Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the March on Washington
Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the March on Washington
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Overview
Chosen a Best Children's Book of the Year by the Bank Street Center!
Voted a Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews!
A biography for younger readers about one of the most influential activists of our time, who was an early advocate for African Americans and for gay rights.
"Bayard had an unshakable optimism, nerves of steel, and, most importantly, a faith that if the cause is just and people are organized, nothing can stand in our way."—President Barack Obama
"Bayard Rustin was one of the great organizers and activists of the Civil Rights Movement. Without his skill and vision, the historic impact of the March on Washington might not have been possible. I am glad this biography will make young people aware of his life and his incredible contribution to American history.—Congressman John Lewis
"'We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers,' declared Bayard Rustin in the late 1940s. A proponent of nonviolent resistance and a stalwart figure in the civil rights movement, Rustin organized a profound and peaceful milestone in American history—the 1963 March on Washington. . . . Troublemaker for Justice describes not only how Rustin orchestrated the March on Washington in two months but also how he stood up for his Quaker principles throughout his life. The three authors, Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle and Michael G. Long, show the difficulties Rustin faced as a gay black man in 20th-century America, and that he shouldered them with strength, intelligence, and a quest for peace and justice."—Abby Nolan, The Washington Post
"An excellent biography that belongs in every young adult library. Readers will find Rustin’s story captivating; his story could encourage young people to fight for change."—Michelle Kornberger, Library Journal,*Starred Review
"In today's political landscape, this volume is a lesson in the courage to live according to one's truth and the dedication it takes to create a better world."—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review
"A long-overdue introduction to a fascinating, influential change maker."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review
"This biography is an indispensable addition to the literature of both civil and gay rights."—Michael Cart, Booklist, *Starred review
Bayard Rustin was a major figure in the Civil Rights movement. He was arrested on a bus 13 years before Rosa Parks and he participated in integrated bus rides throughout the South 14 years before the Freedom Riders. He was a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., teaching him the techniques and philosophy of Gandhian nonviolent direct action. He organized the March on Washington in 1963, one of the most impactful mobilizations in American history.
Despite these contributions, few Americans recognize his name, and he is absent from most history books, in large part because he was gay. This biography traces Rustin’s life, from his childhood and his first arrest in high school for sitting in the “whites only” section of a theater, through a lifetime of nonviolent activism.
"Authors Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle, and Michael G. Long provide middle and high school students with a biography of Rustin that illustrates how the personal is political. Young readers will take away valuable lessons about identity, civics, and 20th-century history."—Rethinking Schools
Teachers: Discussion Guide Available! Explanation of Common Core Instructional Standards Available! Reach out to the publisher at Stacey [@] citylights.com
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780872867987 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | City Lights Books |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 13 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Michael G. Long is the author or editor of numerous books on civil rights, religion, and politics, including We the Resistance: Documenting A History of Nonviolent Protest in the United States; Race Man: Selected Works of Julian Bond; I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters; Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall; and First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson. Long has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, ESPN’s The Undefeated, and USA Today, and his work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and many others. Long has spoken at Fenway Park, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives, and he has appeared on MSNBC, PBS, C-SPAN, and National Public Radio.
Jacqueline Houtman is the author of the award-winning children's book "The Reinvention of Edison Thomas," and earned a PhD in Medical Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her science writing for adults and children has appeared in World Book Science Year, FASEB’s Breakthroughs in Bioscience series, Cleveland Clinic Magazine, The Dana Foundation’s Progress in Brain Research, The Dana Sourcebook of Immunology and numerous academic and educational publications. Her debut novel, The Reinvention of Edison Thomas, was published by Boyds Mills Press in 2012.
Walter Naegle is the former partner of the American Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin and is executive director of the Bayard Rustin Fund, which commemorates Rustin's life, values, and legacy.
Read an Excerpt
Editor’s Introduction by Michael G Long
I first met Julian Bond when he agreed to an interview for a book project about Martin Luther King, Jr. and gay rights. My hope was to secure a comment on Bernice King’s antigay preaching and her claim that her father, Martin Luther King, Jr., “did not take a bullet for same-sex unions.”
We met for lunch in a busy restaurant near his home in the leafy northwest section of Washington, DC. He was nattily dressed, as usual, and caught the attention of several patrons, women and men, as we walked to our seats. I was not sure whether they recognized him for his civil rights work or were just struck by his good looks and straight carriage. He and I were both about six feet tall at the time, but I vividly recall feeling much shorter as I trailed behind him.
In preparation for our time together, I discovered that Bond, unlike other civil rights leaders, Walter Fauntroy and Fred Shuttlesworth, for example, had argued for a number of years that gay rights were civil rights. “Of course they are,” he often said. “Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives—the right to equal treatment before the law. These rights are shared by all. There is no one in the United States who does not—or should not—share these rights.
