Food for Thought: Bayard Rustin Documentary Reflections posted by Adrian Apollo

 

Question 7: What innovations in American life did Bayard Rustin engage in or create? 

When Bayard Rustin was convicted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for sitting next to a white man on a public bus, he was sentenced to thirty days in a road gang or "chain gang" as the convicted men were tied together by chains and forced to do ten hours of manual labor a day. After this experience, he returned to New York and wrote about his degrading encounter in the New York post. Due to the acclaim and popularity of his article displaying the treatment of convicted peoples, the chain gang was discontinued in North Carolina. This is just one of the innovations in American life that Rustin engaged in. He did away with an archaic and demeaning form of criminal punishment by partaking in it directly. His experience was what brought about change in a state in which he did not even live in. 

Question 1: Make notes about Bayard Rustin's relationship to Queer Identity 

Rustin always seemed to be interested in men from a very young age. The documentary explained that his family would not provide "encouragement" towards him being gay but that they "understood" where he was coming from. We start to see people put Rustin down for his sexuality once he began to pursue his career in social activism. AJ Musty, an activist he worked closely with and admired was said to have told Rustin multiple times to stop displaying interest in men. He believed that this fact alone would jeopardize the work he was doing and the work of any movements he would be involved in. I find it interesting that a man who preached about pacifism, love, and non-violence would be so against someone who was "like a son to him" being himself. This fact alone really gave me perspective on Rustin's own situation. He had to sacrifice a large part of his true identity in order to fight for the other half of his identity, which was being black. He could not fully embrace being a gay man, as he would be persecuted for being gay. When he was arrested for public indecency, this would affect his career very much as he was labelled as a sexual pervert. His public credibility was threatened as he worked alongside Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and he could only hide it away for so long. In order to be open in any way shape or form he would have to be separated from the Civil Rights Movement. I think that this is very crucial and significant when analyzing his relationship to queer identity. Rustin was not able to fully embrace this part of himself for a significant amount of his life, as he was targeted highly by those who wished to see the downfall of the Civil Rights Movement. 

Question 4: To what extent did Bayard Rustin live a "compartmentalized life"? 

As we see in the question before this, Rustin had to separate his sexuality from his work within the Civil Rights movement and other activist endeavors he partook in. In the documentary, a psychiatrist that Rustin went to see after his 1953 arrest for sexual perversion discussed Rustin's situation. The psychiatrist and him essentially agreed that Rustin would have to "stop throwing his sexuality into the faces of others". He needed to "quiet down" his homosexual tendencies and behaviors for the sake of his own career. He needed to suppress his feelings in order to save his own work.