Parting the Waters (30 page)

As a precocious eleven-year-old when Harding was President, Rustin won one too many school contests and provoked jealous students to taunt him, saying he didn't know who his mama was, or his daddy. This made no sense to Rustin, but more taunts and a few questions at home turned his entire world upside down. The woman he had always known as his older sister Florence was in fact his mother. His mother and father, the uneducated caterers, were actually his grandparents, and his other brothers and sisters were actually his aunts and uncles. Since his birth, all the family members had created the fiction that an illegitimate grandson was a legitimate son. Among the greatest leaps young Rustin faced when attempting to realign his emotions was to take notice of the man who before had been only Florence's controversial and inconsequential boyfriend, whom Rustin suddenly beheld as a kind of stepfather. This man, like the one Rustin learned was his long-vanished natural father, was controversial because he was a West Indian. American Negroes tended to dislike the West Indian immigrants, because of their arrogance and their British accents and their extreme color consciousness. Rustin, having grown up hearing Negroes call them “monkey chasers,” struggled to control his prejudice against them, including the one in his house. His first shocked response was to listen more carefully to his new stepfather, and within a few weeks he had picked up a pompous West Indian accent that he kept all his life.

When the Depression and family poverty forced him out of college, Rustin went to live with a relative in Harlem. There he waited tables, sang on street corners, talked jazz and revolution, catered private meals for white people, went to free night classes at City College, and otherwise practiced his own art of survival. During 1931, the year he arrived, the hottest political story in Harlem was the Communist International's “show trial” of an immigrant Finn named August Yokinen, charged with acting discourteously toward three Negroes at a Harlem nightclub run by the Communist Party. The trial, attended by 1,500 spectators and covered on the front page of
The New York Times
, proved spectacularly successful in advertising the International's strict policy of brotherhood on the race question. The Communist Party ran the only integrated social clubs in Harlem. Rustin attended them regularly. Although as a Quaker he had been inclined toward the gentlemanly pacifism more associated with the Socialists, he was bitterly disappointed by the official Socialist position that racism would disappear automatically upon the establishment of socialism. By a corollary of this doctrine, the Socialists ruled out as wasteful any special agitation on the race issue. As a practical matter, it meant that white Socialists stayed out of Harlem. Disgusted with the Socialists, Rustin joined the Young Communist League.

His musical talents flourished during the thirties. Faithful to the spirit of the International, Rustin learned an amazing assortment of workers' songs, English madrigals, and folk classics. He earned jobs singing backup for folk singer Leadbelly in New York cafés, and he traveled for nearly two years with Josh White. Everywhere he went, he recruited for the Young Communist League. His qualities made him an ideal organizer. He could entertain crowds with speeches or songs, write pamphlets skillfully, and run a meeting. Fearless, unattached, able to get along with whites and Negroes alike, Rustin rose quickly as a youth recruiter for the Communist Party.

Within days after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the party's Central Committee ordered Comrade Rustin to shut down his Jim Crow work immediately. Policy had shifted overnight. Now comrades were to stop anything that might divert the attention of the United States from the menace of Hitler. Stunned, Rustin asked for a night to think it over. The past few years had been the happiest of his life. He had crisscrossed the country many times, speaking at colleges and high schools and union halls. Having found himself, he could not quit his work just because the party cared more about the Soviet Union than about race. On the other hand, he could not leave the party without giving up most of his friends and his most stable point of reference over the past decade. The next morning, Rustin went back to the Central Committee and resigned, cutting himself adrift again.