Indeed, there was no other African American leader from the 1960s who so closely tied the black civil rights movement to the LGBT movement. Bond conceded that the two movements were not exactly parallel—gays do not have a history identical to slavery, and “people of color carry the badge of who we are on our faces”—but he maintained that the thread connecting the two was discrimination based on immutable characteristics. “Science has demonstrated conclusively that sexual disposition is inherent in some; it’s not an option or alternate they’ve selected,” he said. “In that regard it exactly parallels race. ... Like race, our sexuality isn’t a preference. It’s immutable, unchangeable.”
That was an unpopular position among conservative black ministers, many in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who regularly wielded biblical passages to condemn homosexuality as an immoral and sinful lifestyle choice. But Bond was insistent. “If your religion tells you that gay people shouldn’t get married in your church, that’s fine with me,” he said. “Just don’t let them get married in your church. But don’t stop them from getting married in city hall.” Marriage is a civil right granted by the government, not a religious right granted by churches, and religious believers “ought not to force their laws on people of different faiths or people of no faith at all.”
Bond also argued that his position was in line with the trajectory of King’s civil rights work. “I believe in my heart of hearts that were King alive today, he would be a supporter of gay rights,” Bond said. “He would see this as just another in a series of battles of justice and fair play against injustice and bigotry. He would make no distinction between this fight [for gay rights] and the fight he became famous for.”
Bernice King disagreed with that point, and Bond was well aware of King’s conservative position. In her 1966 book, Hard Questions, Heart Answers, King had sharply criticized “men who accept homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle.” Gay men aren’t “real men,” she argued, and they are to blame for “the present plight of our nation.” King continued to express her antigay theology when she joined Bishop Eddie Long’s ministerial staff at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta. In 2004, she and the bishop—who had long depicted gay sex as unnatural and contrary to God’s design for male and female genitals—traveled to New Zealand to offer their support to a church movement seeking the defeat of a civil union bill that would have extended legal recognition and rights to gay and lesbian couples. It was during this trip when she delivered her most memorable line to date: “I know deep down in my sanctified soul that he [Martin Luther King, Jr.] did not take a bullet for same-sex unions.”
I asked Bond about that claim, suspecting he would either offer a bit of gentle criticism or simply sidestep the question. But Bond’s genteel manners, smooth voice, and sartorial splendor belied the ferocity of his reply.
“I don’t think you can call her anything except a homophobe,” he said. “You can say she’s mistaken or uneducated or not as well-versed in things as she might be, but she’s just wrong on this. And there’s one word for that—homophobe. She’s homophobic.”
He then launched into a lengthy criticism, faulting King for refusing to read, let alone learn from, her father’s papers, and for choosing instead to follow Bishop Long and his homophobic preaching. Although he spoke in a quiet and mellifluous tone, it was clear that Bond was disgusted and angered by what he depicted as Bernice’s perversion of her father’s legacy.
That’s when I realized that I wanted to study Julian Bond. When I heard him passionately condemn Bernice King’s truncated vision of her father’s inclusive ministry, when I watched him lean forward to emphasize that the black civil rights movement was expansive rather than static, when I saw his eyes light up when speaking of his own role in the LGBT movement, and when I sensed his delight that progressive movements often claimed the mantle of the civil rights movement—that’s when I told myself that I just had to dig into the life and legacy of Julian Bond. It took some time, but this book represents the culmination of my efforts to make good on that conviction.
The next time I contacted Bond was when I invited him in 2012 to write the foreword to I Must Resist: The Life and Letters of Bayard Rustin. He accepted the invitation without hesitation and, true to form, penned a clear, concise, and compelling piece. “I knew Bayard Rustin; he was a commanding and charismatic figure,” he wrote. “I was taken by his platform personality, his way with words, and his ability to persuade.”When I read those words today, they call to mind not only Rustin but also Bond himself. Like Rustin, Bond was a commanding and charismatic figure; even a cursory review of his many video interviews will reveal as much. Like Rustin, “the intellectual bank” of the civil rights movement, Bond was a personal think tank to whom various human rights advocates would turn for credibility, wisdom, and strategic thinking. Like Rustin’s, Bond’s way with words, polished early on by black church and Quaker educators, was characterized by clear thinking, deliberate pacing, prophetic content, and intersectional analysis.
I returned to my idea of studying Bond’s life and legacy in the early days of the Trump presidency, while I was working on a book about nonviolent resistance in US history. Bond’s name kept popping up, especially in the period in which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued its statement opposing the Vietnam War and calling for freedom fighters to engage in battle against racial injustice. After Bond had announced his support for the controversial statement, racist members of the Georgia state legislature, with support from the state’s white media, denied him his elected seat in the house chambers. It was a very low point in US political history, not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves—a time when antidemocratic leaders, even in the Oval Office, seek to crush peaceful dissenters who dream of equal justice for all.
