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I didn’t plan on watching Soviet Communism die, but I did. The child of Polish and Slovak immigrants, I had traveled to my ancestral homelands a few times before I left to study for a year, 1988-89. I didn’t know in advance that I’d be attending meetings with Jacek Kuron, the “godfather of the Polish opposition,” or marching in the street chanting “Soviets go home,” or running from riot police and being tear gassed and shot with water canons. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
I returned to the States. Before shouting slogans at communism’s riot police, I had previously been a Peace Corps volunteer, a nurse’s aide, a volunteer with the Sisters of Charity, an inner city teacher, and a door-to-door canvasser. I’d had ample opportunity to consider how one “saves the world,” or to be less grandiose, how one attempts to right wrongs.
I’d learn to distrust what I dubbed “virtue celebrities.” My rule: the more a person in our group became known for his “compassion,” the less reliable that person was in the trenches. You can’t predict in advance who the hero will be once you are in a foxhole. Chances are it won’t be the person whose face is Velcroed to reporters’ cameras.
In the all-night strategy sessions debating how to right wrongs, two moments stand out. The first moment occurred one night in Nepal when we were sitting around the Momo Cave, a dingy hole-in-the-wall where men drank raksi, a foul moonshine. A beautiful young Peace Corps volunteer, accompanying herself on guitar, began singing a song written by Donovan about Saint Francis of Assisi.
“If you want your dream to be
Take your time, go slowly
Do few things but do them well
Heartfelt work grows purely.”
I thought, my God, that’s it. We all wanted to “save the world,” to perform some grand gesture. We couldn’t bring clean water to every Nepali village, but we could teach one kid to read. In Poland, we used to say, “Everybody wants to die for Poland, but who is willing to live for Poland?” Who was willing to do the thankless, anonymous, unglamorous day-to-day work?
The second moment occurred in a living room in Bloomington, Indiana, when I found myself sitting face to face with Lech Walesa. Walesa was the son of a man imprisoned and ultimately killed by Nazis. Walesa was himself a former auto mechanic, shipyard electrician, TIME man of the year, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Polish president. By the time I met Walesa in 1998, the Soviet Union was an historical fossil and Poland was doing better and better everyday. I asked Walesa how Poland had avoided the traps so many other post-revolutionary populations had fallen into. He didn’t hesitate. He immediately and thoroughly credited Christianity for Poland’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary successes.
After I got back from Poland in 1989, I watched and re-watched a PBS documentary series, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement. I fell into the TV screen. I didn’t just watch Eyes on the Prize, I inhabited it. Back in Poland, Poles were debating the same issues that had preoccupied 1960s Civil Rights activists. In fact the same issues had been debated over the century-plus when Poland was colonized by Prussia, Russia, and Austria.
Nowadays Woke and critical race theory insist that whites and blacks are as different as birds and fish. The difference in skin color between me and the main characters of Eyes on the Prize was immaterial. What mattered was that we were all asking the same question: what is the best way to right wrongs? Dramatic, suicidal gestures of defiance? Emigration? Violence? Non-violent resistance? “Acting as if” you lived in a normal country, even though you did not? Working within the system? Romantic nationalists, positivists, émigré poets, and the uncounted Polish serfs who drank themselves into an early grave all offered different answers, as did Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Of course I recognized Martin Luther King as the charismatic poster boy, the sine qua non of the Civil Rights Movement. But his speeches struck me as grandiloquent performances. I always wonder, “What’s behind the performance?” Discovering that he plagiarized his dissertation and that he treated women shabbily didn’t help.
Eyes on the Prize introduced me, briefly, to Bayard Rustin (1912 – 1987). You can see about twenty percent of Rustin’s face in a photograph at the website of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. King, delivering his “I have a dream” speech, occupies the center of the photo. Rustin, standing to King’s right, has been mostly cropped out of the frame. Eyes on the Prize informed viewers that Rustin could not take center stage. He was openly homosexual. Rustin’s sidelined status is reflected in works about him. A 2003 documentary is titled Brother Outsider. A 2004 book is titled Lost Prophet.
Bayard Rustin was born on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1912 in West Chester Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. His father abandoned him and he was raised by loving grandparents. His grandmother was a Quaker and his grandfather was a member of an African Methodist Episcopal church. His grandparents operated a successful catering business. Rustin moved to Manhattan, sang professionally, and eventually became a mentee of Asa Philip Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American-led labor union, and Reverend AJ Muste, a white, Protestant pacifist and executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Rustin moved to California as part of an effort to protect the property of interned Japanese.
In 1942, years before Rosa Parks’ famous 1955 protest, Rustin sat in the front of a bus. A child touched him; the child’s mother said, “Don’t touch a n—–.” Rustin was asked to move to the back of the bus. He refused, saying that if he complied, the child would not realize that it was wrong to order a black man to sit in back. A policeman arrived and beat him. Rustin, a pacifist, did not resist. “But some white passengers, impressed by his courage, spoke out on his behalf,” reports the National WW II Museum. Later, Rustin would serve twenty-two days on a chain gang for participating in a Freedom Ride consisting of equal numbers of white and black activists sitting together. Rustin would eventually be arrested twenty-three times.
He studied non-violence with Gandhians in India. He educated Martin Luther King in non-violence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Rustin said, “Dr. King’s view of non-violent tactics was almost non-existent … Dr. King was permitting himself and his children and his home to be protected by guns.” Rustin’s non-violence was so radical that he convinced King to surrender his own handgun and to forgo armed guards. Rustin and King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. MLK delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the March on Washington, an event planned by Bayard Rustin.
