Strom Thurmond attacks Bayard Rustin
On August 13, 1963, in a last ditch effort to derail the pending March on Washington, Strom Thurmond took the Senate floor and hurled a series of vicious, personal attacks against the man organizing the largest protest in U.S. history.
Thurmond called him a Communist and a draft dodger.
He brought up a previous arrest and accused him of being immoral and a pervert.
The man Thurmond was attacking was not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In fact Thurmond used
King's own words -- secretly recorded by J.Edgar Hoover -- in his
attacks against the march's deputy director.
"I hope Bayard don't take a drink before the march," Clarence Jones, King's lawyer and close friend, said in the recording.
"Yes," King replied. "And grab one little brother. 'Cause he will grab one when he has a drink."
The story behind 'I Have A Dream' speech
"Bayard" would be Bayard Rustin, the most important leader of the civil rights movement you probably have never heard of.
Rustin was imprisoned
for challenging racial segregation in the South before the phrase
"Freedom Rider" was ever said. He taught a 25-year-old King the true
meaning of nonviolent civil disobedience while the great dreamer was
still being flanked by armed bodyguards. And before addressing the crowd
of 250,000 that gathered at the National Mall nearly five decades ago,
famed actor and activist Ossie Davis introduced him "as the man who
organized this whole thing."
No, the reason why you
probably have not heard of Bayard Rustin has nothing to do with the
significance of his contributions to the March on Washington or the
civil rights movement in general. His absence is epitomized by the
sentiment woven between the lines of that joke between Jones and
Rustin's protege. You see, the organizer of the great march, the man who
held a fundraiser at Madison Square Garden to help fund the bus boycott
in Montgomery, the intellectual behind the founding of the Southern
Christian Leadership Council was also unabashedly gay. And it was the
discomfort some had with his sexuality that led to his disappearance in our history books.
"We must look back with
sadness at the barriers of bigotry built around his sexuality," wrote
NAACP chairman emeritus Julian Bond in "I Must Resist," a collection of
Rustin letters. "We are the poorer for it."
As we celebrate the 50th
anniversary of arguably the single most important event of the 20th
century -- as well as the speech that defined it -- there is a natural
inclination to evaluate how close we are to achieving Dr. King's famed
dream.
With President Obama in office, it is silly to suggest no progress has been made. But considering that the wealth gap
between black and white families has nearly tripled over the past 25
years or that a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 40% of white
Americans don't have a friend outside of their race, who can view the
election of one man as King's dream being fulfilled?
Yes, the residue of the
Jim Crow era still poisons the air like mold spores after a flood,
manifesting in unjust laws such as Stop and Frisk and clusters of
failing schools in poor black neighborhoods.
But after recently
reading the full text of Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech, it occurred
to me that perhaps the reason why we're still divided as a nation is
because we haven't figured out what is keeping us apart.
Despite being a leading
voice for racial equality since the 1940s, Rustin's marginalization is a
direct reflection of oppression of a different sort. Thurmond used it
as a weapon to attack the March on Washington. Adam Clayton Powell, a
black congressman from Harlem, used it to gain power. Other black
leaders, like Stokely Carmichael, used it to question his place in the
movement.
You see as big and as
looming and as destructive as racism has been and continues to be in
society, we must remember it is only a branch.
The root of the problem,
the reason why we continue to struggle with equality, is our
pathological intolerance, an intolerance no collective group of people
has proven to be immune to.
"I say to you today,
my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today, and tomorrow,
I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American
dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out
the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal.'"
Dr. King's dream has not
been fulfilled because we began betraying the integrity of his dream
the moment we started scrubbing Rustin's life out of Black History Month
lessons and civil rights movies.
We betray that dream
each time a black person claims offense to the notion that gay rights
are civil rights, as if the black community is the only community
capable of being oppressed.
We betray King's dream
each time a white elected official is allowed to say things about the
gay community in ways that would never be tolerated if directed at the
black community.
I don't say these things
because I view the history and plight of these two minority groups as
being exactly the same -- they are not.
I say these things
because racism and homophobia -- like anti-Semitism, sexism and
xenophobia -- all have the same mother. And as long as concessions are
made for one, we will never be free from the clutches of the others.
The Presidential Medal
of Freedom is the nation's highest civilian award. It was established by
President Kennedy 50 years ago. Considering the anniversary of the
march, it is fitting that Rustin is among the 16 being honored with it
in November.
But like King, he was more than August 28, 1963.
He was a giant.
And so while the medal
is special, the best way to honor him is to talk about him, all of him,
both now and in the many years to come. Bayard Rustin spent his life
fighting for peace and equality and he did so unashamed of who he was.
It's about time history, and the people he helped most, stop being
ashamed of him.
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