The Road to Character

CHAPTER 6

DIGNITY

The most prominent civil rights leader in America at the time Command Performance aired was A. Philip Randolph. He was the African American leader who organized and called for marches, who met with the president, and whose fame and moral authority helped shape the movement.

Randolph was born in 1899, near Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a minister in an African Methodist Episcopal church, but the church paid so little that he made most of his income as a tailor and butcher, while his wife worked as a seamstress.

Randolph, who was not a religious person, recalled, “My father preached a racial religion. He spoke to the social condition of his flock, and always reminded them that the AME church was the first black militant institution in America.”¹ The elder Randolph also took his two boys to political meetings run by blacks. He introduced them to successful black men. And he told and retold the stories of black exemplars throughout history: Crispus Attucks, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass.

The family lived lives of highly respectable poverty. The home was kept impeccably neat. They followed a code of old-fashioned propriety, discipline, and etiquette. Randolph’s parents practiced perfect elocution and taught their son to pronounce every syllable of each word so that throughout his life, words like “responsibility” came out as a long, stately procession: “re-spons-a-bil-i-tay.”

Confronted by humiliating racism, they hewed to a code of moral refinement and gentlemanly conduct that jarred with their material circumstances. The elder Randolph, the biographer Jervis Anderson wrote, “was, very simply, a self-made gentleman, one who was guided by the values of civility, humility, and decency, inspired by religious and social service, and utterly devoted to the idea of dignity.”²

At school, Randolph was taught by two white New England schoolmarms who had come south to educate black underprivileged children, and whom Randolph would later call “two of the finest teachers who ever lived.” Miss Lillie Whitney taught Randolph Latin and math, while Miss Mary Neff taught him literature and drama. Tall and athletic, Randolph excelled at baseball, but he developed a love of Shakespeare and drama that would last. In the final decades of his wife’s life, when she was confined to a wheelchair, Randolph would read Shakespeare to her each day.

Most people are the product of their circumstances, but Randolph’s parents, his teachers, and he himself created a moral ecology that transcended circumstances, a way of behaving that was always slightly more elevated, slightly more formal, and much more dignified than that of the world around him. Throughout his life, Randolph’s carriage was always proper and upright. C. L. Dellums, a colleague and labor leader, remembered, “Randolph learned to sit erect and walk erect. You almost never saw him leaning back, reclining. No matter how enjoyable the occasion, you look around and there’s Randolph just as straight as if there was a board in his back.”³

His voice was soft, deep, and serene. He had an accent that people described as a cross between upper-class Boston and West Indian. He spoke in biblical cadences and used archaic words like “verily” and “vouchsafe.”⁴

He fought any tendency toward looseness or moral laziness with constant acts of self-mastery, whether small acts of personal conduct or large acts of renunciation. His staff marveled at the way women threw themselves at him during his travels and the gentle way he turned them aside. “I don’t think a man ever lived who women begged and chased more than that man,” Dellums would recall to a biographer, “They tried everything but rape. Webster and I had a joke between us that we followed the chief around to handle the overflow. And they were the most beautiful women…. It was always depressing having to get out of there. I’ve seen women try everything, plead with him to come up to their hotel room, for a nightcap or something. He would just say, ‘Sorry, I’m tired. I had a hard day. We better call it a night.’ Sometimes I’d say to him, ‘Chief? You kidding me?’ ”⁵

He did not believe in self-exposure. Outside of his writing, which could be tough and polemical, he did not often criticize others. His formality often kept people from feeling that they really knew him; even Bayard Rustin, one of his closest colleagues, always called him “Mr. Randolph.” He was not interested in money and suspected that personal luxury was morally corrupting. Even when he was an old man and globally famous, he rode the bus home from work every day. One day he was mugged in the hallway of his building. The muggers found $1.25 on him, but no watch or jewelry of any kind. When some donors tried to raise money for him, to enhance his lifestyle, he shut them down, saying, “I am sure you know that I have no money and, at the same time, don’t expect to get any. However, I would not think of having a movement started to raise money for me and my family. It is the lot of some people to be poor and it is my lot, which I do not have any remorse about.”⁶

These qualities—his incorruptibility, his reticent formality, and above all his dignity—meant it was impossible to humiliate him. His reactions and internal state were determined by himself, not by the racism or even by the adulation that later surrounded him. Randolph’s significance was in establishing a certain model for how to be a civil rights leader. He exuded self-mastery and, like George C. Marshall, left a string of awed admirers in his wake. “It is hard to make anyone who has never met him believe that A. Philip Randolph must be the greatest man who has lived in the U.S. this century,” the columnist Murray Kempton wrote. “But it is harder yet to make anyone who has ever known him believe anything else.”