Like King, Rustin was an imperfect person. He joined the Young Communist League in 1936 when he was 24. He was a conscientious objector during World War II and was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the armed forces. In 1953, he was arrested in Pasadena for having sex in a car. (By the way, according to a recent survey, 84% of Americans have engaged in intimate activity in a car.)
Rustin lived long enough to reverse course. The Communist Party promised an end to racism. Rustin was smart enough eventually to see through the Party’s false promises and he left it in 1941. Contemporary black conservative Coleman Hughes observes that Rustin, “quickly left the communists. He never described himself as a Marxist in his essays or letters explicitly, and he opposed communism throughout the Cold War.”
In fact there is a Bayard Rustin connection to Solidarity, the Polish trade union. Tom Kahn (1938-1992) was Rustin’s colleague and, for a time, his lover. In 1980, during a time of crisis and opportunity in Poland, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland appointed Kahn to organize the union’s aid to Solidarity. Kahn called Solidarity “the most important workers’ movement to have appeared in half a century … To do all in our power to nourish and extend the life of Solidarity is the overriding compelling mission of the AFL-CIO … we do not accept the legitimacy of the communist party’s rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe … we look to the transformation of the Soviet system, however long it takes; to its dismantling by non-nuclear means.”
Rachelle Horowitz worked with Rustin for seventeen years. She said that Rustin told her that “had he known what was going on in terms of the Holocaust, he would have gone as an ambulance driver … he would have not opposed the war the way he did.”
In 1970, Rustin stunned and outraged his pacifist comrades by taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times urging the US to send fighter jets to Israel. Horowitz, again: “Bayard was absolutely convinced that next to the labor movement the Jewish community had been the greatest support” of Civil Rights. Rustin opposed anti-Semitism. As for the fighter jets, by then Rustin had begun to call himself a “post-Niebuhr Quaker.” Reinhold Niebuhr was a formerly pacifist theologian who, with Saint Augustine, came to argue for a “Christian realism.”
In 1977, Rustin entered into a committed relationship with Walter Naegle, who would remain Rustin’s partner till his death in 1987. They could not marry, so, to protect his partner’s visitation and financial rights, Rustin legally adopted Naegle.
Rustin died on August 24, 1987, at age 75. The next day, President Ronald Reagan released a statement. “We mourn the loss of Bayard Rustin, a great leader … He will be sorely missed by all those who shared his commitment to the twin causes of peace and freedom … Mr. Rustin understood that the struggle for the two is inseparable … This took great physical, intellectual, and, most of all, moral courage. He was denounced by former friends, because he never gave up his conviction that minorities in America could and would succeed based on their individual merit … Though a pacifist, he was a fighter to the finish. That is why over the course of his life he won the undying love of all who cherish freedom.”
In Rustin, I see in action the two principles epitomized in the above two moments. Like that beautiful young singer in the Momo Cave, Rustin focused on doing small things and doing them well. Rustin was a meticulous planner. He was the guy who made sure that there were enough port-o-potties because “We can’t have any disorganized pissing in Washington.” Rachelle Horowitz snickered when Rustin suggested tens of thousands of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches be prepared for marchers. Rustin reprimanded her. It’s going to be hot in Washington in summer. Peanut butter may be a humble food, but it won’t spoil and make people ill, he pointed out.
Lech Walesa insisted to me that the one feature that supported the Poland’s success in its battle with Soviet Communism and its successful post-Communist transition was Christianity. Bayard Rustin, in a 1986 letter, wrote “My activism did not spring from my being gay, or for that matter, from my being black. Rather it is rooted … in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. Those values are based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal. Adhering to those values has meant making a stand against injustice.” The concept of a single human family of equals springs from the creation story in Genesis. It is reiterated in Galatians 3:28-29.
“Rustin’s Quaker, AME Faith Shaped the Civil Rights Era,” reported Sojourners in 2021. Rustin’s public talks were “deeply founded in scripture” and peppered with references to Jesus and the Bible, according to Walter Naegle. After moving to Manhattan, Rustin joined the Fifteenth Street Meeting, a Quaker congregation. He worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, under the leadership of Protestant Minister AJ Muste.
Rustin would be as difficult for many to appreciate in 2023 as he was in 1963. Many of his writings and speeches are every bit as pertinent, and as potentially controversial, today as they were sixty years ago.
Leftists and black identity politicians have denounced Rustin as a “neocon” who, treacherously, supported “American imperialism” and “private property.” Amiri Baraka described him as a “big gun of white oppression” and a “slave ship profiteer.” In the documentary Brother Outsider, one can see a black protestor holding a sign reading “F– Bayard.” That is, the sign uses an anti-gay slur. In 2022, YouTuber “Professor BlackTruth” insisted that Bayard Rustin was a “scumbag,” a traitor to black people, and a government spy.
In 1964, Bayard Rustin tried to stop violence during riots in Harlem. After rioting blacks accused him of being an “Uncle Tom” because of his non-violence, Rustin replied, “Sure, I’m a Tom, and I’m prepared to be a Tom, when I can save women and children from being shot down in the street, and if you’re not, you’re nothing but a fool.” One might imagine Rustin saying the same thing, and facing the same accusation, during the BLM riots of 2020.
On August 13, 1963, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond condemned Rustin on the Senate floor, calling him a “pervert.” Ironically, Thurmond had his own sexual secret. In 1925, he had fathered a child by a fifteen-year-old black servant girl. Thurmond’s goal was to undermine the then upcoming March on Washington, but his plan backfired. Thurmond was a notorious segregationist, and no blacks wanted to be seen to be supporting him. So, they supported Rustin.
