Gay man in the Civil Rights Movement

Philadelphiaencyclopedia: Rustin was the unrecognized genius behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, wherein he used his abilities to bring disparate groups together in support of the Civil Rights movement. However, in the years following the March on Washington, Rustin began to pull away from the leftist parts of the movement which he viewed as both too militant (the Black Panthers) and too off-track (Affirmative Action). During this time Rustin became a strong supporter of Israeli statehood, while still acknowledging that Israel was guilty of injustices against Palestinians. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, Rustin became a delegate for the organization Freedom House, monitoring Human Rights and elections in places such as Poland, Zimbabwe, Chile, El Salvador and Haiti, among many others. It was on a trip to Haiti, in fact, that he contracted intestinal parasites that weakened him before his return to New York City, where he died of a heart attack on August 21, 1987. To be gay in the decades when Rustin lived openly and unashamed of his sexual orientation meant living with almost constant awareness of vulnerability. Most gays and lesbians stayed in the closet. His courage and legacy continue to provide a role models as Civil Rights and Gay Rights activist can be felt daily throughout the West Chester and Philadelphia communities today. Rustin’s activism and example informs the classes taught on gays and lesbians throughout the area (West Chester University first taught a class on the LGBT community in 1998) (The Activism and Legacy of Bayard Rustin).

Islandnet: Today, the United States is still struggling with many of the issues Bayard Rustin sought to change during his long, illustrious career. His focus on civil and economic rights and his belief in peace, human rights, and the dignity of all people remain as relevant today as they were in the 1950s and 60s. Rustin’s biography is particularly important for lesbians and gays, highlighting the major contributions of a gay man to ending official segregation in the US. Rustin stands at the confluence of the great struggles for civil, legal and human rights by African-Americans, lesbians, and gays. In February 1956, when Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery to assist with the nascent bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. had not personally embraced nonviolence. In fact, there were guns inside King’s house and armed guards posted at his doors. Rustin persuaded boycott leaders to adopt complete nonviolence, teaching them Gandhian nonviolent direct protest. Apart from his career as an activist, Rustin was also fun-loving, mischievous, artistic, gifted with a fine singing voice, and known as an art collector who sometimes found museum-quality pieces in New York City trash. Historian John D’Emilio calls Rustin the “lost prophet” of the civil rights movement. "To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true." — Bayard Rustin (Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin).

Bayard Rustin (March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American civil rights activist, important largely behind the scenes in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and earlier. He is credited as the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He counseled Martin Luther King, Jr. on the techniques of nonviolent resistance. He became an advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes in the latter part of his career. Homosexuality was criminalized at the time, which made him a target of suspicion and compromised some of his effectiveness. Rustin died on August 24, 1987, of a perforated appendix. An obituary in the New York Times reported, "Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: 'The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.'" (Wikipedia)

RELATED READING:

• Official Web-site: The Life of Bayard Rustin
• Bayard Rustin - Activist and American
• Bayard Rustin, 40 years after Stonewall
• Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
• Rustin revisited
• Bayard Rustin Is Dead at 75; Pacifist and a Rights Activist
• Poor Marchers Have Dropped Bayard Rustin (June 08, 1968)
• Rustin Denies Charge That He Was Communist (Aug 16, 1963)
• Gay Rights are Civil Rights, says Black leader (Video)

COINTELPRO 101

                                       

4strugglemag: COINTELPRO 101 - “The film’s brilliance is not simply its nicely-styled aesthetic elements. They are there of course. Strong interviews, rarely seen clips, high quality audio and video production across the board with equally strong narration from Liz Derias. But it is the film’s ability to force new confrontation with the political reality of today, as much as with the past, that truly demonstrates its value. The simple point made by Geronimo Pratt is also its strongest; that COINTELPRO made official the illegality of politics, the “criminalization of positions” represented by its targets. COINTELPRO was the political and legal descendant of its ancestors, slavery and genocide, and is now itself an ancestor to the still-implemented policies of, for instance, the Patriot Act. This central theme of the film is its most important because it forces us to put in context the current and horrific state of peace, freedom and labor movements. “It turned so-called U.S. citizens in the 20th century into insurgent rebels to be dealt with as any foreign army or movement” – Jared Ball, Mar 2011 (Review: COINTELPRO 101).

Noam Chomsky: “We were talking about unions before. Union busting is criminal activity by the government, because they’re saying, “You can go ahead and do it; we’re not going to apply the laws,” effectively. And the COINTELPRO, which you mentioned, is actually the worst systematic and extended violation of basic civil rights by the federal government. It maybe compares with Wilson’s Red Scare. But COINTELPRO went on from the late ’50 right through all of the ’60s; it finally ended, at least theoretically ended, when the courts terminated it in the early ’70s. And it was serious” (Chomsky: Only a Massive Uprising Will Change Our Politics).

COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological warfare, planting false reports in the media, smearing through forged letters, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, extralegal violence and assassination. Covert operations under COINTELPRO took place between 1956 and 1971, however the FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception. The FBI’s stated motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order. In an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, MIT professor of linguistics and political activist Noam Chomsky spoke about the purpose and the targets of COINTELPRO saying, “COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations… by the time it got through, I won’t run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entire new left, at the women’s movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination” (Wikipedia).

RELATED READING:

• A video documentary
• WIKILEAKS: Corrupted Oracle or Cointelpro Asset of the Establishment?
• Goodbye to All That
• Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans
• Warrantless FBI Electronic Surveillance
• A Short History of FBI COINTELPRO
• COINTELPRO and the History of Domestic Spying
• The Nation: FBI Dirty Tricks
• COINTELPRO Undermined Basic American Rights
• Radical Scientology’s Cointelpro
• Extreme human rights abuses through experimentation presented to Obama
• Wikipedia: The Pearcy Massacre Still Never Happened
• Ex-FBI agent: ‘Gangstalking’ term self-harm for Gov. no-touch Torture eugenics
• Cointelpro 101 (2010)
• A History of Repression-Cointelpro 101