Public-Spiritedness

The chief challenges of Randolph’s life were: How do you take imperfect people and organize them into a force for change? How do you amass power while not being corrupted by power? Even in the midst of one of the noblest enterprises of the century, the civil rights movement, leaders like Randolph were filled with self-suspicion, feeling they had to be on the lookout for their own laxity, their own sinfulness, feeling that even in the midst of fighting injustice it is still possible to do horrible wrong.

There’s a reason the civil rights leaders were transfixed by the book of Exodus. The Israelites in that book were a divided, shortsighted, and petulant people. They were led by a man, Moses, who was meek, passive, and intemperate and who felt himself inadequate to the task. The leaders of the movement had to tackle the insoluble dilemmas of Mosaic leadership: how to reconcile passion with patience, authority with power sharing, clarity of purpose with self-doubt.⁷

The solution was a certain sort of public-spiritedness. Today, when we use the phrase “public-spirited,” we tend to mean someone who gathers petitions, marches and protests, and makes his voice heard for the public good. But in earlier eras it meant someone who curbed his own passions and moderated his opinions in order to achieve a larger consensus and bring together diverse people. We think of public-spiritedness as self-assertion, but historically it has been a form of self-government and self-control. The reticent and sometimes chilly George Washington exemplified this version of public-spiritedness.⁸ Randolph exemplified it, too. He combined political radicalism with personal traditionalism.

Sometimes his advisers would get fed up with his unfailing politeness. “Every now and then,” Bayard Rustin told Murray Kempton, “I think he permits good manners to get in the way…. Once I complained about that and he answered, ‘Bayard, we must with good manners accept everyone. Now is the time for us to learn good manners. We will need them when this is over, because we must show good manners after we have won.’ ”⁹

The Genteel Radical

Randolph began his career by moving from Florida to Harlem, arriving in April, 1911, a month after the Triangle factory fire. He became active in theater groups, and with his elocution and presence seemed on the verge of becoming a Shakespearean actor until his parents squelched the idea. He briefly attended City College, where he read Karl Marx voraciously. He helped start a series of racial magazines, bringing Marxism to the black community. In one editorial he called the Russian Revolution “the greatest achievement of the twentieth century.” He opposed U.S. entry into World War I, believing the war only served the interests of munitions makers and other industrialists. He crusaded against Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. In the middle of that fight some anonymous enemy sent Randolph a box containing a threatening note and a severed human hand.

At the same time he was getting arrested for violating antisedition legislation, his personal life became even more bourgeois and upstanding. Randolph married a genteel woman from a prominent Harlem family. On Sunday afternoons they enjoyed taking part in the weekly promenades. People got dressed up in their finest clothes—gaiters, canes, boutonnieres, spats, and fancy hats—and strolled down Lenox Avenue or 135th Street, exchanging greetings and pleasantries with neighbors along the way.

By the early 1920s, Randolph had begun to move into labor organizing. He helped start a half dozen small trade unions, organizing waiters, waitresses, and other disaffected groups. In June 1925, Randolph was approached by a few Pullman car porters who were looking for a charismatic, educated leader who could build a union for them. The Pullman Company provided luxury railway sleeping cars that were leased to railroads. The patrons were served by squads of liveried black men who shined shoes, changed linens, and brought food. After the Civil War, the founder, George Pullman, had hired ex-slaves to do this work, believing they would be a docile labor force. The porters had tried to unionize as early as 1909, but had always been beaten back by the company.

Randolph accepted the challenge and spent the next twelve years trying to create a porters’ union and win concessions from the company. He traveled around the country trying to persuade porters to join the union, at a time when the slightest whiff of union activity could cost them their job or get them beaten. Randolph’s primary tool was his manner. As one union member would recall, “He gripped you. You would have to be without feeling to pull yourself away from him. You felt by him the way the disciples felt by the Master. You may not know it right then, but when you got home to yourself, and got to thinking what he had said, you would just have to be a follower of him, that’s all.”¹⁰

The work was slow, but over the next four years the union grew to nearly seven thousand members. Randolph learned that the rank and file didn’t like it when he criticized the company, to which they still felt loyal. They did not share his more general critique of capitalism, so he changed tactics. He made it a fight for dignity. Randolph also decided he would reject all donations from sympathetic whites. This would be a victory blacks would organize and win on their own.

Then the Depression hit, and the company struck back, firing or threatening any employee who voted to strike. By 1932, union membership was down to 771. Offices had closed in nine cities. Randolph and the headquarters staff were evicted for failure to pay rent. Randolph’s salary, which had been ten dollars a week, fell to nothing. Always a polished, sharp-dressed man, his clothes became tattered and worn. Union activists were beaten in cities from Kansas City to Jacksonville. In 1930 an Oakland loyalist named Dad Moore wrote a determined letter a month before his death:

My back is against the wal but I will Die before I will Back up one inch. I am fiting not for myself but for 12,000 porters and maids, and there children…. I has bin at Starvasion Door but it had not change my mind, for just as the night folows the Day we are gointer win. Tell all the men in your Dist that they should folow Mr. Randolph as they would follow Jes Christ.¹¹

Nonviolent Resistance

The black press and the black churches turned against the union for being overly aggressive. In New York, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia offered Randolph a city job paying $7,000 a year, but Randolph turned it down.