While some have a problem with Rustin’s homosexuality, others might find him to be not “gay enough” or not the right kind of gay. Professor and author Michael G. Long said that Rustin “wasn’t camp. He didn’t wear his sexuality on his sleeve as gay liberationists did.” Invited to contribute to an anthology of black, gay authors, Rustin declined. “I did not ‘come out of the closet’ voluntarily – circumstances forced me out … While I support full equality, under law, for homosexuals, I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter.” Rustin wrote, further, that it was being a Quaker, not being black or gay, that was the foundation of his public life of activism. Thus, it was a Christian ideal, rather than a racial or sexual identity, that was the primary motivator, to him.
In a 1970 letter, Rustin articulated his opposition to identity politics. It was the power of the truth, rather than the speaker’s identity, that rendered words worth listening to, he insisted. “All too many blacks fall into the trap of calling any white person who disagrees with them a racist. I have always considered this practice unethical … [One] who is intellectually competent … can defend a position without having to stoop to name calling. It follows from this introduction of ad hominem attacks into political discourse that a white person cannot talk about problems affecting blacks and vice versa … People who engage in such attacks … will build no more than a Tower of Babel.”
Bayard Rustin debated Malcolm X multiple times. Malcolm X was younger and more handsome than Rustin. He offered a slicker package. In their debates, Malcolm X repeatedly praises Allah. He says that Islam is directly opposed to Christianity. He mocks Christianity’s emphasis on meekness and forgiveness. Africa was an Islamic Utopia of high culture, stolen from the black man by the white man. Islam is the black man’s true religion; Christianity is “white.” Malcolm X repeatedly defers, worshipfully, to “the honorable Elijah Muhammad,” the man who would eventually call for Malcolm X’s assassination, after Malcolm X exposed Elijah Muhammad’s sexual abuse of underage girls.
When he was still a member of Elijah Muhammad’s cult, Malcolm X offered listeners a very easy solution to their problems. There were no individuals in Malcolm X’s rhetoric. There was only one enemy, “the white man,” and he was the source of all evil. There was one victim and hero, “the black man,” the source of all things good. Malcolm X repeats, ad nauseum, accusations of the pure evil of the white man. The white man robs, beats, and destroys the black man. The white man is a slave owner. The black man is a slave. Nothing has changed since the Emancipation Proclamation. The black man would defeat the white man with violence and enter the Utopia of the Nation of Islam. The black man will claim several US states as a black homeland. “We believe that separation” between blacks and whites “is divine,” he says.
Malcolm X advances conspiracy theories that mesh with contemporary critical race theory. As taught by critical race theory, if the white man does anything positive for the black man, it is only because the white man stands to benefit thereby. The Cold War motivates the white man. The white man only is “giving an inch” to the black man to buttress his reputation as “leader of the free world,” especially in Africa’s newly independent nations. The white man will never “integrate you and me.” The black man will still not have rights “a hundred years from now.”
Malcolm X aims directly at the listeners’ lizard brains. Hate! Violence! Grievance! Revenge! Malcolm X literally recommends “an eye for an eye,” which leaves the whole world blind. In audio of the debates, one can hear Malcolm X receiving the more enthusiastic applause.
Malcolm X is notorious for saying, after the Kennedy assassination, that that assassination was a case of “chickens coming home to roost.” One might use the same phrase in reference to Malcolm X’s life. Elijah Muhammad, whom Malcolm X praised repeatedly, would call for the assassination of Malcolm X. Malcolm X’s grandson, also named Malcolm, would eventually set the fire that would kill Malcolm X’s widow. And that grandson would himself be murdered in Mexico. Qubilah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter, was arrested for plotting the assassination of Louis Farrakhan. One can’t help but think of Matthew 26:52.
Bayard Rustin refutes just about every plank of Malcolm X’s platform. He offers listeners a far more complicated, and demanding, worldview. “The problem can never be stated in terms of black and white,” Rustin has the courage to say. Rustin praised white Civil Rights hero James Peck. Rustin said, “in a showdown, I will stand with Jim Peck sooner than I will stand with many Negroes I know.” Whites are not the only source of evil; some whites are good; some blacks are bad. America has progressed. “The problem is man’s injustice to man.” Rustin warned that NOI “will become the thing it hates most. That is the danger of the Muslim movement, that it itself will become a doctrine of superiority, except it will be a black one as against a white one.” Rustin calls NOI an “apartheid” movement. In a Muslim theocracy, Rustin says, black men like him would be decapitated.
Rustin, who was an art collector, mentions that the best art from West Africa depicted human faces and bodies; Islam forbids such art. In other words, Islam, Rustin points out, was not the religion of most slaves brought to the US and African art is proof of that. Rustin points out that the NOI is anti-Semitic, and NOI believes in complete separation between blacks and whites. NOI shares these two positions and with Nazism and the KKK; thus, NOI formed an alliance with Neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, who promised that he would “put all Jews in the gas chamber.”
Rustin recommends integration. Blacks will “get involved in the economic and social life in America.” Blacks must become an “integral part” of the United States and “all of its institutions.” He believes that all humans are members of the same human family. Rustin recommends “constitutional methods … going to the courts.” Full citizenship rights will come about because Negroes “with a sense of dignity and pride,” will engage in self-sacrifice and “organize themselves” through actions like the Montgomery bus boycott and student sit-in movement. The ultimate goal is “freedom and justice for all people.” Rustin points out that through the “slow grinding process of integration … America has made considerable progress.” “Up until 1954 we did not have integration of schools. And now we do. Negroes were kept out of trade unions. But now they are being integrated into them.” America is “in a very good position to point to a considerable amount of progress.” Rustin clearly rejects Malcolm X’s invitation to wallow in a paralyzing victim identity. Walter Naegle described Rustin as “a forgiving person.” Rustin’s Christian ability to forgive made it possible for him to move forward and not to wallow in grievances over past injustice.
