Bayard Rustin and the March on Washington

When people remember the March on Washington they often recall the giant crowds or Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Less known is the person who made the event possible. Today on the show, the story of Bayard Rustin, the man behind the March on Washington. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa Abdelfatah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Freedom Now Movement, hear me. We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington, to go by plane, by car, bus.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  250,000 people, black and white, marched on the nation's Capitol.

• 0:55Speaker 04

  It nationalized this Southern freedom struggle. It was really glorious.

• 1:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  August 28, 1963, the March on Washington, lives in many of our minds as a single moment, a single voice, a single dream.

• 1:14Speaker 05

  I have a dream that one day.

• 1:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  But what you probably don't know is there's a man standing behind Martin Luther King Jr. as he's making this speech, just a few feet to his right. He's tall, thin, wearing thick, black-framed glasses. And this moment would never have happened without him. His name: Bayard Rustin. Bayard. Bayard. Bayard Rustin.

• 1:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today on the show, the story of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, the man behind the March on Washington. That's coming up after a quick break.

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• 3:23Speaker 05

  Since the beginning of this nation,

• 3:26Speaker 05

  we have attempted to make a moral and psychological analysis of prejudice,

• 3:38Speaker 05

  the economic and social degradation to which it has led.

• 3:44Speaker 05

  And I'm afraid we are still doing so.

• 3:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement to end segregation and institutionalized racism was heating up. Sit-ins, boycotts, and marches were consuming cities across the South, a movement that was beginning to spread to northern cities, too. And Bayard Rustin was a busy strategist, organizer, and political leader.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Rustin has this almost utopian idealism.

• 4:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is John DiMillo, author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  This is the world that we're aiming for. And as human beings, with our moral sense, we can move in that direction.

• 4:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Central to Bayard's concept of utopian idealism was his dedication to nonviolence, an idea that had been instilled from an early age by his grandma, Julia Davis Rustin, a devout Quaker who had raised him as her own child. Julia was, I would say, the primary influence on Bayard, certainly in his childhood. This is Walter Nagel. Walter was Bayard's partner until Bayard's death in 1987. Later in life, Bayard would say, quote, "My activism did not spring from being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values instilled in

• 5:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  me by my grandparents who reared me." He was also greatly inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  I regard myself as a soldier, though a soldier of peace. I know the value of discipline and truth.

• 5:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Gandhi just took things to the next level for Bayard. He believed an empire had been torn down and a nation changed with little more than words and peaceful protest. That was revolutionary for him, and Gandhi's voice would echo through Bayard's activism for the rest of his life. They wanted us to talk about violence so they could destroy us. So long as we were adhering to nonviolence, they could not destroy us. It was a viewpoint that Bayard held fast to in all of his work, and especially as he began working on something he'd been dreaming about for a long time.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  A massive march directed toward and on the nation's capital. I have long fought for equal opportunity for black workers.

• 6:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  A march for jobs.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  And for economic progress.

• 6:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  For all people.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  For all workers.

• 6:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Bayard and a group of organizers presented his dream of a big march to A. Philip Randolph, a labor rights leader who was then at the center of the civil rights movement. Randolph called himself a socialist and firmly believed that a decent, well-paying job would lead to social and political freedom, especially for Black people. For hours, they brainstormed, trying to imagine what this march would be, what its goals were, who would come, and how they would market it to the world.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  January 1963. The 100 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation have witnessed no fundamental government action to terminate the economic subordination of the American Negro. Negroes seek, as an integral part of their own struggle, as a people, the creation of more jobs for all Americans. Therefore, the project described below must be a massive effort involving coordinated participation by all progressive sectors of the liberal, labor, religious, and Negro communities.

• 7:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Walter was there for all the planning. They developed a two-day proposal.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  The first day was to be sit-ins in the congressional offices of those who were opposed to civil rights legislation.

• 7:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Norman Hill, then the National Program Director of the Congress of Racial Equality.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  The second day was to be a mass demonstration.

• 7:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  There were two main objectives.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  A, the project should call for action by the President and Congress, listing concrete demands. B, we should emphasize the theme that no worker in America is generally free. We now demand a program of action in 1963 that will ensure the emancipation of all labor, regardless of color, race, or creed.

• 8:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  In other words, jobs and economic justice were going to be the focus of the event. Randolph liked it, and it was decided. They would host a march on Washington that summer. So now, all that was left to do was, you know, pull off the most ambitious protest in American history in just a few months.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Well, Mr. Randolph asked me if I would set up the logistics for the march, which I immediately began to do, and to get every agency in America...