The tide turned in 1933 with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and a change in the labor laws. Still, company executives had trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that to settle the labor dispute they would have to sit down as equals with the black porters and their representatives. It wasn’t until July 1935 that the company and union leadership met in a room in Chicago to begin negotiations. An agreement was finally reached two years later. The company agreed to a reduction in the work month from 400 to 240 hours and agreed to increase the company’s total pay package by $1,250,000 a year. Thus ended one of the longest and most bitter labor fights of the twentieth century.

By this time Randolph was the most famous African American organizer in the country. Having broken decisively with the Marxism of his youth, he spent the next years in a series of brutal fights to purge Soviet-dominated organizations from the labor movement. Then, in the early 1940s, with the country mobilizing for war, a new injustice pressed down on the black community. The factories were hauling in workers in droves to build planes, tanks, and ships, but they were not hiring blacks.

On January 15, 1941, Randolph issued a statement calling for a giant march on Washington if this discrimination was allowed to continue. “We loyal Negro American citizens demand the right to work and fight for our country,” he declared. He formed the March on Washington Committee and realistically expected they could bring ten thousand or perhaps twenty or thirty thousand blacks together for a protest march on the Mall.

The prospect of the march alarmed the nation’s leadership. Roosevelt asked Randolph to come see him for a meeting at the White House.

“Hello, Phil,” the president said when they were together. “Which class were you in at Harvard?”

“I never went to Harvard, Mr. President,” Randolph responded.

“I was sure you did. Anyway, you and I share a kinship in our great interest in human and social justice.”

“That’s right, Mr. President.”

Roosevelt launched into a series of jokes and political anecdotes, but Randolph eventually cut him off.

“Mr. President, time is running on. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries.”

Roosevelt offered to call some company heads and urge them to hire blacks.

“We want you to do more than that,” Randolph replied. “We want something concrete…. We want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.”

“Well, Phil, you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end of other groups coming here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Questions like this can’t be settled with a sledgehammer.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President, the march cannot be called off.” Randolph, bluffing a bit, vowed to bring a hundred thousand marchers.

“You can’t bring a hundred thousand Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt protested, “somebody might get killed.”

Randolph insisted. The impasse lasted until Mayor La Guardia, who was at the meeting, jumped in. “It is clear Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march, and I suggest we all begin to seek a formula.”¹² Six days before the march was due to take place, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industries. Randolph called off the march, amid much opposition from civil rights leaders who wanted to use it to push other causes such as discrimination in the armed forces themselves.

After the war, Randolph pushed more broadly for worker rights and desegregation. His great power, as always, derived from his obvious moral integrity, his charisma, his example as an incorruptible man in service to a cause. He was, however, not a meticulous administrator. He had trouble concentrating his energies on a single cause. The unabashed admiration he inspired in the people around him could threaten organizational effectiveness. “There is, especially in the National Office, an unhealthy degree of leader-worship of Mr. Randolph,” one outside analyst of the 1941 March on Washington organization observed, “which paralyzes action and prevents an intelligent working out of policy.”¹³

But Randolph had one more important contribution to make to the civil rights movement. In the 1940s and 1950s he was among those who championed nonviolent resistance as a tactic to advance the civil rights cause. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and some of the early labor movement tactics, he helped form the League of Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation in 1948.¹⁴ Against most of the established civil rights groups, which advocated education and reconciliation over confrontation and contention, Randolph argued for restaurant sit-ins and “prayer protests.” As he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1948, “Ours would be [a movement] of non-resistance…. We would be willing to absorb the violence, absorb the terrorism, to face the music and to take whatever comes.”

This tactic of nonviolence relied on intense self-discipline and renunciation of the sort Randolph had practiced his entire life. One of the aides who influenced Randolph and was influenced by him was Bayard Rustin. A few decades younger, Rustin shared many qualities with his mentor.

Rustin

Bayard Rustin grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and was raised by his grandparents. He was well into boyhood before he learned that the person he thought was his older sister was actually his mother. His father, who suffered from alcoholism, lived in the town but had no role in Rustin’s life.