Revisiting the racist attempts to squelch Bond, I thought it would be helpful to resurrect Bond’s voice for our present struggle against the racist forces of injustice that attempt to crush dissidents in the Age of Trump. I knew I had made the right choice when I began my research of his papers at the University of Virginia. In the early days of my research, to tell the truth, I did not know a whole lot about Bond other than the basic information available in numerous civil rights books: he was the son of the famous African American educator, Horace Mann Bond; he worked in communications for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; he was denied his seat in the Georgia House of Representatives; he was nominated to be the Democratic candidate for vice-president while he was still too young to serve in the office; he was elected as a state representative and senator; he lost his bid to become a US representative to John Lewis; and he served as the chair of the NAACP. I also knew that Bond had narrated “Eyes on the Prize,” the award-winning documentary about the black civil rights movement and its monumental legacy. In fact, there were few things I enjoyed more as a professor than introducing my students to Bond’s moving descriptions of the nonviolent foot soldiers who overcame the nightmarish obstacles between them and the “beloved community” of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream.
What I did not know as I began my research was that Bond had carefully documented his own work in the black civil rights movement and his relentless efforts to steer the movement from protest to politics and to connect it to evolving movements for the rights of women, the poor, the elderly, prisoners of color, prisoners on death row, victims of police brutality, black Africans, and those with special needs, among others. What I didn’t know was that no one from the black civil rights movement, not even Reverend Jesse Jackson, had sought more consistently and doggedly to establish solid connections between the black civil rights movement and the many progressive movements it inspired, sometimes in ways that it could never have predicted. And what I didn’t know was that Bond’s numerous papers included radio commentaries, newspaper op-eds, syndicated columns, letters, notes, television interviews, oral history interviews, and other means of communication, many of them explaining his sharply pointed, and progressive, positions on virtually every significant human rights issue in his lifetime.
This book is not a biography. It’s a collection of Bond’s remarkable works, written and spoken, that address the most important issues and events of the latter half of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first: civil rights and reparations for slavery, the Vietnam War and political dissent, welfare and domestic colonialism, liberation movements in Africa and Alabama, Watergate and political corruption, racism and anti-Semitism, political prisoners and the death penalty, environmentalism and energy, women’s rights and abortion, affirmative action and rap music, LGBT rights and same-sex marriage, AIDS and social security, terrorism and the War on Terror, and voting rights and the Confederate flag, among others. Also included in this collection are Bond’s assessments of the major political personalities of the same time period: John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Elijah Muhammad, Eugene McCarthy and Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, Jimmy Carter and Vernon Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer and Roy Wilkins, John F. Kennedy and Herman Talmadge, George H. W. Bush and Clarence Thomas, Ronald Reagan and Angela Davis, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Louis Farrakhan and O.J. Simpson, and George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And, of course, Julian Bond.
So many folks approached Bond for articles, commentary, speeches, and interviews because they knew that he had something to say—actually, he had a lot to say—and that he could say it with remarkable clarity, precision, and brevity. That was his gift, and he shared it generously.
Bond’s words in this book are not merely things of the past; they’re living and breathing, fresh and refreshing, and ripe for picking. If there’s anything that his words reveal without qualification, it’s that Julian Bond was one of the most eloquent and brilliant leaders of The Resistance—that group of political activists who, on the one hand, oppose anyone and anything that undermines equal justice under law, and on the other, devote their lives to building what Dr. King called the “beloved community,” a time and place marked by racial reconciliation, political equality, economic justice, and peace. Bond’s brilliance was grounded less in his street resistance —he never really preferred being on the frontlines of nonviolent direct action campaigns—than in his thoughts about strategies for resistance, ways to build the beloved community, and the connections we can make as we resist and build in the post-King years.
I have edited Bond’s works with a light hand, changing a few grammatical errors here and there and cutting thoughts that go astray from his main points. I have also excluded those pieces which bear his name as author but were clearly penned by others. In the few cases where I have included pieces penned by those who helped him write speeches or articles on rare occasion, I have made it a point to indicate coauthorship. Nevertheless, I can state with confidence that the great majority of selections included in this book offer us Bond’s unfiltered voice—an inspiring, instructive voice that warns us of bigots while imploring us to organize our communities into pockets of resistance that embody and enact not only the spirit of the civil rights movement but all the human rights movements that Bond embraced with such energy and enthusiasm.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
A Few Words about Words xi
Chapter 1 Out of the Shadows 1
Chapter 2 One Big Family 5
Chapter 3 Steal Away 13
Chapter 4 A Determination to Be the Best 19
Chapter 5 We Were Rebellious 27
Chapter 6 The Power of Nonviolence 35
Chapter 7 Nonviolent Direct Action 43
Chapter 8 War is Wrong 49
Chapter 9 "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow" 57
Chapter 10 Jim Crow Army 65
Chapter 11 Chains 71
Chapter 12 A Reputation in the Field 77
Chapter 13 Bayard's Problem 81
Chapter 14 The Montgomery Improvement Association 85
Chapter 15 From the Courts to Community Action 93
Chapter 16 Outcast 99
Chapter 17 Mr. March-on-Washington 103
Chapter 18 "I Have a Dream" 109
Chapter 19 Negroes Are Lying Dead in the Street 115
Chapter 20 We Will Try Our Best to Carry On 123
Chapter 21 Fighting for All 129
Chapter 22 Let Freedom Ring 137
Things to Think About 143
Important Events in Bayard Rustin's Life 144
Endnotes 146
Bibliography 151
About the Authors 153
Index 155
Acknowledgments 160