Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 80

17 March 1912—24 August 1987

Marching for Freedom

On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Looking toward the Washington Monument in the distance, he took a deep breath and launched into one of the most famous speeches ever given in American history. Addressing the estimated quarter of a million people gathered to hear him, he memorably told them that he had a dream that one day segregation would be a thing of the past in the United States.

The man who was responsible for putting together the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was Bayard Rustin, a longtime pacifist and civil rights advocate. Because he had ties with the Communist Party and was gay, several of King’s closest advisors warned him against associating too closely with Rustin. They were afraid that the authorities, particularly FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, would use Rustin’s past to smear the movement. But King stood by Rustin, recognizing that he was one of the most skilled members of his team. The success with which Rustin coordinated the march proved King right.

Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Moving to Harlem in the 1930s, he joined the American Communist Party, later saying that it was the only organization in the United States at the time that opposed segregation. He soon broke with the party, however, because of its endorsement of violence as a political weapon. His reading of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi had converted him to nonviolence.

When the United States entered World War II, Rustin refused induction and was sentenced to three years imprisonment. Upon his release, he began working with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and became an advocate of nonviolent direct action in the struggle against segregation. He joined a team of sixteen men—eight blacks and eight whites—who intended to travel throughout the South on a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Their action was a protest against the interstate law that forbade blacks and whites from riding on the same bus. The journey was launched on 9 April 1947. In North Carolina, the bus was stopped and several members, including Rustin, were beaten by local cops and then given hard labor jail sentences. But their treatment helped direct the nation’s attention to the evils of segregation.

His participation in the Journey of Reconciliation earned Rustin the reputation of being someone skilled in the art of nonviolent resistance. When Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, it was only natural that he would turn to Rustin for advice. Their collaboration led two years later to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization committed to using nonviolence in the struggle for civil rights. Its motto, inspired by Rustin, was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” Rustin’s and King’s efforts finally paid off with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended racial segregation.