#brotheroutsider

[y2shae]

http://rustin.org/ #BrotherOutsider: The Life of #BayardRustin https://www.instagram.com/p/BnC-g2dguVw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=xbh2rhyrmfja

[cambridgeteenroom]

Black History Month: Bayard Rustin

In the final scenes of Selma, amazingly enough, Bayard Rustin is not one of the figures mentioned in an afterword.  An activist for sixty years for civil rights, Rustin was kept in the background because of his homosexuality.

PBS is airing a film about Rustin called Brother Outsider.  You can learn more about it here, including a link to watch the film online!

[whatishouldhavelearned]

Where is Bayard Rustin?

This weekend we celebrate & remember the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. While many people remember the great Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Park- there is a man that history has somehow erased. That great man is the architect of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin. I ask my friends who are educators to bring honor to this great civil rights, human rights and profound man behind the scenes and educate their future students about him. We owe it to this man, Bayard Rustin that his name not be forgotten, that we learn of the impact he had on the great civil rights leader and his profound force on trying to make the world a kinder and better place to live.

When President Obama went to the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit on April 18, 2012, he got to visit one of the shrines of the civil rights movement that helped lead to the nation’s first African-American president. “I actually had the chance to sit in Rosa Parks’ bus,” Obama said. "I just sat there for a moment and pondered the courage and tenacity that is part of our very recent history, but is also a part of that long line of folks — sometimes nameless, oftentimes didn’t make the history books — but who constantly insisted on their dignity, their stake in the American Dream." Parks’ refusal to move to the back of that bus on Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., led to her arrest, which led to a bus boycott by African Americans, which led to the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led to the elevation of a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr.

Said Obama at another stop: "It takes ordinary citizens to bring about change, who are committed to keep fighting and keep pushing, and keep inching this country closer to our highest ideals."

I ask President Obama to pay tribute to the great Bayard Rustin. I ask him to question what the history books that have written and ask him to ask the education system & Black community, “Where is Bayard Rustin?”

I ask him to pay tribute to a man behind the scenes who orchestrated so much to create a better future.  Few will hear the name of one of the most influential civil rights leaders of the 20th century, Bayard Rustin. Some may ask, if he was so influential, why he is not discussed, and the answer to this question is simple: He was openly gay. Due to his sexuality, Bayard Rustin has been largely written out of Black History or simply ignored. Thanks to Rustin, civil disobedience became a powerful catalyst for political change in this country. Without Rustin as his steadfast mentor, adviser and confidant, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have understood the impact of direct action, which defined his civil rights leadership.

Without Rustin as a trailblazer, the Occupy movement would not have come about, even though most of its participants probably don’t know his name. He is the man who organized one of the greatest and most significant marches of American History. That’s right he organized the March on Washington in 1963. But besides that huge accomplishment Bayard was always a forefront is making sure justice & liberties where served to all.

Prior to Ms. Parks there had been many ‘freedom ride’. The Freedom Riders were inspired by the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, led by civil rights activists Bayard Rustin and George Houser. Rustin and Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. This was the first of the Freedom Rides to test the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel (Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia). Rustin and CORE executive secretary George Houser recruited a team of fourteen men, divided equally by race, to ride in pairs through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

The NAACP opposed CORE’s Gandhian tactics as too meek. Participants in the Journey of Reconciliation were arrested several times. Arrested with Jewish activist Igal Roodenko, Rustin served twenty-two days on a chain gang in North Carolina for violating Jim Crow laws regarding segregated seating on public transportation.

  In one of his own Rosa Parks moment he was quoted saying: “I cannot move.” The police came, and they started dragging Bayard out of his seat. And he pointed to a little white child across the aisle saying, “If I move, this child will not know that injustice is taking place here.”

Now the history books seemed to have forgotten Mr. Bayard Rustin because Mr. Rustin was an openly out homosexual black man. Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: 'The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.' March 17, 2012 would have marked the 100th birthday of Bayard Rustin. While King’s birthday is now a national holiday, Rustin by and large languishes in historical limbo because of his openness about being gay.

We the American people owe it to him to remember him & learn about him. His name should be synonymous with Human Rights Activism especially in the Civil Rights movement. I ask you the American public to ask the education systems, elementary, high school, colleges to ask your educators “Where is Bayard Rustin?”