He points out that Malcolm X’s scheme of taking the territory of several US states is unworkable and will never happen. Given that what Malcolm X wants can’t ever happen, he’s basically offering black people nothing but pie in the sky schemes.
Malcolm X’s value system supported NOI affiliating with a Neo-Nazi. Bayard Rustin’s value system supported his defending a white professor. In 1982, the Harvard Black Law Student Coalition and the Harvard Third World Coalition boycotted a Harvard class entitled ”Racial Discrimination and Civil Rights.” Jack Greenberg was to teach the class. Greenberg, white and Jewish, was a legend. He argued forty civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v Board of Education, and won most of them. He had commanded soldiers in the Pacific Theater of World War II. When asked if he was afraid to walk through protestors to get to class, he replied, “No, I was on the beach at Iwo Jima.”
In an August 9, 1982 letter to the New York Times, Rustin wrote, “The objection that Mr. Greenberg is white is nothing more than blatant racism.” The student protest was “destructive and irresponsible … Blacks, as victims of racial discrimination, should be the first to reject the view that race can disqualify one … young blacks are pursuing their education … as a consequence of the opportunities opened to them by the civil rights battles waged inside and outside the courts by both blacks and whites … It is ironic – indeed perhaps tragic – that they would vent their rage on … a man who has contributed in no small measure to the freedom and dignity of young black Americans.”
In 1969, Rustin interrogated the concept of “black studies.” Is “black studies,” he asked, “an educational program or a forum for ideological indoctrination? Is it designed to train qualified scholars in a significant field of intellectual inquiry, or is it hoped that is graduates will form political cadres? … Is it intended to provide a false and sheltered sense of security, the fragility of which would be revealed by even the slightest exposure to reality? Does it offer the possibility for better racial understanding, or is it a regression to racial separatism?”
Thomas A. Billings, Director of Project Upward Bound at the Office of Economic Opportunity and a “white liberal,” wrote an open letter to Rustin. Daniel P. Moynihan characterized Billings’ open letter as “incredible … outrageous … an intolerable injury … a government official, on stationary of the Executive Office of the President, directed an extended personal attack against a private citizen … the issue is the intimidation by Government of a private citizen because of his holding disapproved opinions. This is the essence of thought control in a totalitarian state. Those who express thoughts disapproved of by those who control the government machinery are vilified and defamed; others who might be so tempted are warned of the consequences in the most vulgar terms, ‘You, too, can get in trouble.'”
As Moynihan describes, above, over fifty years ago, Rustin was a victim of “cancel culture,” because he was not black enough, or the right kind of black. The person who would cancel this black Civil Rights hero was a white liberal employed by the government to push “black studies.”
In his open letter, Billings is passionate. He insists that without separate “studies” devoted to each oppressed ethnic group, American school children would be crippled by shame. American liberal education, Billings insists, is in “eclipse” and “bankrupt.” “What is real? What is good? What is true?” Billings asks, echoing postmodernist rejection of objective truth. Old answers no longer suffice, Billings insists. Now, black students need to study black music in school. Such courses will make Mexican, or Indian, or black students feel pride.
Rustin responded. Rustin says that Billings, as a “white liberal,” suffers from “self contempt” and a feeling of “extraordinary guilt.” Rustin’s analysis of Billings’ white liberalism is worth quoting at length, as it remains as pertinent today as it was when it was first written.
“There is a psychological phenomenon occurring today among increasing numbers of affluent highly-educated Americans like yourself that has been variously described as anomie, alienation, identity crisis. These people suffer from a sense of dislocation and dispossession which has given rise to a political orientation that Arnold Toynbee has called ‘subjective proletarianism.’ It is a romantic form of politics rooted in guilt, acutely sensitive to problems concerning individuality and identity, and characterized by a peculiar combination of self-deprecation and snobbish patronization. Thus it is not surprising that this lumpen intelligentsia would react with unusual enthusiasm to the position of black nationalists, would romanticize their demands for separatism and self-determination, and would identify these demands as the position of the ‘black community,’ which, in fact, they represent the views of a small minority of Negroes. Negroes have been used and exploited in many ways by white Americans, but it is only recently that they have been asked to satisfy the masochistic craving of disenchanted liberals for flagellation and rejection.”
Rustin’s full response can be read here.
***
In November, 2023, Netflix released Rustin, a biopic. Rustin was directed by George C. Wolfe, who had primarily been a theater director before moving to film and projects like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Nights in Rodanthe. Rustin is a product of the Higher Ground production company, founded by Barack and Michelle Obama. Rustin is 106 minutes long with a soundtrack by Branford Marsalis. The screenplay is by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black.
Rustin is a good movie and it’s well worth a watch, and then another watch, to catch everything you missed the first time. There is a lot of history onscreen. I could not resist, the first time I watched the movie, stopping it about every five minutes to perform internet searches of personalities, relationships, statements, and events. Did MLK really abandon Rustin so dramatically? Did Roy Wilkins really dislike Rustin so much? Was Adam Clayton Powell really such a shark? Did the March on Washington planners really meet in a building dubbed the Utopia Neighborhood Club House? Did Bayard Rustin really pick up trash after the March on Washington was over, and his more high-profile colleagues had left to meet face to face with the president in the White House?
