What Would Bayard Rustin Do? Part 1
Our guest author is Eric Chenoweth, co-director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe (IDEE) and the principal author of Democracy Web, a civics education curricular resource project of the Albert Shanker Institute.
A new exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, “The Life of Bayard Rustin: Speaking Truth to Power,” shines a light on Rustin’s central work in the Civil Rights Movement and his contributions to the international peace and human rights movements. It runs through December 31, 2025 and will form the basis of a permanent exhibition in the museum’s expansion planned for 2026. Part I of “What Bayard Rustin Would Do” describes the exhibition and the context to Rustin’s work up to 1965. Part II describes Rustin’s work and writings in the last 25 years of his life as he faced the increasing backlash to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The full article is posted on the Albert Shanker Institute’s March on Washington Resources page.
We live in a reactionary age. Worldwide, the advance of freedom in the previous century did not just stall. It went into reverse. What is shocking many is that this reactionary age has taken root in the modern world’s oldest, richest and most militarily powerful democracy. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in January 2025 has put him in a position to assert largely unchecked power to reverse America’s progress towards a multiracial democracy.
This period in America would not have surprised the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. He spent decades working to end a previous period of white reactionary rule in the United States. Yet, soon after the masterwork of his career — the organizing of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — he began warning of a political backlash against the gains made to end Jim Crow rule and to make the country a full democracy ensuring the right to vote to all citizens. As he that backlash began to manifest, he argued for political strategies and policies to move the country in a radical direction towards greater equality. Whatever situation he found himself, Rustin worked to achieve a more equal, tolerant and pluralist society and a freer world through nonviolent and democratic means. His life and teachings offer guidance on how to respond to today’s global reactionary challenge. A new museum exhibition offers a launching point.
Speak Truth to Power
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, located at the preserved Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, is shining light on Rustin’s central work in the Civil Rights Movement as well as his contributions to the international peace and human rights movements. The new exhibit, “Speaking Truth to Power: The Life of Bayard Rustin,” runs through December 31, 2025 and will serve as the basis for a permanent exhibit as part of the museum’s expansion in 2026.
Curated by art historian Gay Feldman with photographs by David Katzenstein, “Speaking Truth to Power” offers a highly interesting collection in different media that takes one back to Rustin’s time and introduces visitors to his life’s work. The exhibit consists mostly of items from collected materials provided by Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner, who directs The Bayard Rustin Fund and has advised on a number of other projects related to Rustin’s life and work.1 One exhibition case shows original posters from speaking events and conferences in the 1940s intertwining his pacifist and civil rights beliefs. Another includes an array of photos, materials and descriptions of Rustin’s international work, including a trip to India in the late 1940s to learn about strategic nonviolence from the Gandhian movement and to Africa in the 1950s to support the nonviolent independence struggles of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria. His range of talents and unique personality are shown with displays of original album covers of his early singing career with Josh White and examples of Rustin’s personal jewelry and cane collections (which he always wore and carried) as well as of the extraordinary collection of religious and African art that he amassed over a lifetime.
A video of an interview with Naegle by the museum’s Director of History, Ryan Jones, provides a more personal account of Rustin’s life and its significance. One video section focuses on the role of Julia Rustin, the grandmother who raised Rustin and instilled in him civil rights and Quaker principles.2
As many leaders and institutions submit to Donald Trump’s demands for allegiance to his reactionary policies, the exhibition title alone is a basic lesson for our time. It refers to a pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for An Alternative to Violence, that Rustin helped write in the mid-50s for the American Friends Service Committee. Rustin is often credited for bringing “speak truth to power,” a familiar phrase in Quaker circles, to popular use in civil rights, peace and other social movements. The phrase certainly reflects how Rustin, born in 1912, lived his life over 75 years: from a first solo sit-in to integrate a local movie theater in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania; to the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, the first interracial freedom ride in the South to test the Supreme Court’s ban of segregation in interstate bus travel; to organizing protests across continents for a nuclear test ban treaty in the 1950s; through to his rebuke of the Democratic Party leadership for accommodating Reaganism in the 1980s. From whatever vantage point, Rustin did not let power deter him from speaking out and acting on his beliefs.
The Ten Demands
One remarkable exhibit case centers around the March on Washington that includes ephemera of many actions that Rustin helped organize leading up to it. It includes items from the original 1941 March on Washington Movement led by A. Philip Randolph to integrate defense industries and federal employment and Randolph’s 1947-48 campaign to desegregate the armed forces. Two pamphlets are featured from the Journey of Reconciliation (“We Challenged Jim Crow” and “22 Days on a Chain Gang,” Rustin’s account of his imprisonment in North Carolina). There is also a never-before-displayed original copy of Rustin’s earliest hand-written plans for a March on Washington. Drawn up in 1956, it shows the detail and purpose that Rustin considered necessary to the many direct actions he organized. It was the basis for three precursor marches from 1957 to 1959 — the National Prayer Pilgrimage and two Youth Marches for Integrated Schools — that he and Randolph organized to demand implementation of the Brown v. Board decision.
A video loop with rare footage of the 1963 march offers a glimpse of the broader strategy, discussed further below, that Randolph and Rustin brought to that time. Few remember but Rustin followed King’s powerful speech to end the march by reciting a series of demands. The massive crowd of 250,000 had come not for a vague slogan but to push for specific civil rights and economic demands on the U.S. government. Rustin printed them on a flyer titled “What We Demand” and had them distributed widely prior to the march in the North and the South. On the screen, Rustin recites the demands in his distinct diction and asks the crowd, “What do you say?” The crowd gives its resounding ascent.
