Celebrating labor leaders during Black History Month (part 2)
This Black History Month, UFCW 227 wants to honor a very important contributor to the Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Rights movement, Bayard Rustin. Known for work in the Civil Rights movement, Bayard Rustin also served the trade union and civil rights movements as a brilliant theorist, tactician and organizer. Despite his accolades, Rustin was arrested and convicted as a sex offender in 1953 due to California laws that targeted LGBTQ people. This unjust and biased conviction was recently pardoned by Governor Newsom, the current governor of California. Now more than ever, it is important to tell the story of this gay, black, working class man who broke many barriers.
Born in West Chester, Pa., on March 17, 1912, Rustin was raised in a close-knit African American household by his maternal grandparents, Janifer Rustin, a caterer, and Julia Davis Rustin, a nurse and charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The young Rustin excelled in academics, music and sports at the integrated West Chester Senior High School and was elected class valedictorian his senior year.
After high school and college, Rustin decided to dedicate himself to the cause of peace and civil rights. After brief stints volunteering with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker pacifist group, he moved to New York City in 1938 where he joined the Young Communist League, which he broke from in 1941.
In 1947, Rustin participated in the first Freedom Ride across the South, known as the “Journey of Reconciliation” to protest the segregation of interstate bus travel. In Chapel Hill, N.C., local authorities charged Rustin and three white protesters with violating the state's segregation laws. Convicted, they were sentenced to 30 days of hard labor on a chain gang. Rustin's description of his ordeal in the New York Post sparked prison reform in the state and led to abolition of the convict labor system there.
After the 1947 Freedom Rides, A. Philip Randolph asked Rustin to direct his Committee Against Discrimination in the Armed Forces, which helped convince President Truman to desegregate the armed forces in 1948. Rustin traveled to Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, advising leaders on their planned nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns for liberation and later helped organize the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's first annual protest march in England.
Rustin's most significant contributions would occur in the civil rights arena, however, where he served as the chief tactician of the movement. In 1955, Rustin worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to organize the successful boycott of the segregated local bus system in Montgomery, Ala., and for the next five years he remained King's special assistant and close adviser. In 1957 he helped create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In 1955, the American Federation of Labor merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the desegregated AFL-CIO with labor leader A. Philip Randolph as its vice president. In 1963, Randolph asked Rustin to help him organize a massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to mark the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Randolph appointed Rustin the chief organizer of the march and it was an inspired choice. The gathering is most often remembered as the setting for King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. But it also helped secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and the Voting Rights Act of 1964.
In 1965, with a founding grant from the AFL-CIO, Rustin launched the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) to forge an interracial coalition that would promote racial justice and secure jobs and freedom for all Americans. He served as APRI's executive director from 1965 until 1972 and as its honorary president until his death in 1987. Under Rustin's leadership, APRI announced a "Freedom Budget" that proposed to eliminate poverty in 10 years, conducted a nationwide voter registration campaign and ran a successful program to prepare people of color for apprenticeships in the building trades.
In July 1987, Rustin became ill after returning from a mission to Haiti, where he had studied the prospects for democratic elections. Suffering from a perforated appendix that was tragically misdiagnosed, Rustin died a month later. He was 75. UFCW 227 members continue to honor the legacy of Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph by providing rides to the polls every Election Day in partnership with the A. Philip Randolph Institute chapter in Louisville.
#BlackHistoryMonth