• 8:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Catholic, Protestant, Jewish intellectuals, labor movement, everybody involved. And to contain it so it was intensely nonviolent. In the spring of 1963, Bayard assembled a team to begin organizing the march.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  He made us feel like we were players in history and that he took us seriously.

• 9:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  People like Rochelle Horowitz, who traveled around the country convincing people that the march should take place.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  I was the transportation director of the March on Washington. And also, I assisted Bayard generally during the march.

• 9:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  They got buy-in from a lot of people and set up meetings with heads of the civil rights movement, AKA, the Big Six, which included A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  The leader of the National Association for the Dancing with the Colored People.

• 9:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Whitney Young.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Leader of the National Urban League.

• 9:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  James Farmer.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Of the Congress of Racial Equality.

• 9:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  John Lewis.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

• 9:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Martin Luther King Jr.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

• 10:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  And at the same time, Bayard was making tweaks to the proposal. He changed the mission statement to include two goals.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Jobs and freedom.

• 10:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Freedom, meaning racial justice. President John F. Kennedy was working on a civil rights bill, and Bayard figured the Big Six wouldn't want to take attention away from it, especially since Kennedy had already made it clear he opposed the march.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  He indicated that there might be violence, which would set back the cause of civil rights.

• 10:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Bayard made another tweak. He reduced the event from two days to one and then presented the revised proposal to the Big Six. And they were on board, except Roy Wilkins of the NAACP had one condition. He didn't want Bayard Rustin, a gay former communist, to be the top organizer of the march. So it was decided that Randolph should chair the march.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  He said he would do so on one condition, that he be given the right to name his deputy to do the day-to-day organizing of the march. He named Byron Rustin.

• 11:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  This wouldn't be the first time that Bayard was pushed behind the scenes. The march was announced to the world in early June of 1963. It was scheduled to take place on August 28, 1963. And then the organizing sped up.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  We worked six days a week. Day and night, engaging in outreach to as many groups and people as we could.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Folding letters, mailing out mailings, calling people on the phone. Because remember, we didn't have social media. We used mimeography, we used telephone. It was like the dark ages.

• 11:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Word began to spread, and they could tell people were interested in coming. Only problem was...

• 11:50Speaker 03

  We didn't know how many people would come.

• 11:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  So they were feeling their way through the dark, trying to plan travel, food, lodging, around maybes and what ifs. Disagreements came up along the way. Some were minor.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  Bayard at one meeting announced that the National Council, I think, of Negro women were preparing thousands of sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly. And I joked, "Oh, peanut butter and jelly."

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Really, first time you ever got really angry. He said, "Rochelle, it doesn't spoil."

• 12:25Speaker 04

  So we weren't going to have people sick on the march.

• 12:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  But other disagreements were more substantial, like the fact that no women were scheduled to speak at the march.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  I remember Mrs. Haymer, San Lu Haymer, you know, speaking so articulately about the problems we were faced. But I don't remember her standing behind the pulpit, saying those things.

• 12:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Author Joyce Ladner had grown up in the heart of the Jim Crow South. At the time, she was busy working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  There were some preachers who said it was bad luck for a woman to cross the pulpit.

• 13:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  There was still an era where male domination was accepted, you know? But everyone involved in the march, from the top down, agreed on one thing. The march had to be nonviolent. Anything less could spell disaster for the movement.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Bayard, I think, knew from day one that he was going to ask the New York City black policemen to volunteer as marshals. And then he proceeded every day during the march to take a group of them out in the courtyard or back of the Friendship Building and train them in nonviolent crowd control. Holding hands and encircling people should there be a disturbance.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  We're nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.

• 13:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Rachelle says activists who had a more militant approach, like Malcolm X, were uninvited. Bayard knew that the march hinged on perceptions. Plenty of people were waiting for it to fail. So the crowd had to remain nonviolent. And the public face of the march also had to be nonthreatening and wildly inspirational.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the code of justice.

• 14:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  It had to be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love so that when the day comes...

• 14:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  With the march just a few weeks away, things were looking good. Everything was going according to Bayard's plan. But J. Edgar Hoover, the notoriously shady director of the FBI at the time, tried to dig up some dirt on people linked to the march. And a gay, black socialist, former communist and conscientious objector?

• 14:56Speaker 05

  How many jeopardy's can you afford?

• 14:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Was the perfect target. And Hoover knew exactly who to pass the dirt to. A segregationist senator from South Carolina.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Named Strom Thurmond.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Strom Thurmond, on the floor of the United States Congress, attacked by Rustin as being a pervert and a draft dodger.