The answer to all the above questions is “yes.” I was especially moved by the answer to the final question, which I acquired by writing directly to Walter Naegle, Rustin’s surviving partner, and Michael G. Long, a Rustin scholar. Yes, Bayard Rustin, a giant of Civil Rights, was excluded from the White House meeting. Yes, he did spend the post-March-on-Washington time period picking up trash leftover by marchers. Rustin was a man who instinctively knew the wisdom expressed in the Donovan’s song about Saint Francis,
“Day by day, stone by stone
Build your secret slowly
Day by day, you’ll grow too
You’ll know heaven’s glory.”
Rustin rewards the viewer with lots of eye candy. We get to enjoy retro clothes, cars, and sets. The men wear skinny ties and the ladies have trim waists, flared skirts, high heels, and poofy hairdos. Cars have fins.
Though this is a serious film dealing with a complex man’s internal struggles, the screenplay, the direction, and the soundtrack work together to keep the pace brisk and to develop character through action. In the first seven and a half minutes of the movie, the viewer gets lunch counter protests, school desegregation, the Montogomery bus boycott, in-fighting among Civil Rights leaders, a planned protest at the Democratic Convention, Martin Luther King and Rustin as best friends and allies, Adam Clayton Powell sabotaging that friendship with a false rumor of gay sex between them, and King, to save himself, betraying, and emotionally crushing, Rustin. This is all carried off to a snazzy, jazzy soundtrack and bravura performances from all the actors.
Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin is the heart and soul of the film. He radiates joie de vivre and energetic, committed, idealism. He’s impossible not to like.
Gus Halper is a quiet but powerful presence as Tom Kahn. He’s mostly in the background, weaving in and out of scenes dominated by other characters. The viewer slowly learns that Tom is younger than Rustin, that he and Rustin were sometime lovers but that that did not work out because Rustin was the star and Tom was a mere, sometimes replaceable understudy to the great man’s life, and having sex with someone you work for is complicated. Eventually Rustin admits to Tom that he couldn’t give Tom what he needed and deserved because he, Rustin, was too focused on saving the world. When all the battles are won and when I’ve accomplished what I feel driven to accomplish, Rustin says to Tom, maybe then I’ll be able to fall in love and commit to one person.
But Tom will not allow others to define him. Tom has two powerful scenes where black characters attempt to belittle him because he is white. Tom won’t have it. He owns his power. He has sacrificed much to the Civil Rights struggle, and he demands to be acknowledged for that sacrifice, and for his accomplishments. Halper really impressed me in this role that, given its secondary status, could have been less memorable and less incisive. Halper vivifies Tom and lets the viewer know that the Civil Rights Movement wouldn’t have gone anywhere without whites like Tom.
Lilli Kay is lovely as Rachelle Horowitz but she’s given far too little to do. I hope that viewers become curious enough to watch YouTube videos of the real Rachelle Horowitz, who is funny and charming. She was the transportation coordinator for the March on Washington, even though she couldn’t drive and regularly lost her bus after previous demonstrations.
Rustin, in presenting Horowitz, Kahn, and other white Civil Rights activists, is to be credited for refusing the false narrative of Malcolm X or Nikole Hannah-Jones (who is, ironically, half Czech), that blacks and only blacks improve conditions for blacks. From the opening scene, which depicts both blacks and whites integrating lunch counters, to its final shots of the March on Washington, where an estimated twenty-four percent of the attendees were white, Rustin acknowledges the interracial cooperation that brought America to living up to its best ideals.
Glenn Turman is suitably stentorian and dignified as A. Philip Randolph. Chris Rock is suitably humorless and hostile as Roy Wilkins, one of Rustin’s nemeses. Maxwell Whittington-Cooper is a lovely, young John Lewis.
Jeffrey Wright hands in a hypnotic performance as an absolutely serpentine Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Wright is playing a bad guy but he does so with such over-the-top wickedness that I rewatched his scenes a few times. He really needs to be tapped for an Adam Clayton Powell biopic.
Rustin wants to get a lot of history on the screen, and it wants to do that in a hurry, so as not to alienate younger viewers with short attention spans. These conflicting agendas frequently undermine each other. For example, in one scene, Adam Clayton Powell is threatening Rustin, and suddenly Dr. Anna Hedgeman (CCH Pounder), an historically significant Civil Rights figure, brings up the historically significant fact that women were shut out of speaking roles in the March on Washington. The script silences her after her brief protest. The issue is never resolved. Her juxtaposition with the Adam Clayton Powell subplot feels cluttered.
Rustin introduces a fictional character, Elias Taylor (Johnny Ramey). He’s an organizer and a preacher. His wife Claudia is the daughter of a church pastor; she wants her father to pass his church on to Elias, so that she, Claudia, can drive a Lincoln, just like her mother. In other words, Claudia is materialistic and shallow.
Taylor comes on to Rusin in a men’s room. Later, Taylor preaches a sermon. The sermon is a series of double entendres. When Taylor speaks of God’s love, he’s really talking about sex with Rustin. The sermon scene is intercut with a scene of Rustin and Taylor having sex. Later, Taylor regrets his homosexuality, and condemns Rustin as satanic.
In a similarly Christophobic scene, AJ Muste (Bill Irwin) is depicted as a homophobic prig, borderline racist, and scold. In fact Muste was an historically significant Christian labor activist who worked to protect immigrant laborers, and a peace and Civil Rights activist. Of Muste, Bayard Rustin said, “During all my work with Martin King, I never made a difficult decision without talking the problem over with AJ first.” That relationship is betrayed by Rustin’s caricature of Muste.