Rustin remembered his grandfather as having “the most erect carriage of any person you have ever seen. None of us can remember a single unkindness in him.” His grandmother had been raised a Quaker and was one of the first black women in the county to receive a high school education. She impressed upon Bayard the need for calm, dignity, and relentless self-control. “One just doesn’t lose one’s temper” was one of her favorite maxims. His mother also ran a summer Bible camp, with emphasis on the book of Exodus, which Bayard attended every day. “My grandmother,” he recalled, “was thoroughly convinced that when it came to matters of the liberation of black people, we had much more to learn from the Jewish experience than we had to learn out of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”¹⁵

In high school Rustin was a good athlete and wrote poetry. Like Randolph, he spoke in a proper, almost British accent, which could appear haughty to those who first met him. His classmates teased him for his excessive dignity. One high school classmate recalled, “He spoke biblical poetry. And Browning. He would tackle you and then get up and recite a poem.”¹⁶ As a freshman he became the first black student in forty years to win his high school’s oratory prize. By senior year he made the all-county football team, and he was a class valedictorian. He developed a passion for opera, Mozart, Bach, and Palestrina, and George Santayana’s novel The Last Puritan was one of his favorite books. On his own he also read Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, which, he testified, was like “taking a whiff of something that simply opens your nostrils except that it happened in my brain.”¹⁷

Rustin went off to college at Wilberforce University in Ohio and then Cheney State in Pennsylvania. While in college he realized he was gay. The realization did not induce too much emotional turmoil—he had been raised in a tolerant family and was to live more or less openly as a homosexual for his entire life—but it did cause him to move to New York, where there was at least an underground gay culture and a bit more acceptance.

Once in Harlem, he went in multiple directions at once, joining leftist organizations and also volunteering to help organize Randolph’s March on Washington effort. He joined a Christian pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and quickly emerged as a rising star of the movement. Pacifism was a way of life for Rustin. It provided him with both a path to inner virtue and a strategy for social change. The path to inner virtue meant suppressing personal anger and the violent tendencies inside. “The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself,” Rustin would say.¹⁸ As a strategy for change, pacifism, he later wrote in a letter to Martin Luther King, “rests upon two pillars. One is resistance, continuous military resistance. The evildoer is subjected to pressure so that he never is permitted to rest. Second it projects good-will against ill-will. In this way, nonviolent resistance is a force against apathy in our own ranks.”¹⁹

Throughout his late twenties, Rustin traveled for FOR, electrifying audiences around the country. He staged constant acts of civil disobedience, which quickly became legendary in pacifist and civil rights circles. In 1942 in Nashville he insisted upon riding in the white section of a public bus. The driver called the police. Four officers arrived and beat him while Rustin maintained a passive, Gandhian demeanor. As David McReynolds, a member of FOR, later recalled, “Not only was he the Fellowship’s most popular lecturer but he was also a genius at tactical matters. Bayard was being groomed by FOR to become an American Gandhi.”²⁰

In November 1943, when he received his draft notice, Rustin decided he would take a stance of noncooperation and go to jail rather than serve in one of the rural labor camps as a conscientious objector. At that time, one out of every six inmates in federal prison was a prisoner of conscience. These inmates thought of themselves as the shock troops of pacifism and civil rights. Locked away, Rustin aggressively defied the prison’s segregationist policies. He insisted upon eating in the Whites Only part of the dining hall. During free time he stationed himself in the Whites Only part of the cell block. Sometimes his agitation got him in trouble with the other prisoners. On one occasion a white prisoner went after him, bashing him with a mop handle, landing blows on Rustin’s head and body. Once again, Rustin went into a Gandhian pose of nonresistance. He simply repeated over and over again, “You can’t hurt me.” Eventually the mop handle snapped. Rustin suffered a broken wrist and bruises across his head.

Word of Rustin’s exploits soon spread beyond prison walls, to the wider press and activist circles. In Washington, officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, under the leadership of James Bennett, classified Rustin as a “notorious offender,” in the same category as Al Capone. As his biographer John D’Emilio put it, “Throughout Rustin’s 28-month imprisonment, Bennett was plagued by letters from subordinates who pleaded for advice on what to do about Rustin, and from Rustin’s supporters on the outside who kept an eye on his treatment.”²¹

Promiscuity

Rustin behaved heroically, but there was also an arrogance and an anger and sometimes a recklessness in his behavior that was not in keeping with his stated beliefs. On October 24, 1944, he felt compelled to send a letter to the warden apologizing for his behavior at a disciplinary hearing. “I am quite ashamed that I lost my temper and behaved rudely,” he wrote.²² There was also a recklessness to his sexual life. Rustin was gay at a time when gay life was pushed underground, when there was no public affirmation for gays and lesbians. But there was a relentlessness to Rustin’s search for partners that even his lovers found disturbing. His speaking tours before and after prison involved constant rounds of seduction. One long-term lover complained that “coming home one day and finding him in bed with somebody else was not my idea of fun.”²³ In prison he was flagrant about his sexual interests and was several times caught performing fellatio on other prisoners.