Some weeks later, he secured an appointment with A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Until recently, the Communist Rustin had scorned Randolph as a lifelong Socialist. Now, suddenly, it was Randolph who was the most militant of the Negro leaders, having threatened publicly to lead a massive march on Washington unless President Roosevelt issued an order banning racial discrimination in defense industries. Randolph's most vociferous critics were American Communists, including the Negro Communist leader who had just shoved Rustin out of the party. They called Randolph a traitor for attempting to interfere with American war preparations. In Randolph's office, Rustin confessed blindness for having worked so long for the Communists, and the ever tolerant Randolph told him to forget it. Recognizing his talents, Randolph gave him temporary work in his March on Washington movement. When Roosevelt capitulated, signing the order on defense jobs, Randolph made an appointment for Rustin to see A. J. Muste at the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

As FOR's youth secretary, Rustin began his career as an itinerant Gandhian. FOR leaders, recognizing that pacifist recruitment was going nowhere so long as Hitler was making war, decided to emphasize the anti-colonial aspects of Gandhian nonviolence. By the seesaw habits of ideological politics, activists for Negro rights came suddenly to the fore in Gandhian circles even as they became taboo in Communist ones. The FOR developed during the war a new organization called the Congress of Racial Equality. Rustin worked both for FOR and CORE, as did a young Negro aristocrat named James Farmer. Together they sat at the feet of a traveling Gandhi disciple named Krishnalal Shridharani, author of
War Without Violence
. This book became the semiofficial bible of CORE, and by example the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, woman-chasing Shridharani taught the wide-eyed young Americans that Gandhian politics did not require a life of dull asceticism.

It did require sacrifice, however, and in 1943 Rustin renounced as an unconscionable privilege his right to Quaker war duty in a hospital, spending the remainder of World War II in Lewisburg Penitentiary. Upon his release, he headed a Free India Committee and was frequently arrested for picketing outside the British Embassy in Washington. In 1947, Rustin joined a CORE-sponsored bus ride through the South to test a new Supreme Court ruling that Negro passengers on interstate routes could not be forced to sit in the back of the bus. White opponents met the challenge with beatings, and Rustin was among those convicted under local segregation laws. A showcase appeal proceeded until the day Roy Wilkins called the freedom riders to his office to say that the NAACP lawyers had misplaced their interstate bus tickets, which was essential evidence. Therefore, the appeal could not go forward. “You boys have got to go on the chain gang,” said Wilkins. Amid the instant recriminations, in which some of the riders charged that the local NAACP officials were crumbling under pressure, Rustin took the Gandhian position that cheerful acceptance of punishment might make a better witness for the cause than lawful evasion. “If we got to go, we got to go,” he told Wilkins with a smile. After the chain gang, he went to India for six months on the invitation of Gandhi's Congress Party, and later to Africa, where he worked with young African anti-colonists like Kwame Nkrumah and founded the Committee to Support South African Resistance. Stories of his travels became legend within the restricted circles of Gandhian intellectuals.

Rustin welcomed more jailings and a few beatings, including one in New Orleans that left him without some of his front teeth. On June 25, 1951, he led a motley group of religious idealists, Marxists, and FOR activists on a march from Central Park to Times Square in protest against the Korean War. One of the passersby was so infuriated by the speeches that he seized a picket sign, ripped off the placard, and rushed toward Rustin with the stick, screaming that they were a bunch of Commies. Rustin calmly handed the man a second stick, inviting him to strike with them both. Nonplussed, the man threw both sticks on the ground, but later he decked another marcher with his fists, while Rustin shouted excitedly to passersby that there was nonviolent power in the acceptance of the blows.

He could make such a solemn speech and then abruptly break into a grin of delight and say he needed to go “Gandhi” somebody into giving some money for a march. He had a strong sense of the absurd and a gift for parody, both of which were enhanced by his modified Cary Grant accent. These charms were appreciated in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village. He drank at the White Horse Tavern along with Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer, and other literati, and entertained people by singing obscure ditties back at his apartment, accompanying himself on the harpsichord. His personal life was generally a mystery, even to most of his friends, but it was widely assumed that he was a homosexual. This proclivity would suit or explain some of the eccentricities of Rustin's life—his hobby of cooking gourmet meals for rich people on Park Avenue, his sponsors who kept him going at times with gifts of money or art. In the Village of those years, homosexuality caused little stir, but when Rustin began to get into public trouble, his political colleagues worried that there might be a self-destructive urge at the core of him.

