Rustin, who passed away in 1987, is best
known as the chief organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom. His legacy has had a renaissance in the past few weeks, as the
White House announced he will posthumously receive the Medal of Freedom
from President Obama in November, just two months after the march
celebrates its 50th anniversary. Walter Naegle will accept the honor on
behalf of the love of his life.
“We were very much an ordinary
couple. He was an extraordinary person, but our everyday lives were
quite ordinary,” Naegle maintains.
In the 2003 documentary about Rustin, Brother Outsider, Naegle jokes that he had to come out to his mother by saying, “I’m gay, he’s black, and he’s older than you.”
But
neither Rustin’s sexual openness nor his controversial political
positions came without great costs. He wound up behind bars for
practicing his nonviolent Quaker faith (from 1944 to 1946 in a
Pennsylvania prison for conscientiously objecting to serving in World
War II) and for practicing homosexuality (60 days in a California jail
for “sex perversion” in 1953). And his many achievements — like
pioneering one of the first Freedom Rides, refusing to give up his seat
on a segregated bus in 1942, more than a dozen years before Rosa Parks
did, and helping found the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition to
support the efforts of a then young, largely unknown minister named
Martin Luther King Jr. — often were tainted under the threat of exposure
for his unpopular behavior and criminal convictions.
When Naegle
learned that the White House was going to honor Rustin, he was
thrilled, of course, but also a bit worried that he’d “wake up one
morning to the headline, ‘Obama Gives Medal of Freedom to Communist
Fag.’” But any attack Rustin could possibly face in death would likely
pale compared to what he faced in life, as he battled critics as diverse
as the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond to the black Harlem
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Both — for different reasons, obviously
— tried outing Rustin to oust him from political life.
And yet,
when the civil rights movement needed a man even his detractors
acknowledged was the best organizer in the country — a man who turned
out 200,000 people on the Capitol Mall in an orderly fashion when no one
ever had before, creating the blueprint for the modern American mass
political rally — they turned to Bayard Rustin. By the eve of the march
in 1963, Rustin had no less a defender than MLK himself standing up for
him.

King canceled the protest, and Rustin resigned from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
1960
was not the first time Rustin was forced to negotiate how much sex
could be a part of his life. After his 1953 arrest, in which he’d been
picked up with two men in the back seat of a car in Pasadena,
California, he wrote, “sex must be sublimated if I am to live in this
world longer.”
Did that mean he’d ever considered living a celibate life?
“Not
Bayard!” Naegle says, roaring with laughter. “Maybe for five minutes.”
The Pasadena incident meant that Rustin knew “he had to be more
careful.” When Naegle talks about Rustin having sex in public, he admits
that it’s not that “I’ve never done that — I mean, I haven’t gotten
arrested. I was just too quick for them!”
But, he adds, “At the
time I did those things, I was not in a position with an organization.
He made some bad choices. Now, in all fairness to him, at the time the
Pasadena incident happened, straight people were having sex in cars!
Having sex outside of marriage was not supposed to happen, and in some
places it was illegal …[and] I am sure that straight people who were —
caught having sex in cars were told to go home. Gay people were vilified
and demonized.”
Naegle says that Rustin “had an extraordinarily
strong sense of himself and of who he was,” but that “when you live in a
society in which you’re constantly being told that you’re less than or
that you’re not as good as, for being black or a Jew or gay or anything,
a certain amount does get internalized. You can’t help that.”
Rustin’s
sexual arrest record terrorized him again in 1963, when segregationist
Sen. Strom Thurmond read its entire contents into the congressional
record, in an attempt to make the march lose its best organizer. It
backfired. Civil rights leaders, taking an “enemy of my enemy is my
friend” approach, were not supporters of Thurmond and backed Rustin.
Still,
no matter how careful a homosexual was about not putting himself in a
position in which he could be easily arrested again, there was nothing
Rustin could do to stop rumors or new information being picked up by
federal eavesdropping (JFK signed off on Rustin’s phone being tapped,
Naegle says, which LBJ and Nixon continued) in the hands of someone like
Adam Clayton Powell.
And yet, Rustin was not one to hold a
grudge, even against Powell. “They were never at war,” Naegle says of
Rustin and Powell’s relationship. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and
Powell had to stay in bed with Rustin for years after blackmailing him
for being gay.
“I think [Powell’s] power was threatened,” Naegle
says. “He’d been the most powerful black man in the political world for a
long time,” and then along came King, Ralph Abernathy, and a bunch of
black Southerners encroaching on his turf.