The prison authorities eventually convened a disciplinary hearing. At least three prisoners testified that they had seen Rustin performing oral sex. At first Rustin lied, vehemently denying the charges. When authorities announced they were putting him in a separate part of the prison as punishment, he wrapped his arms and legs around a swivel chair, resisted the guards, and ended up in isolation.

News of the incident spread across activist circles nationwide. Some of his supporters were upset to learn he was gay, but Rustin had never really hidden that. Mostly they were upset because his sexual activities undermined the example he had been setting as a disciplined, heroic resister. In a movement that called upon its leaders to be peaceful, self-restrained, and self-purifying, Rustin had been angry, arrogant, lax, and self-indulgent. A. J. Muste, the leader of FOR and Rustin’s mentor, wrote him a harsh letter:

You have been guilty of gross misconduct, especially reprehensible in a person making the claims to leadership and—in a sense—moral superiority which you were making. Furthermore, you have deceived everybody, including your own comrades and most devoted friends…. You are still far from facing reality in yourself. In the self that has been and still is you, there is nothing to respect, and you must ruthlessly cast out everything in you, which prevents you from facing that. Only so can your true self come to birth—through fire, anguish complete and child-like humility…. You remember Psalm 51: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness—wash me thoroughly from mine iniquities and cleanse me from my sin…. against thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight…. Create me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”²⁴

In a later letter, Muste made it clear that it was not Rustin’s homosexuality he was objecting to, but his promiscuity: “How utterly horrible and cheap where there is no discipline, no form in the relationship.” Just as an artist with the freest vision, the most powerful creative urge, submits to the severest discipline, so, too, must a lover tame his impulses in order to reach “the discipline, the control, the effort to understand the other.”

With promiscuity, Muste continued, “we come close to the travesty and denial of love, for if love means depth, means understanding above the ordinary…means exchange of life blood, how can that happen among an indefinite number of people?”

Rustin initially resisted Muste’s harsh judgment, but eventually, after weeks in isolation, he surrendered, writing a long, heartfelt letter in reply:

When success was imminent in our racial campaign my behavior stopped progress…. I have misused the confidence that negroes here had in my leadership; I have caused them to question the moral basis of non-violence; I have hurt and let down my friends over the country…. I am a traitor (by our means of thought) just as surely as an army captain who willfully exposed military positions during a battle…. I have really been dedicated to my “ego.” I have thought in terms of my power, my time, my energy and of giving them to the great struggle. I have thought in terms of my voice, my ability, my willingness to go into the non-violent vanguard. I have not humbly accepted God’s gifts to me…. [This] has led, I now see, first to arrogance and pride and then to weakness, to artificiality and failure.²⁵

A few months later Rustin was permitted to travel home, with an accompanying guard, to visit his dying grandfather. While on the way home, Rustin met up with Helen Winnemore, a fellow activist and an old friend. Winnemore told Rustin she loved him and wanted to be his life companion, to give him the heterosexual relationship, or at least cover, so that he could continue his work. In a letter to his longtime male lover, Davis Platt, Rustin summarized the offer Winnemore had made, paraphrasing her words:

Now since I believe that once redeemed your power for service and redemption of others will be vast, and since I believe your greatest immediate need is for real love, real understanding, and confidence, I tell you without shame of the love I have for you, of my desire to be with you thru light and darkness, to give all that I possess that the goodness within you shall live and flower. Men must see the goodness that potentially is yours and glorify your creator. This, Bayard, she went on to say in effect, this [is the] love I have for you and I offer it joyfully not for myself or for you alone, but for all mankind, which would profit by what your integration would mean—and then for a long time we were silent.²⁶

Rustin was touched by Winnemore’s offer. “Never had I heard such unselfish love speak in a woman. Never had I sensed a more simple and complete offering.” He did not take Winnemore up on her offer, but he regarded it as a sign from God. The memory of their conversation brought him “a joy that is almost beyond understanding—a flash of light in the right direction—a new hope…a sudden reevaluation…a light on the road I know I should travel.”²⁷

Rustin vowed to curb his arrogance, the spirit of anger that had marred his pacifist activities. He also rethought his sex life. He fundamentally accepted Muste’s critique of his promiscuity. Rustin worked on his relationship with his longtime lover Davis Platt, exchanging a series of long, searching letters with him in the hopes that one truly loving relationship would serve as a barricade against lust and promiscuity.

Rustin remained in prison until June 1946. Upon his release he immediately became active again in the civil rights movement. In North Carolina, he and some fellow activists sat at the front of a segregated bus and were beaten and nearly lynched. In Reading, Pennsylvania, he extracted an apology from a hotel manager after a clerk denied him a room. In St. Paul, Minnesota, he conducted a sit-in until he was given a room. On a train from Washington to Louisville he sat in the middle of the dinner car from breakfast straight through lunchtime as the waiters refused to serve him.