I didn’t buy the relationship between Taylor and Rustin. It felt concocted merely to make several points. The sermon scene was Christophobic and insulting. Identifying Christianity as the wellspring of homophobia is inaccurate. Non-Christian cultures also express homophobia. Rustin is in a rush to cover a lot of personal and historical ground. The Taylor subplot took time away from better material and better scenes.
I really liked Rustin, but I didn’t love it. Bayard Rustin deserves a movie I could love. I’d like to see a movie more closely focused on Rustin the man. Such a film would be less worried about losing viewers with short attention spans. It would be willing to probe, to be complex, to take up the questions so many who want to right wrongs have debated for millennia. Violence or non-violence? Cooperation or pure resistance? Such a film might be denounced as slow, as talky, but so be it. We’re still asking these questions. We could benefit from an intimate view of how one man, Bayard Rustin, came up with his answers to these questions, and how and why they evolved as he aged.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
“Everybody wants to die for Poland, but who is willing to live for Poland?” Who was willing to do the thankless, anonymous, unglamorous day-to-day work?”
Must remember to enter that aphorism into my Commonplace Book. Do people still keep those? I do.
Off topic – one entry in mine from near 20 years ago:
“The soul is to the body as the smile is to the face – rather than as is the coffee to the cup.”
Rowan Williams, Archbishop (Anglican) of Canterbury
Daily Telegraph interview, 20 August 2006
I started writing down sentences, phrases, or paragraphs from books I didn’t want to buy, or couldn’t afford to buy, before I had any idea that was called keeping a “Commonplace Book”.
What sucks is when something in a book strikes you as memorable and having been worth writing down weeks, months, or years afterward and you can’t remember the exact words or where you read it.
“Dying is easy; it’s living that’s hard.” – Credited to the character Luke Spencer on the TV show “General Hospital” in 1963
I had heard that the above quote was from a letter from Van Gogh to his brother Theo, but maybe not. I can’t find an attribution to Van Gogh on the internet.
“For we deceive ourselves by looking for death ahead of us, whereas a great part of death has already taken place. Whatever part of life is behind us is possessed by death…
We are liable to the mistake of thinking that only the old and those already on life’s downward slope are inclining towards death, whereas the earliest days of childhood, middle age, indeed any time of life takes us in that direction. The Fates perform the task that is theirs: they deprive us of the realization that we are dying, and the more easily to creep up on us, death lurks under the very name of life; childhood is transformed into boyhood, boyhood into manhood, and the man of middle years is replaced by the greybeard. Should you calculate them accurately, our very gains are losses….
We are dying every day, since a part of our life is subtracted every day, and even when we are growing life is shrinking. We lost our infancy, then our boyhood, then our youth. Right up to yesterday every moment of time past is lost; we are sharing with death the day that we are spending now. Just as it is not the last drop that stops the water clock but every drop that has previously fallen, the last hour when we cease to exist is not the only one to cause death but the only one to complete it: we reach death then, but we have been coming to it for a long time.” – Seneca
No one cares about your peculiar habit or your so-called Commonplace Book . Basically you are too cheap to buy anything. I knew what you were doing along. It wasn’t too hard to figure that out.
Maybe you should have an original thought sometime
Hello THX, As the Inspired Scriptures tell us, death “rules as king” over us. We are dying from the moment we are born – and we are in such a sad state now that we seem to feel this is normal. But it isn’t. We were made to live, not die. And, as someone well over her sell-by date (under the Threescore Years and Ten Rule), I can say that the older I get the more wonderful and interesting the gift of life seems.
I hope to “inherit the earth”, as Jesus promised – to live forever on this splendid planet. I hope you will. I hope we all will. According to the Inspired Scriptures, there is more happiness ahead for us, right here on this lovely earth, than we can now imagine.
May your God bless you Sue.
I fully understand the ache and the longing for more life and to be with our loved ones who have passed away again forever. The ache and the longing to repair our mistakes and the harm we did to ourselves and to others.
God bless you darling.
Leonard ( May I call you that?),
Do you have something relevant to the topic of the essay to say?
She puts her heart and soul into these and this is one of her best and all you add another distraction about your adoration of Ayn Rand. And a handful of self-aggrandizing thoughts on something unrelated to making yourself feel ‘special’.
Ever consider writing for Front Page under your real name? Your thoughts? Tell your story? Risk responses?
I read your post and I wonder what you think the stochastic parrot responses of Ayn Rand are accomplishing. How is this relevant to the essay on hand?
and it’s Dr. Goska :>}
. . . 20 August 2005, actually.
I’d never heard of Bayard Rustin, what an interesting man. His letter in opposition to black studies was amazing.
It is amazing. Please check out the link and also read the attack on him by Thomas A Billings. to think that a white man felt he could tell a black man how to educate black children — through something called black studies — and that a black man who resisted that because those studies would not help the students once they left school — the arrogance is astounding and it is very much reflected today. Their interaction has not aged one bit. it is reflected in current white liberal attacks on those they label “black conservatives.”
You are a treasure. Your writing is terrific. Thank you!
It certainly sounds as if Bayard Rustin firmly believed in Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s dream for a person to be judged for the content of his
character and not the color of her skin. And for that to happen, we
certainly need the U.S. Constitution where everyone is equal – as the
one big human family that we are as Mr. Rustin would put it – before
the law.