Even still, Rustin
“defended Adam when he was being censured by the House, for all that
hanky-panky going on in Bimini.” Just a couple of years after he guided
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through
the House of Representatives, Powell was accused of missing too much
work and taking two women on vacation to the Bahamas at taxpayers’
expense. In January of 1967, the House Democratic Caucus stripped Powell
of a committee chairmanship; in March, the full House voted not to seat
him.
Rustin, he says, believed Powell “was being singled out
because he was black. He wasn’t saying he was a choirboy, but there were
plenty of white politicians doing the same thing, and this was racist.”
Despite not being seated, Powell was re-elected to his seat in 1968 and
filed suit about being kicked out of Congress. In 1969, the Supreme
Court ruled that Powell’s colleagues had unseated him
unconstitutionally.
Naegle’s voice cracks and he tears up when he
says, “Bayard was willing to stand up for people — even though they had
mistreated him — if it was a matter of principle.”

“I was a
pretty serious kid,” Naegle says, “so I knew about the march.” He says
he first learned who Rustin was around then, as his name was in the
papers and he was on the cover of Life magazine.
The March
on Washington was one of the seminal events that inspired Naegle’s
increasing interest in the nonviolent movement, a passion he’d share
with his future partner. By the time he graduated high school in the
late ’60s, at the height of the Vietnam War, he decided he wasn’t going
into the military. When he dropped out of college and joined Vista (the
domestic Peace Corps, which preceded AmeriCorps), he was prepared to go
to jail as a conscientious objector.
In January 1969, “I sent my
draft letter back saying, ‘Thank you very much, but no thanks,’” Naegle
recalls, chuckling. At the time, the peace, hippie, and queer movements
were blossoming and overlapping. Many people in them — gay and straight —
“acted gay” in front of their draft board to get out of serving.
“I
could have avoided it if I had said I was gay,” he says when asked
about this possibility. But, at “that point my life, it was about
confronting what I thought was an evil, and doing it openly.”
“Gay
people should be allowed to serve in the military,” Naegle believes,
“if that’s what they want, which is where we are now.”
Eventually,
an FBI agent showed up at Naegle’s job to question him “for about 45
minutes.” He waited with a cloud over his head for years, but nothing
came of the visit. (Many years later, he found out that the military had
made a technical error in not sending him a conscientious objector
application. Naegle eventually obtained his FBI file under the Freedom
of Information Act, which was “just about 10 pages, compared to
Bayard’s, which was about 10,000.”)
During those years, when the
anti-war movement was gaining a critical mass, there was notable absence
from the ranks of its leaders: Bayard Rustin.
Rustin grew up in a
Quaker family in rural Pennsylvania. He had been a palpable force in
the anti-violence movements of the 1930s and ’40s, working with groups
like the Quaker American Friends Service Committee and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation. His work took him around the United States and landed
him in Harlem. He made his bones as a “freelance troublemaker organizer
for hire,” as Naegle describes him, honing the skills he’d perfect on
the Capitol Mall by running logistics for political meetings in New
York. He traveled to India to learn nonviolence from Gandhi’s disciples
shortly after the Mahatma was assassinated.
Rustin went to jail
for refusing to serve in World War II, as unpopular a war effort to
criticize as any in American history. But during Vietnam, Rustin “didn’t
become a leader in the anti-war movement, but he didn’t support the
war,” Naegle says. “He maintained his personal commitment to
nonviolence, much more than many of his critics.”

The
solidarity of this moment wouldn’t last through much of the ’60s. Rustin
would eventually be accused by some pacifists of not being hard on LBJ
because Johnson was rolling out the Great Society’s anti-poverty
programs, which Rustin found so crucial to helping black people.
Meanwhile, by 1968, King was on the outs with much of the civil rights
movement for being too concerned with peace and poverty. His speech at
the Riverside Church decrying the Vietnam War was not well received by
many black leaders (but was supported by Rustin). His fateful decision
to go to Memphis to stand with the sanitation workers was derided by
many movement leaders (but supported by Rustin).
But King’s plans
for the Poor People’s Campaign — in which he wanted to lead a coalition
of black, white, and Hispanic poor people to set up a shantytown on the
Capitol Mall — were not even supported by Rustin.