When A. Philip Randolph called off a resistance campaign, Rustin harshly criticized his mentor for issuing a statement that was nothing more than a “weasel worded, mealy mouthed sham.”²⁸ He was quickly ashamed of himself, and he avoided Randolph for the next two years. When they finally met again, “I was so nervous I was shaking, waiting for his wrath to descend upon me.” Randolph laughed it off and resumed their relationship.

Rustin went on speaking tours around the world, a star once again. He also continued to seduce men at every stop. Eventually Platt threw him out of their apartment. Then, in 1953, while on a speaking engagement in Pasadena, he was arrested at just after three in the morning. He was performing oral sex on two men in a car when two county police officers approached and arrested him for lewd vagrancy.

He was sentenced to sixty days in jail, and his reputation would never fully recover. He had to dissociate himself from his activist organizations. He tried unsuccessfully to get a job as a publicist for a publishing house. A social worker suggested he get a job cleaning bathrooms and hallways in a hospital.

Backstage

Some people try to recover from scandal by starting where they were and simply continuing through life. Some people strip themselves down and start again from the bottom. Rustin eventually understood that his new role was to serve his good cause, but in the background.

Rustin slowly recommitted himself to the civil rights movement. Instead of being the star speaker, leader, and organizer, he would forever after be mostly in the shadows, working behind the scenes, receiving no credit, shifting the glory to others, like his friend and protégé, Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin wrote for King, spread ideas through King, introduced King to labor leaders, pushed him to talk about economic as well as civil rights issues, tutored him on nonviolent confrontation and the Gandhian philosophy, and organized one action after another on King’s behalf. Rustin was a significant player in the Montgomery bus boycott. King wrote a book about the boycott, but Rustin asked him to take out all references to his own role. When asked to sign some public statement on behalf of this or that stand, he generally refused.

Even this backstage role was fragile. In 1960, Adam Clayton Powell, the pastor and then congressman from New York City, let it be known that if King and Rustin did not bow to his demands on a certain tactical matter, he would accuse them of having a sexual affair. Randolph urged King to stand by Rustin, since the charge was so obviously bogus. King hesitated. Rustin handed in his resignation from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the hope that King would reject it. Instead, King quietly accepted it, much to Rustin’s dismay. King dropped Rustin personally as well, no longer calling upon him for advice, sending the occasional bland note as a cover for his decision to cut him off.

In 1962, Rustin turned fifty, largely unknown. Of all the major civil rights leaders, Randolph was the one who had stuck by him most steadfastly. One day, as they were sitting around in Harlem, Randolph began reminiscing about the World War II era march on Washington that never took place. Rustin sensed immediately that it was time to complete that dream and organize a “mass descent” on the nation’s capital. The marches and protests across the South had begun to shake the foundations of the old order, Rustin believed. The election of John F. Kennedy made Washington once again relevant. It was time to force federal action through mass confrontation.

At first, the major civil rights organizations such as the Urban League and the NAACP were skeptical or completely hostile. They did not want to offend legislators or members of the administration. A confrontational march might reduce their access to those in power and lessen their ability to exercise influence from the inside. In addition, there had long been a basic difference of outlook within the civil rights movements that involved not just a debate about strategy but also a deep difference of opinion about morality and human nature.

As David L. Chappell argues in his book A Stone of Hope, there were really two civil rights movements. The first was northern and highly educated. People in this group tended to have an optimistic view of history and human nature. Without thinking much about it, they perceived the arc of history as a gradual ascent, a steady accumulation of more scientific and psychological knowledge, a steady achievement of greater prosperity, a steady growth of progressive legislation, and a gentle rise from barbarism to decency.

They believed that racism was such a clear violation of America’s founding documents that the main job for the civil rights activist was to appeal to reason and the better angels of people’s nature. As education levels increased, as consciousness was raised, as prosperity and economic opportunity spread, then more and more people would gradually see that racism was wrong, that segregation was unjust, and they would rise to combat it. Education, prosperity, and social justice would rise together. All good things are compatible and mutually reinforcing.

People in this camp tended to believe in conversation over confrontation, consensus over aggression, and civility over political force.

There was a second camp, Chappell argues, that emerged from the biblical prophetic tradition. Its leaders, including King and Rustin, cited Jeremiah and Job. In this world, they argued, the just suffer while the unjust prosper. Being right does not necessarily lead to being victorious. Man is a sinner at the core of his being. He will rationalize the injustices that benefit him. He will not give up his privileges even if you can persuade him they are unjust. Even people on the righteous side of a cause can be corrupted by their own righteousness, can turn a selfless movement into an instrument to serve their own vanity. They can be corrupted by whatever power they attain and corrupted by their own powerlessness.