I wonder what Rustin would think of American TV regarding race if he
could return now. He would see that almost every commercial portrays
Black people or families prospering, with Whites mostly in secondary roles
and that interracial couples are frequently depicted. Would he see it as
Blacks fully integrated now into American society. Or would it dawn on
him that the media-government-entertainment industry-corporate
advertisers-and other powers-that-be are conditioning America to
insidiously adjust to a nation dominated by Blacks and Browns. With
Whites melded into those other races and becoming more rare – along
with any vestiges of their ideas of Constitutional individual freedom.
Because it wouldn’t take long for Rustin to realize that anti-White CRT
is totally endorsed by the White House and taught to every member of
the U.S. military as well as throughout academia. I do believe he would
become part of MAGA as it began to dawn on him that his fight against
oppression is still very much alive.
Obama provided the resources for this movie and, as usual, he and his cronies seem to have turned it into a divisive political propaganda platform.
Thanks Danusha but I’ll give it a miss.
Please give it a try. I’m no fan of either Obama, and I certainly did not vote for him, but I enjoyed this movie.
Okay you talked me into it, I’ll give it a try.
Sadly the broken winged gull isn’t around anymore.
So when you talk about Tom & Rustin having sex in the movie, just how explicit is that scene? That might determine if I’m willing to watch it or not.
I too, had not heard of Rustin but find this article most interesting.
It’s not at all explicit. I don’t remember any body parts. And it’s a real brief scene.
A couple of weeks or so ago you recommended that I listen to Jordan Peterson’s criticism of Ayn Rand ‘s philosophy. I listened to his podcast, to be honest Mr. Peterson is either unable or unwilling to digest and understand Ayn Rand’s ideas or he is dishonestly misrepresenting Rand’s ideas. His criticisms don’t hold water.
Perhaps you might be interested in the Ayn Rand’s Institute rebuttal of Peterson’s criticisms.
No one is interested. And it’s not “Mr. Peterson.” It’s Dr. Peterson.
Since you are not clairvoyant, and you cannot read minds, you cannot claim “no one is interested”.
It’s not Jill Biden, it’s Dr. Biden.
Spare me the pretentious, empty, honorific. Spare me the Wizard of Oz honorifics and parchment papers.
“Show me your papers, Herr, Doktor, Doktor!”
Genius is what genius does, not what an empty Wizard of Oz credential declares is genius.
To hell with credentialism and the argument from authority!
You know what is amazing? The fact that, according to you, no one who comes up against you is ever able to, or willing to digest and understand Ayn Rand’s ideas. I wonder why. I think you simply hate any criticism at all of your atheist Goddess.
Could it be that her ideas are basically incomprehensible, or that she is a terrible communicator? Or both.? Or perhaps it is you, the one who is so cracked in the head, that you think you have solved the code that is objectivism.
Maybe there is no code to be broken, no philosophy to be understood. Basically there is no there there.
I have a feeling that breaking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park in WWII was easier than deciphering the bizarre mishmash of nonsense that is Ayn Rand’s idiotic manic philosophy
That plus the fact that there is definitely something very wrong with you. Put that in your commonplace book.
Or maybe he won’t. My guess is he won’t.
The god of rationality cannot be challenged Amen
I’m not a god and neither is Ayn Rand a goddess. You asked me in a serious and polite tone to listen to Jordan Peterson’s podcast of his criticisms of Rand’s philosophy and I did.
Now, I offer you the Ayn Rand Institute’s rebuttal and what you offer is a snide remark.
Who is the one that cannot be challenged? Me or you? I took you seriously and you were not serious at all.
Do you wonder that I insulted you a while ago? What’s the point of taking you seriously when what you’re really up to is cunning duplicity.
“The highest tribute to Ayn Rand, is that her critics must distort everything she stood for in order to attack her. She advocated reason, not force; the individual’s rights to freedom of action, speech, and association; self-responsibility, NOT self-indulgence; and a
live-and-let-live society in which each individual is treated as an END, not the MEANS of others’ ends. How many critics would dare honestly state these ideas and say, ” . . .and that’s what I reject”?
–Barbara Branden
It’s a good thing today’s modern Christianity is essentially Cafeteria Christianity; you can be a homosexual and a Christian too. It’s just a matter of cherry picking the parts of Scripture you like and rejecting the parts of Scripture you don’t like.
But why is this possible? Because we live in a time when secular reason still has ascendancy and dominance over faith. We live in a time after the Aristotelian Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. Reason is still respected more than blind faith in Scripture. And so, when Scripture contradicts the conclusions of reason, most Christians will INTERPRET Scripture in the most rational way possible or evade and ignore the Scripture.
For example, my esteemed Danusha Goska interprets the Adam and Eve-Garden of Eden Scripture as allegory. That’s a very modern, rational, and secular interpretation of Scripture. The individual freedom to interpret Scripture any way the individual wants to would not have been possible during the Christian Dark and Middle Ages when reason was the mere handmaiden of faith. If reason contradicted Scripture, reason was rejected and silenced. The rational heretic was ordered to recant or be punished for his heresy and blasphemy.
You make it seem like us traditional or conservative Christians march in lockstep with Leftist Christians. That is how desperate you are and how out of touch you are. You make it seem like all Lutherans approve of what the ELCA is doing.
And if secular reason still has ascendancy and dominance over faith (which it doesn’t, of course) why hasn’t your religion of Objectivism caught on yet? When it comes to secular reason Objectivism is the driest and lifeless of all the totalitarian atheistic secular faiths.
Greek philosophy, your foundation and bedrock of the rational and scientific beginnings and aspects of Western Civilization, folded like a cheap suit in the face of the spread of Christianity, which absorbed the teachings of your pagan heroes. Without Christianity no one would remember or care about the Greeks or their fragile democracy.