The ten demands are among the most radical set of precepts for social progress in American history. The first six relate to the March’s theme of freedom, most importantly the adoption and enforcement of civil rights legislation “to guarantee all Americans access to public accommodations, decent housing, adequate and integrated education, and the right to vote.” The last four demands, around the theme of jobs, include: a “massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages”; a national minimum wage to support “a decent standard of living”; fair labor standards in “all areas of employment”; and a “federal Fair Employment Practices Act” barring discrimination by “all federal, state, and municipal governments, employers, and trade unions” (emphasis in original).
The Source
As innovative as the NCRM exhibit is, it could cover only so much. Two things stand out as largely missing — both from the exhibition and the museum. The first is Rustin’s close relationship working with Dr. King to ground the Civil Rights Movement in the principles and tactics of strategic nonviolence, both during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in creating the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The second is the integral place of A. Philip Randolph in the work of both Rustin and King. It is in the latter relationship that one finds the source for the Ten Demands and the basis for Rustin’s work after the march.
In 1941 and 1948, Rustin had rebelled against Randolph’s national leadership. When Presidents Roosevelt and Truman each met the central demands of the March on Washington Movement and the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, Rustin publicly criticized Randolph for not pushing further. Each time, Randolph welcomed Rustin back to his work as Rustin in turn came to appreciate Randolph’s tactical acuity in achieving concrete gains for Black Americans. He also came to identify himself more with Randolph’s foundational beliefs.
Rustin described those beliefs in a 1969 essay, “The Total Vision of A. Philip Randolph.” First, he wrote, Randolph “has understood that social and political freedom must be rooted in economic freedom.” Second, even as Randolph felt that “Negro salvation is an internal process of struggle and self-affirmation, he has recognized the political necessity of forming alliances with men of all races and the moral necessity of comprehending the Black movement as part of a general effort to expand human freedom.” And third, “as a result of his deep faith in democracy, [Randolph] has understood that social change . . . [depends] on direct political action through the mobilization of masses of individuals to gain economic and social justice.”
The March on Washington and the scope of its demands reflected especially Randolph’s vision. As recounted in Jervis Anderson’s biographies of both men, Randolph believed that a dramatic national action was needed in the 100th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation to spotlight the continued lack of freedom and the resulting dire economic conditions facing Blacks in America. He was increasingly concerned about conditions in northern cities, where automation was undermining economic gains Blacks had made from moving north in The Great Migration.
In a meeting the two held in December 1962, Randolph tasked Rustin with planning a large protest in Washington, DC. Over six months, as plans evolved, Randolph and Rustin forged a coalition among the fractious Big 6 leaders of civil rights organizations and four leaders of unions and religious groups for a massive march around the themes of jobs and freedom. Not all organizations formally agreed to the full set of demands, but their leaders agreed that they should be presented to President Kennedy and Congress.
While King’s oratory took the day, Randolph, as the March’s opening speaker, set out its grand purpose:
"We want a free, democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines. Now we know that real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin. The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality.3
"It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits — for we are the worst victims of unemployment. Negroes are in the forefront of today’s movement for social and racial justice because we know we cannot expect the realization of our aspirations through the same old anti-democratic social institutions and philosophies that have all along frustrated our aspirations."
The radical language of Randolph may surprise some but, as Rustin makes clear, it was consonant with his lifelong democratic socialist beliefs as well as the raised hopes of the time. With passage of the Civil Rights Act and President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious introduction of the War on Poverty, Randolph and Rustin believed the opportunity existed to meet their fuller goals and to create what Rustin called “equality in fact.” So did Martin Luther King, Jr., who put forward a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged in 1964 in his book Why We Can’t Wait. In the fall of 1965, the three together proposed the Freedom Budget, a $100 billion plan (equivalent to $1 trillion today) to reorient federal spending around universal jobs training, guaranteed employment, a living wage, affordable housing, and full funding for education, health care and urban renewal. It was “What We Demand” set out in specifics.
The Freedom Budget became Rustin’s main focus. As his aged mentor stepped back, Rustin took the helm of a new organization named for Randolph and dedicated to strengthening the coalition of civil rights and labor movements. He spent the next years leading the effort for the Freedom Budget’s enactment. Rustin gained the endorsement of economists, labor leaders and civil rights organizations; he lobbied the Johnson administration; he testified before Congress; he wrote articles in prominent publications; and he spoke across the country to rally public support.
Johnson achieved much of his legislative agenda with the adoption of Medicare, Medicaid, food benefits, Head Start, later the Fair Housing Act, and other programs. Over time, these did reduce poverty, especially for the elderly; the gap narrowed in graduation rates and basic skills scores between minority and white students; among other gains. In the end, though, the hope was left unfulfilled for “a proper priority of values” and the reorganization of the economy to achieve social and economic equality. Still, Rustin never stopped advocating for the Freedom Budget and the full equality for Black Americans and all Americans he believed essential to fulfilling American democracy. His work over the last 25 years of his life will be discussed further in Part II of the series.
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1Among those many projects are Rustin, the 2023 film directed by George C. Wolfe and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama; the documentary film Brother Outsider; codirected by Nancy Kauss and Bennett Singer; the Rustin Center for Social Justice in Princeton, New Jersey, which provides resources and a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community; a young adult book called Troublemaker for Justice, co-written with Jacquelyn Houtman and Michael J. Long; and Long’s I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters (City Light Books, San Francisco: 2003).
2(Naegle’s study of Julia Rustin and her own civil rights activism is part of a collection of essays edited by Michael G. Long, Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics, published by New York University Press in 2024.)
3“What about Mrs. Murphy’s property rights” was the familiar refrain of segregationists and free market libertarians in debates over civil rights legislation requiring private businesses to provide equal treatment for Blacks.