Evil, King declared, is “rampant” in the universe. “Only the superficial optimist who refuses to face the realities of life fails to see this patent fact.”²⁹ People in this realist camp, who were mostly southern and religious, had contempt for the northern faith in gradual natural progress. “This particular sort of optimism has been discredited by the brutal logic of events,” King continued. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency, man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism, but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.”³⁰

The optimists, members of this camp argued, practice idolatry. They worship man and not God, and when they do worship God it is a God who merely possesses human qualities in extreme form. As a result they overestimate the power of human goodwill, idealism, and compassion and their own noble intentions. They are too easy on themselves, too complacent about their own virtue, and too naïve about the resolve of their opponents.

Randolph, King, and Rustin had this more austere view of their struggle. The defenders of segregation would not lie down, and people of goodwill would not be persuaded to act if there was any risk to themselves. The civil rights activists themselves could not rely on their own goodwill or their own willpower, because very often they would end up perverting their own cause. If there was to be any progress, it was necessary not just to be engaged, one had to utterly surrender to the movement, at the cost of one’s own happiness and fulfillment and possibly life. This attitude of course fueled a fierce determination, which many of their more optimistic secular allies could not match. As Chappell put it, “Civil rights activists drew from illiberal sources to supply the determination that liberals lacked, but needed.”³¹ The biblical lens didn’t protect the realists from pain and suffering, but it explained that pain and suffering were inevitable and redemptive.

One consequence of this attitude was that the prophetic realists were much more aggressive. They took it as a matter of course that given the sinful nature of man, people could not be altered merely by education, consciousness raising, and expanded opportunity. It was wrong to put one’s faith in historical processes, human institutions, or human goodness. As Rustin put it, American blacks look “upon the middle class idea of long term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust.”³²

Instead, change comes through relentless pressure and coercion. That is to say, these biblical realists were not Tolstoyan, they were Gandhian. They did not believe in merely turning the other cheek or trying to win people over with friendship and love alone. Nonviolence furnished them with a series of tactics that allowed them to remain on permanent offense. It allowed them to stage relentless protests, marches, sit-ins, and other actions that would force their opponents to do things against their own will. Nonviolence allowed the biblical realists to aggressively expose the villainy of their foes, to make their enemies’ sins work against them as they were exposed in ever more brutal forms. They compelled their foes to commit evil deeds because they themselves were willing to absorb evil. Rustin endorsed the idea that extreme behavior was required to make the status quo crumble. He saw Jesus as “this fanatic whose insistence on love thrust at the very pillars of a stable society.”³³ Or, as Randolph put it, “I feel morally obligated to disturb and keep disturbed the conscience of Jim Crow America.”³⁴

Even in the midst of these confrontations, Randolph, Rustin, and the other civil rights activists were in their best moments aware that they were in danger of being corrupted by their own aggressive actions. In their best moments they understood that they would become guilty of self-righteousness because their cause was just; they would become guilty of smugness as their cause moved successfully forward; they would become vicious and tribal as group confronted group; they would become more dogmatic and simplistic as they used propaganda to mobilize their followers; they would become more vain as their audiences enlarged; their hearts would harden as the conflict grew more dire and their hatred for their enemies deepened; they would be compelled to make morally tainted choices as they got closer to power; the more they altered history, the more they would be infected by pride.

Rustin, who had been so undisciplined in his sexual life, saw nonviolence as a means a protester could use to discipline himself against these corruptions. Nonviolent protest in this view is different from normal protest. It demands relentless self-control. The Gandhian protester must step into race riots without ever striking out, must face danger while remaining calm and communicative, must confront with love those who deserve to be hated. This requires physical self-discipline, marching into danger slowly and deliberately, keeping one’s arms curled around one’s head as the blows rain down. It requires emotional discipline, resisting the urge to feel resentment, maintaining a spirit of malice toward none and charity toward all. It requires above all the ability to absorb suffering. As King put it, the people who had suffered for so long had to endure more suffering if they were to end their oppression: “Unearned suffering is redemptive.”³⁵

The nonviolent path is an ironic path: the weak can triumph by enduring suffering; the oppressed must not fight back if they hope to defeat their oppressor; those on the side of justice can be corrupted by their own righteousness.

This is the inverted logic of people who see around them a fallen world. The midcentury thinker most associated with this ironic logic is Reinhold Niebuhr. People like Randolph, Rustin, and King thought along Niebuhrian lines, and were influenced by him. Niebuhr argued that, beset by his own sinful nature, man is a problem to himself. Human actions take place in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension. We simply can’t understand the long chain of consequences arising from what we do, or even the origins of our own impulses. Neibuhr argued against the easy conscience of modern man, against moral complacency on every front. He reminded readers that we are never as virtuous as we think we are, and that our motives are never as pure as in our own accounting.