“He disagreed
with Dr. King at times, and people didn’t like that,” Naegle says, but
it was always “on matters of tactics and political strategy, not on
personal or moral issues or principles. It had more to do with
practicality.” Indeed, the Poor People’s Campaign was seen by its
supporters as a kind of sequel to the March on Washington. But Rustin
did not think the Poor People’s Campaign was wise, “with thousands of
poor people and without a concrete program or plan. Bayard’s position
was, ‘It’s fine to protest, but you have to make it clear to your
opposition what you’re protesting about.’”
Despite his
reservations, Rustin did step in to help with organizing the Poor
People’s Campaign after King died. But he stepped down after a few
weeks; 1968 was not a good year for civil rights in the United States,
and King’s final campaign was plagued by infighting in the wake of his
death. Rustin knew — and history has proven him right — that you don’t
get the kind of lasting attention of a nation that the March on
Washington produced unless your organizational plan is every bit as
impressive as the message you are trying to deliver.
Regardless
of the varying levels of success of each, the March on Washington was
the model for the Poor People’s Campaign, which itself was the model for
the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. From a tactical standpoint,
Naegle thinks Rustin would have had “real questions about [Occupy]. You
need to give your opposition a way to get out of the situation, to lose,
with dignity, or to win. It’s fine to go out and say, ‘Hey, we want
peace.’ I mean, George Bush would say that! But how do you get to that?
What are the practical steps?”
The man who got Mahalia Jackson,
John Lewis, Roy Wilkins, Andrew Young, Rabbi Uri Miller, and Dr. Martin
Luther King together on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial knew the value
of the practical steps.

Rustin, being so much older than Naegle,
wanted to protect him legally for inheritance purposes. But “gay
marriage” was almost unheard of, and any kind of legal status like
domestic partnerships for legal couples was many years away.
So Rustin, ever the creative problem solver when it came to outwitting discrimination, adopted Naegle as his son.
“Bayard
saw something in one of the LGBT papers,” Naegle recalls, about a
couple in the Midwest who had tried to adopt each other. He had probably
read about Michael McConnell and Jack Baker, who got married in
Michigan in 1971. McConnell then legally adopted Baker so that he could deduct him from his taxes. (They are still together.)
Naegle
says that Rustin “talked to his lawyer about it and we decided we would
try it. So I got permission from my mother, and she had to sign a paper
disowning me.”
Was his mother OK with that, or did she find it strange?
“Both,”
he says with an expression that reads both as a grimace and an ironic
smile. They did it as a legal technicality in the face of other options.
The New York Times felt no need to explain this distinction. In its 1987 obituary of Rustin, it merely describes Naegle as Rustin’s “administrative assistant and adopted son.” It is strange that the Times didn’t address the terms of the adoption, considering that Naegle and Rustin were always out as a couple.
“When
I was with Bayard, he was always getting invited to social events — the
dinners for the Jackie Robinson Foundation, the Urban League, the
Frederick Douglass Foundation,” Naegle says, who would go as his date.
Yet the Times’ obit ignored Naegle’s overall role in Rustin’s
life. The paper also relegated Rustin’s sexual orientation to the back
of the bus, waiting until the 40th paragraph in a 42-paragraph-long
story to say that Rustin had recently been “quoted as saying he was
homosexual,” even though he’d been out his whole adult life and had
spent the final years of his public life explicitly calling for gay
rights.
But it was the 1980s, and the obit is an example of how the Times, as consistently as it could get away with, avoided LGBT issues and pushed them as far from sight as possible. As the play The Normal Heart
dramatizes, the ’80s began with the Times needing to be shamed into
covering the nascent AIDS crisis. By the end of the decade, the paper of
record still had great difficulty talking about homosexuality.
Rustin
had no such difficulty. Naegle says Rustin was calmer in his final
years, wandering around New York City with his walking stick as a kind
of elder statesman, before he died at the age of 75. His fervor for
racial civil rights grew more muted, as he relied upon institutional
forces to carry out the battles he’d set in motion via street-level
activism in his youth. But Rustin’s language calling for gay rights and
economic rights grew increasingly militant during his final years.
In
1986, just a year before he died, Rustin gave a speech at the
University of Pennsylvania in which he exhorted gay people to “recognize
that we cannot fight for the rights of gays unless we are ready to
fight for a new mood in the United States, unless we are ready to fight
for a radicalization of this society.”
Veering into the economics
of poverty, Rustin said, “You will not feed people à la the philosophy
of the Reagan administration. Imagine a society that takes lunches from
school children. Do you really think it’s possible for gays to get civil
rights in that kind of society?”