and Dr. King began working closely together.

[396] Some might call them friends.

[397] Bayard himself used slightly more formal language.

[398] I was an associate with Dr. Moore for a number of years.

[399] Now, actually, I'm the person who drew up plans for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

[400] The relationship was more of, I would say, perhaps as a mentor to a student.

[401] I went away and bought several books on the Gandhian technique.

[402] And at that point, I became deeply influenced by Gandhi.

[403] Bayard, who was 17 years older than King, taught King everything he knew about Gandhi's philosophy and work to elevate King's profile to a national level.

[404] Non -violence, organized, I should say, organized non -violent resistance is the most powerful weapon that oppressed people can use in breaking loose from the bondage of oppression.

[405] But King and the Baptist ministers he worked closely with always kept Bayard at a bit of a distance.

[406] Being a northerner and being, you know, kind of an intellectual, if you will.

[407] And, of course, there was the whole issue of Byrd, you know, barring being gay.

[408] At a given point, there was so much pressure on Dr. King about my being gay, and particularly because I would not deny it, that he set up a committee to explore whether it would be dangerous for me to continue working with him.

[409] That point came in 1960.

[410] It was an election.

[411] and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a congressman from Harlem, was angry that Bayard and King were planning demonstrations to disrupt the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

[412] Powell feels like it will interfere with the influence that he's developing by working within the Democratic Party in Congress.

[413] So he sets out to take down Bayard and King with him.

[414] He contacts King's inner circle and tells them, He is prepared to circulate the rumor that Dr. King and Bayard Rustin are having a secret sexual affair.

[415] Even though there was absolutely no truth in any respect to that, you can imagine the scandal the way the media would take up rumors like that.

[416] You know, the newspaper headlines said rest of his eyes, you know, but he was really being pushed out.

[417] Rustin withdraws entirely from the efforts to organize the protest movement at the convention.

[418] He felt personally let down, and I think he felt, Bart felt that it was, you know, it was weak not to stand up.

[419] At the same time, you know, at that point, Dr. King was still very much a young man. And he was under a tremendous amount of pressure.

[420] Remember that in the 1940s, and the 1950s and into the 1960s, it was common practice throughout the United States for police, law enforcement, to pursue, go in search of, harass, and arrest men who were suspected of being gay.

[421] And you could be arrested for almost anything.

[422] So Rustin, in the late 40s and early 40s, 50s, found himself picked up by the police on a number of occasions because he would be out in New York City in what we're called public cruising areas like Times Square.

[423] And especially as a black man, not in a black neighborhood, in those days a white police force was especially attentive to his presence.

[424] Byrd was always open about his sexuality, and as he rose in the civil rights movement, that part of himself was always there, looming in the background.

[425] You know, there were a lot of gay men at that time who, you know, lived what we call closeted lives.

[426] And Byrd was not about to do that.

[427] You know, he had fulfilling relationships.

[428] He had happy relationships.

[429] Of course, none were as happy as until he met me. But nevertheless, it taught him the need to learn how to do his work without calling attention to himself.

[430] He had to be a little more discreet.

[431] So he learned how to become the organizer who mobilized other people who then were the ones who had the most visible public presence.

[432] But despite his best efforts not to call attention to himself, sometimes the attention found him anyway.

[433] And each time it did, the movement cast him out.

[434] It was a vicious cycle of exposure and exile.

[435] The first few times it happened, he turned the blame inward on himself.

[436] After he landed in hot water for a sexual encounter in 1944, he wrote to one of his co -organizers, It was my own weakness and stupidity that defeated the immediate campaign and jeopardized immeasurably the causes for which I believe I would be willing to die.

[437] My behavior stopped progress and has all but made negotiation impossible.

[438] I have thought I was dedicated to race and nonviolence, but I now see that the mistakes I made have come because I have really been dedicated to ego.

[439] But by 1960, when Adam Clayton Powell tried to take down Bayard for being gay, he'd come to see things differently.

[440] Nobody should have to earn the right to be defended.

[441] People should be defended because we should defend humans who are in trouble.

[442] A separation between Rustin and Dr. King develops.

[443] Bayard found himself on the outskirts of the movement, yet he was.

[444] I remember on one occasion somebody said to me, quote, goodness gracious, you're a socialist, you're a conscientious objector, you're gay, you're black, how many jeopardies can you afford?

[445] And it's not until 1963 when ideas about a march on Washington begin to circulate that Rustin comes back into the picture of the racial justice movement.

[446] When we come back, the final sprint to the March on Washington.

[447] Washington, and a government plot that nearly derailed it all.

[448] You're listening to TrueLine from NPR.

[449] My name is Chris.

[450] I live in Puerto Rico.

[451] I love listening to your podcast.

[452] Keep up the great work.

[453] Thanks, guys.

[454] On the TED Radio Hour, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, her latest research into the intimate relationships people are having with chatbots.

[455] Technologies that say, I care about you.

[456] I love you.

[457] I'm here for you.

[458] Take care of me. The pros and cons of artificial intimacy.

[459] That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

[460] Part 3.

[461] To the Promised Land.

[462] With the march just a few weeks away, things were looking good.

[463] Everything was going according to Byard's plan.

[464] But Jay Edgar Hoover, the notoriously shady director of the FBI at the time, tried to dig up some dirt on people linked to the march.

[465] And a gay, black socialist, former communist and conscientious objector...

[466] How many jeopardies can you afford?