Even while acknowledging our own weaknesses and corruptions, Niebuhr continued, it is necessary to take aggressive action to fight evil and injustice. Along the way it is important to acknowledge that our motives are not pure and we will end up being corrupted by whatever power we manage to attain and use.

“We take and must continue to take morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization,” Niebuhr wrote in the middle of the Cold War. “We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.”³⁶

Behaving in this way, he continued, requires the innocence of a dove and the shrewdness of a serpent. The ultimate irony is that in any struggle “we could not be virtuous if we were really as innocent as we pretended to be.”³⁷ If we were truly innocent we couldn’t use power in the ways that are necessary to achieve good ends. But if you adopt a strategy based on self-doubt and self-suspicion, then you can achieve partial victories.

Culmination

At first Rustin and Randolph had trouble rallying civil rights leaders around the idea of a March on Washington. But the violent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, during the spring of 1963 changed the mood. The whole world saw the Birmingham police force setting dogs on teenage girls, unleashing water cannons, and hurling boys into walls. The images mobilized the Kennedy administration to prepare civil rights legislation, and they persuaded nearly everybody in the civil rights movement that the time was right for a mass descent on the nation’s capital.

Rustin, as the chief organizer of the march, expected to be named the official director. But at a crucial meeting, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP objected: “He’s got too many scars.” King vacillated and finally Randolph stepped in, saying he would himself serve as director of the march. This would give him the right to appoint a deputy, and he would appoint Rustin, who would be director in all but name. Wilkins was outmaneuvered.

Rustin oversaw everything from the transportation systems to the toilet facilities to the speaker lineup. To avoid confrontation with the D.C. police he organized a corps of black off-duty policemen and gave them training in nonviolence. They were to surround the marchers and prevent clashes.

Two weeks before the march, the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond went on the Senate floor and lambasted Rustin for being a sexual pervert. He introduced the Pasadena police booking slip into the Congressional Record. As John D’Emilio points out in his outstanding biography Lost Prophet, Rustin instantly and inadvertently became one of the most visible homosexuals in America.

Randolph leaped to Rustin’s defense: “I am dismayed there are in this country men who, wrapping themselves in the mantle of Christian morality, would mutilate the most elementary conceptions of human decency, privacy and humility in order to persecute other men.”³⁸ Since the march was only two weeks away, the other civil rights leaders had no choice but to defend Rustin as well. Thurmond ended up doing Rustin a great favor.

The Saturday before the march, Rustin issued a final statement that summed up his policy of tightly controlled aggression. The march, he declared, “will be orderly, but not subservient. It will be proud, but not arrogant. It will be non-violent but not timid.”³⁹ On the day, Randolph spoke first. Then John Lewis brought the gigantic crowd to full roar with a fiery, aggressive speech. Mahalia Jackson sang and King delivered his “I have a dream” speech.

He ended with the refrain from the old spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last!” Then Rustin, playing a master of ceremonies role, mounted the podium and reintroduced Randolph. Randolph led the crowd in a pledge to continue the struggle: “I pledge that I will not relax until victory is won…. I will pledge my heart and my mind and my body unequivocally and without regard to personal sacrifice, to the achievement of social peace through social justice.”

After the march, Rustin and Randolph found each other. As Rustin would later recall, “I said to him, ‘Mr. Randolph, it looks like your dream has come true.’ And when I looked into his eyes, tears were streaming down his cheeks. It is the one time I can recall that he could not hold back his feelings.”⁴⁰

In the final decades of his life, Rustin cut his own path, working hard to end apartheid in South Africa, bucking the civil rights establishment in New York City during a crucial teachers’ strike in 1968, defending the ideal of integration against more nationalist figures like Malcolm X. In those final years, he did find personal peace, in the form of a long-term relationship with a man named Walter Naegle. Rustin almost never spoke about his private life in public, but he did tell an interviewer, “The most important thing is that after many years of seeking, I’ve finally found a solid, ongoing relationship with one individual with whom I have everything in common, everything…. I spent years looking for exciting sex instead of looking for a person who was compatible.”

—

THE STORY OF A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin is the story of how flawed people wield power in a fallen world. They shared a worldview based on an awareness of both social and personal sin, the idea that human life is shot through with veins of darkness. They learned, Randolph instantly and Rustin over a lifetime, to build an inner structure to contain the chaotic impulses within. They learned that sinfulness is battled obliquely through self-giving, by directing life away from the worst tendencies. They were extremely dignified in their bearing. But this same sense made them aggressive in their outward strategy. They knew that dramatic change, when it is necessary, rarely comes through sweet suasion. Social sin requires a hammering down of the door by people who are simultaneously aware that they are unworthy to be so daring.

This is a philosophy of power, a philosophy of power for people who combine extreme conviction with extreme self-skepticism.