• 15:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  A media firestorm ensued. And the big question was, what would happen to Bayard? It was a question that Bayard had faced many times before, including eight years prior, when he had worked with Martin Luther King Jr.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  At a given point, there was so much pressure on Dr. King about my being gay, and particularly because I would not deny it, that he set up a committee to explore whether it would be dangerous for me to continue working with him.

• 15:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Since then, he had effectively been cast out, only returning to the movement to plan the March on Washington. And now it looked like he would be exiled again. Except this time.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  A. Philip Randolph, at that point, called a press conference and indicated that Bayard Rustin would remain the deputy director and chief organizer of the march, that he had full and complete confidence in the ability of Bayard Rustin, and that the march would indeed go forward.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  This is from the New York Times of August 16th, 1963, which says Negro Rally Aid Rebutted.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  That certainly was a turning point in Bayard Rustin's civil rights career. He was given credit for being the organizing architect of the march itself.

• 17:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  For the first time in his life, Bayard didn't have to retreat. Exposure didn't lead to exile, all because A. Philip Randolph decided to break the cycle.

• 17:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Seven, six, five, four, three, two. One day left until the march.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  It's very strange. I have a bit of amnesia about how I can't remember how I got to Washington. I think Joyce told me we flew down.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  We all took trains down to Washington. And we all checked into the Statler Hilton. The one person who didn't take the train down was Elton Holmes Norton. Because Byatt felt that one person should stay behind to take any last-minute calls or whatever.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  What I remember mostly about that day is, you know, running around, trying to set things up.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  It was just a lot of people, people I'd never seen before, you know, leaders like Norm Hill. And I was, you know, just so excited whenever I saw someone from Mississippi. There was both great anticipation and also hesitancy and some fear. No one knew exactly what the numbers would be like. You know, it was like, we've done all the planning, now we hold our breath and see how it all comes to fruition.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  But there was the famous moment when Byatt came dashing through this big room that we'd be using at the Statler, and he said, "Where's John Lewis? Get John Lewis."

• 18:45Speaker 05

  The fact is that John Lewis wrote a speech which was not within the guidelines of what the leadership had agreed to.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Cortland Cox had put John Lewis's speech out on the table and...

• 18:57Speaker 03

  All the reporters immediately got copies of it.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  And it hit the fan.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  There's a section in John's speech, something like, "If violence doesn't stop, we will have no choice but to march through the South the way General Sherman did."

• 19:21Speaker 03

  August 28th, 1963.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  We woke up very early.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  We had breakfast at the hotel.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  And afterwards, we walked over, walked on the mall over to the site of the march.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Where there was to be a pre-march musical presentation.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  A bullet from the back of a bush could measure every blood.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  I remember being there to hear Bobby. We called Bob Dylan Bobby.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  And Joan Baez sang, as did Peter Paul and Mary.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  A member of the porters saw Byron and moved toward him because at that point, being that early in the morning, there was no evidence of marchers. And they asked Byron, in effect, where was the march? Would it still come off? And so, using a British accent, he pulled a piece of paper out of his coat jacket and said, "Indeed, gentlemen, everything is on schedule." What they didn't know was that the piece of paper was blank. And an hour later, the marchers began coming into Washington DC in historic fashion.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  We were all very ecstatic because the people were just coming in by throngs. They were singing, they were happy, and we knew it was going to be a success.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Fellow Americans, we are gathered here in the largest demonstration. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom. I have the pleasure to present to this... Great audience. Young John Lewis marches to the jobs and freedom. In what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. The first demand is that we have effective civil rights legislation.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Now, people have asked me often, what was the thing you remember most about the March on Washington? And I always say the crowd. It was unimaginable to see 200,000 people anywhere at that time. Looking out at that crowd from a small town in Mississippi, I have this kind of feeling that that comes up in me, a sense of awe and pride and so on. It feels a certain way, and I still get it. I remember thinking very clearly, that they support us. They support us.

• 22:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. If you want to hear the full-length episode about Bayard Rustin, check out The Man Behind the March on Washington. And join us next week when we hear directly from journalists during the Vietnam War.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party. There was roses and champagne and all kinds of wonderful things. You'd think you were at home, you know? But then, over the edge of the parapet, you could see these flares coming up. And the question was, was it was incoming or outgoing? You would never know till it happened.

• 23:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Vietnam War. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Morghadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randa Delfatah. Thanks for listening.

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