After several such incidents threatened to engulf the FOR in public scandal, A. J. Muste told Rustin and the top leaders of FOR that he loved Rustin like a son but that he would have no choice but to dismiss him if anything happened again. Not long thereafter, on January 21, 1953, Rustin and two other men were arrested in the back of a parked car in Pasadena, California, convicted on morals charges, and sentenced to thirty days in jail. Rustin resigned from the FOR staff the next day. Upon his release, he went back to New York a much reduced man, having lost the confidence of Muste's circle of leaders, which included all those capable of employing Rustin in what he regarded as the struggle of the century. This made the third time that Rustin had been crushed—once by his family, once by the Communist Party, and now by his own inner drives. Unemployed, a bastard, a Negro, an ex-Communist, an ex-con, and a homosexual, he was a misfit by any social standard, but Rustin still believed that he could not only rescue himself but also have a positive moral impact on the entire country. To him, this was cosmic logic and the romance of the ages. He saw a chance in the Montgomery bus boycott before anyone else.

 

Rustin left New York for Montgomery by car on the same day that King began Religious Emphasis Week at Fisk University in Nashville. His timing was exquisite. That morning, Ralph Abernathy received from the city commissioners and a group of white businessmen what was billed as an ultimatum: if the Negroes promptly accepted the settlement terms they had previously rejected, there would be “no retaliation whatsoever” against those taking part in the boycott; if they did not, the law would take its course. Abernathy did not have to guess what this meant, as the whole town was abuzz with the news that the grand jury had returned a fistful of criminal indictments. He bargained without result and then walked outside to tell reporters that the city was offering nothing more than segregation and increased bus fares. “We have walked for eleven weeks in the cold and rain…” he said. “Now the weather is warming up. Therefore we will walk on until some better proposals are forthcoming from our city fathers.”

That was for public consumption. Abernathy proceeded directly to a tense meeting of the executive board. It was all very well to say they were going on, it was agreed, but could they continue the boycott if the leaders and the car-pool drivers were all in jail? What were the white people really going to do? The general consensus was that the whites wanted to “cut off the head” of the boycott. They wanted to get King first. No one said outright that this was a reassuring idea, but several did say that they could keep going even if King were lost. Avoidance was in the air. Few if any of the people in the room had ever been arrested. Finally, S. S. Seay rose to speak as though possessed. “We all know they're gonna try to separate Dr. King from the rest of us,” he said. “He knows it, too. He's talked about it, and I have seen that disturbed look in his face. I'd know it anywhere. I say let's all go to jail!”

These words snapped through the room. One minister headed for the door, caught himself, and then broke the silence with “How we gonna do that?” It was a logical question, but met with an emotional response. Board members and observers jumped to their feet to second Seay, and all the meandering talk of tactics and procedure was washed over by a tide of bravado. That night they took a unanimous recommendation to a huge mass meeting at St. John's A.M.E. Church. Of four thousand people in attendance, only two voted to end the boycott on the city's terms.

The next morning, Abernathy formally notified the city of the MIA's decision by telegram. Not long thereafter, Bayard Rustin knocked on his door. Abernathy recognized some of the references Rustin offered, but otherwise he did not know quite what to make of him. Citing the chaos of the moment, which was evident by the constant flow of messengers and the guards posted on the porch, Abernathy begged off a long discussion about the boycott. He advised Rustin to draw the shades on the windows and bolt the door of his hotel room.

E. D. Nixon accorded Rustin a lengthier reception, being less busy than the acting MIA leader. Besides, he struck up an instant bond of trust and rapport with Rustin because of Philip Randolph, their common mentor. Randolph had raised the money for Rustin's trip to Montgomery. The reason for the nearly martial state of preparation around Abernathy, Nixon explained, was that they all expected the deputy sheriffs to start rounding up the indicted people any day now. If that was so, said Rustin, then the MIA leaders might be making a tactical mistake by waiting anxiously for the deputies to come after them. Such behavior reinforced the psychology of the crusading lawman and the skulking criminal. Rustin gently suggested a more Gandhian response—something on the order of handing an attacker a stick. That evening, after leaving Nixon's, Rustin walked up to South Jackson Street to take a look at King's house. Floodlights had been strung around the roof to illuminate the perimeter for security. Volunteer guards stood outside even though, as Rustin had learned to his disappointment, King and his family were out of town.