There was no Aristotelian Renaissance and Christian Dark Ages as you condescendingly put it. There was simply the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. And there were different ways to interpret scripture hence the varied way Christianity blossomed over time. If the Aristotelian Renaissance actually existed then where did all of that great German and Italian religious Baroque music come from? And where are all of the great Objectivist works of art in the world?
Your hatred of Christianity has made you a prisoner of your own mistaken beliefs, which are always wrong.
And then you try a silly little back-handed compliment of faint praise towards your “esteemed Danusha Goska”. You are as phony and pathetic as a $3 bill.
No matter how hard you try she will not give up her faith. Definitely not for a fraud like you. And she still won’t date you.
“The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life — and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable; mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. “Woe unto ye who laugh now,” the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America:”
And this oft repeated Peikoff rant has what to do with the article about Bayard Rustin? Or do you simply feel the need to post something, anything so you can feel a part of something, since basically you are part of nothing.
The Muslims caused the dark ages of Europe b/c they shut down commerce on the Med Sea.
No, they did not.
The Muslims were an exacerbating, added, detrimental, outside factor, during the Dark and Middle Ages, but not the fundamental and crucial reason for the Dark and Middle Ages.
The renunciation of life on earth, the abandoning of reason for faith in the supernatural, the self-hatred, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, demanded by Christianity is the fundamental, crucial, and primary, cause of the Dark and Middle Ages.
You can see the same phenomena happening today, right now as we speak. The West is once again abandoning reason and collapsing into irrationality. And this collapse of the West into unreason is what is giving Islam once again the power to invade and destroy the West. As it was during the Christian Dark and Middle Ages, so it is now for the West.
“The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason.” – Ayn Rand
God forbid something than what you think caused the Dark Ages, actually caused the Dark Ages. Maybe it was the fleas carried by rats on boats from the Middle east. Maybe it was the start of the Little Ice Age.
The fact is you have no idea what caused it but you have your little straw man argument based on your rabid insane hatred of Christianity
“The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason.” – Ayn Rand
No one cares what Rand said about the Middle Ages. But you will fall for anything, since you believe in nothing. You are that cowed by this dead cow that you agree with everything she spouted whether it makes any sense or not.
That is the Pirenne Thesis. It was interesting and popular, at least it was read, for a while. (Henri Pirenne 1862-1935).
Malcolm X was murdered because he broke away from the Nation of Islam.
I don’t know how much of Bayard Rustin’s writng is available free-access-on-line, but it is anthologized in Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Introduction by C. Vann Woodward, Chicago : Quadrangle Bòoks, 1974.
Danusha, you keep portraying yourself as poor, but by God (so to speak), you seem to have lived, and are living, a rich, fulfilling, varied, courageous, and exciting life.
You might be financially, relatively, poor but in many other ways you’re rich.
And she still won’t date you. You such a suck up.
Thanks for this great article.
Bayard Rustin was a staunch Zionist,
He was Chairman of the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC), formed in 1975. two months before the UN’s “Zionism is Racism” resolution,
Rustin said the organization’s purpose was to “foster a better understanding of the democratic nature of Israeli society” and would work to “counter anti‐Israel propaganda, which characterizes the Israeli people and their government as racist, fascist, imperialist and the like.”
More than 200 African-American leaders and celebrities condemned the UN resolution in a declaration drafted by BASIC that appeared as an ad in the New York Times. The ad also blasted the Arab boycott of Israel as “repugnant.”
I might watch ‘Rustin’; it looks much more watchable than the MLK documentary ‘From Montgomery to Memphis-the dreariest three hours I can remember spending.. Detriot-no pun intended has deteriorated since the Civil Rights era with a Potemkin Village of a downtown. And I wish we had Lech Walesa here; Hamtramck -the former Polish enclave in Detroit where my grandfather sold insurance right off the boat from Klimentow Poland became the first Islamic run city in the US.
In 2004 council president Karen Majewski oversaw Hamtramck giving formal approval to broadcasting the Muslim azan over loudspeakers five times a day.
Why two down votes? Are there Sharia sympathizers reading your article. Ms. Goska? Maybe from your university?
“As far as the issue of actual pollution is concerned, it is primarily a scientific, not a political, problem. In regard to the political principle involved: if a man creates a physical danger or harm to others, which extends beyond the line of his own property, such as unsanitary conditions or EVEN LOUD NOISE [emphasis added], and if this is proved, [objective] law can and does hold him responsible. If the condition is collective, such as in an overcrowded city, appropriate and objective laws can be defined, protecting the rights of all those involved…” – Ayn Rand
Why 4 down votes, moron?
Throwing Ayn Rand drivel in her face will also not get her to date you. Why? Because you are a loser.
Well, off to church to commune with the Sat. evening crowd. And then again tomorrow morning. What are you doing tonight? Sticking stuff in that commonplace book?
An eloquent, informative review of what sounds like a good though flawed movie about an amazing and undervalued recent-historical figure who deserves much more attention and respect.
I remember Bayard Rustin supporting labor unions, including the United Federation of Teachers which had to strike to enforce its contract in 1968 which was being violated by a black controlled school district in Brooklyn. Teachers were illegally fired for being white, Jewish, and union members. The mentioned “Eyes on the Prize” had six episodes on the civil rights movement followed by another six. The Last six I dubbed “Flies on the Prize” for the self-promotion and racism that was developing. What happened in Brooklyn resembled that divide. Notice the district and Rustin on opposite sides. Now, numerous unions have been coopted by the left. Lane Kirkland, mentioned in the article, was the last AFL-CIO leader who was anti-communist.