Bayard Rustin

In the first book, I described...

Bayard Rustin at a bathhouse, and he was like in his 70s, and I was like, you know, he's a little flabby.

I didn't know.

I see him in suits.

I'm guessing he's a 70-year-old man.

His lover came forward to contact me and sent me a picture of Bayard Rustin at the beach with his shirt off in his 70s, and he's like, my man kept it tight.

you better ride for your man if you

gonna

Taking it away from that abstraction though, Bloom points out that historical moral progress like ending slavery, advancing women's rights, and expanding LGBTQ+ rights happened legislatively through this intellectual commitment to equal rights and logic.

Now, one thing that his work made me think of was the violence that occurred on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was entirely one-sided because the organizers knew, Bayard Rustin and John Lewis among them, they had the power of media on their side, and the photos that were published in the following days work exactly how they wanted, and it helped lead to the passing of civil rights legislation.

I'll also say that personally, it's the type of empathy that most resonates with me, even when I'm being swayed to not slow down my thinking on topics.

Or should I say, especially when I'm being pulled.

Seasoned labor organizer and socialist A. Philip Randolph proposed a march on Washington in 1941 that would change the entire trajectory of treatment of African Americans.

I'm not talking about the March on Washington pulled off by Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Dr. Martin Luther King over 20 years later.

This March on Washington was more of a movement because, in the end, the march itself didn't actually have to happen.

Well, not yet, anyway.

When Randolph was organizing this march in the 1940s, a certain young man who would become a driving force in the modern civil rights movement was organizing right alongside him.

His name? was Bayard Rustin.

Rustin was born on March 17, 1912, in Westchester, Pennsylvania.

Upon moving to New York in the 1930s, he became heavily involved in pacifist groups and early civil rights protests.

And in the 1950s, Rustin developed a relationship with the young Martin Luther King Jr. and became of his key advisors.

He was a devout student of Gandhi's teachings and helped introduce Dr.

King to the practice of nonviolent interracial organizing.

He also participated in a predecessor of the Freedom Rides, in which young civil rights activists rode interstate buses into the segregated South to challenge the lack of enforcement of the Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia and Boynton v. Virginia, which ruled that segregated public transportation was unconstitutional.

Let me say it again, you missed that one.

Bayard Rustin, without a question, is one of the greatest community and civil rights organizers to be born on American soil, and yet the North American church considered him outside of God's love, care, anointing, and blessing.

You still missed it.

Audre Lorde, without an argument, is one of the most gifted cultural critics ever to live in the space known as America.

This is the first book that is all him.

He was part of a, a essay collection as well on, uh, Bayard Rustin the last time he was on the show.

Please welcome Paul Prescott.

[applause]

Uh, and you talk a lot about the difference that the New Deal made, which put the battery on the back of the CIO and other unions to just really make more moves.

So, and I just want to read this one passage here.

"In a speech at Clark College in 1971, Bayard Rustin perfectly captured the effect the CIO had on marginalizing Black nationalist sentiment.

'The Garvey movement was destroyed not because Garvey stole money.

In nineteen sixty-three, Kameny and five other Mattachine members attended the March on Washington as a quarter million African Americans demanded civil rights legislation, job training, and school desegregation.

Looking around the crowded Mall, one of the Mattachine members wondered aloud, "Why aren't we having civil rights marches, too?" The March on Washington had been organized by King's chief lieutenant Bayard Rustin, an openly gay Black man who worked behind the scenes of the civil rights movement because his sexuality was considered a public relations liability.

In nineteen fifty-three, Rustin had been arrested on charges of lewd conduct and vagrancy after he was found in a parked car with two white men following a speech he gave in Pasadena, California.

He was sentenced to two months in jail and forced to register as a sex offender.

... um, I would love to do that.

Um, once upon a time, and I think I still do have this, I wanted to tell Bayard Rustin's story, 'cause I don't think hi- even though there's a Netflix story now-

Yeah

...