A Born Organizer

 “Rustin” directed by George Wolfe, 2023

If you are unfamiliar with the story of Bayard Rustin, this movie will give you a glimpse into his life.  It concentrates on the organizing for the August 1963 March For Jobs and Freedom in D.C. where Martin Luther King made his famous speech.  It is also aimed at an Oscar nomination, especially for the screen-eating lead actor Colman Domingo. 

The real Rustin, tooth gap and all.

Rustin was a civil rights and peace activist who was in a Communist youth group for 5 years, then quit as a pacifist when WWII started.  He was trained by the American Friends Service Committee, a pacifist group, then a member of the Quakers, then became an organizer for the Socialist Party, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the civil rights organization CORE, the War Resistor’s League and King’s SCLC before he began organizing this march, especially after convincing King to speak.     

The film highlights the internal conflicts and issues between Rustin and his Socialist Party labor ally A. Phillip Randolph versus conservative leaders like the NAACP’s ‘uncle Tom’ Roy Wilkins and bombastic New York politician Adam Clayton Powell. Wilkins is unfortunately played by a grey-haired Chris Rock, one of the most idiotic casting decisions ever. An earlier march was threatened in 1941 when Randolph and Rustin were attempting to get FDR to integrate the armed forces.  They succeeded without a march.

Rustin’s homosexuality was one issue within ‘the movement,’ as it was for the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and racist South Carolina reactionary Strom Thurmond. Thurmond denounced Rustin as “a Communist, a draft dodger and a homosexual” in order to stop the march.  Rustin had been arrested and convicted of ‘sodomy’ in Pasadena years before. He was beaten by police for sitting in the front section of a Jim Crow bus in 1942, but not charged.  He was put on a chain gang in 1947 for violating segregated seating again, but Thurmond didn’t mention that arrest. 

Standard scenes of Rustin’s gay dalliances with a black preacher and a white volunteer follow.  The key internal woman organizer of the March, Eleanor Holmes Norton, complains that no women were speaking – because all the leaders were men. At that time gay and women’s rights were seemingly too early for this movement, but King did stand up for Rustin when the pressure got hot.  What is forgotten is that a huge range of celebrities and musicians also appeared at the rally, including Mahalia Jackson and Stevie Wonder, so it was a concert too.  Walter Reuther’s UAW came on board after an invite by the hilariously combative leader of a large New York District 65 local , Cleveland Robinson.  Robinson later founded the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. 

Rustin convinced hundreds of NYC black police not to carry guns as volunteer security for the event.  One of the best scenes is a SNCC-BPP-type activist haranguing these cops as Uncle Tom’s in order to get them to keep their anger in check.  No equivalent harassment by a white racist is shown, so this is a slam against the left.  The details of the rally were organized by a large group of multi-ethnic young people who did it down to a T: sandwiches, buses, porta-potties, security, sound systems, chairs, tables and outreach.  

The group had wanted a 2-day event, camping overnight on the National Mall in tents and then surrounding the White House, but that was scotched after Wilkins’ met with JFK.  Later in 1968 the King and SCLC-led Poor People’s Campaign did camp on the National Mall in a tent village christened Resurrection City.  After 6 weeks Washington D.C. police violently evicted the tenants and ended the occupation,  Poverty is inbuilt into the capitalist system and not reformable, so the response was different.  That event will probably not get lionized by Hollywood, even though King was one of its leaders until he was assassinated in Memphis by a police sharpshooter.

Many of the figures of the heroic period of the civil rights movement appear briefly, among them Ella Baker, John Lewis, Medgar Evers,  James Farmer, Coretta Scott King and others.  And yes, the film was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, which means it has the stamp of liberal approval. 

This was the biggest public demonstration in U.S. history up to that time, with estimates of attendance around 250,000.  Most of the attendees were darker skinned.  After the rally, JFK invited the leadership (though not Rustin) to attend a meeting at the White House.  Months later the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, a first national attempt to deal with Jim Crow outside the federal realm.  1963 was chosen as the 100^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the site of the speeches was the Lincoln Memorial.  But it was really spurred by the police and city violence in Birmingham and the lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides across the South.

At the end the most poetic scene is Rustin, after not being invited to the White House, telling the ‘leaders’ that he’d be a garbage man if that is what it took to bring freedom. They leave to hobnob with JFK and he grabs up a shoulder bag and begins picking up garbage to help clean the site along with his young volunteers. It showed the real proletarian mettle of the man.

The film illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the civil rights movement at this moment – its energy and brilliance, its mass character, its internal conservative side, its reliance on key figures in the Democratic Party and government, along with its limited 'rights' aims and mild character.  Worth watching, if only to fill in the gaps in your knowledge about what it really takes to organize a huge event.  

And sorry, if you don’t know an acronym, look it up.

P.S. - + Adolph Reed Jr on the Netflix biopic about Bayard Rustin produced by the Obamas: “It was so banal and + wrong-headed that immediately after it ended, I watched ‘The Battle of Algiers’ as a purgative.”

P.P.S. - Counterpunch's James Creegan exposes Rustin's opposition to the left in the 1960s - "But Rustin did not merely fail to speak out against the war. He was also extremely vociferous when it came to condemning the Black Power movement, anti-war mobilizations and the New Left." https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/25/the-rebel-who-came-in-from-the-cold-the-tainted-career-of-bayard-rustin/ 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The New Black (The Old Black),” “Meridian” (Walker); “Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (T. Reed); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “The Second Founding” (Foner); “Selma,” “Orders to Kill” (Pepper); “The South – Jim Crow and Its Afterlives” (A. Reed); “One Night in Miami,” “Roman J. Israel,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “Slavery By Another Name.”      

The Cultured Marxist

November 21, 2023