by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The San Diego
Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) and the Peace Resource Center are
presenting a special screening of Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard
Rustin, a 2003 documentary about the
pioneering Black Queer activist who issued the original call for the 1963 March
on Washington at which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the famous “I Have a
Dream” speech. The showing will take place Tuesday, December 13, 6:30 p.m. at
the Peace Resource Center, 3850 Westgate Place in City Heights.
Rustin — whose
name, incidentally, was pronounced “BYE-ard,” not “BAY-ard” — was a pacifist in the 1940’s who went to prison rather
than serve in the U.S. military during World War II. He was also a Black
civil-rights activist and a Gay man who lived long enough to come out as such
and even make a statement shortly before the end of his life in 1987 that
whereas in the 1960’s Blacks had been the cutting edge of the civil rights
movement, by the 1980’s it was Queers who had taken that role. Rustin was a
counselor to Dr. Martin Luther King, though the two men broke not only over
Rustin’s sexual orientation and King’s fear that it would taint the movement
but also because they took opposite positions on the war in Viet Nam.
Though a woman
who knew Rustin attended a screening of the film at the San Diego Public
Library in 2003 and said she had marched with him in 1961 in New York City on
the first-ever protest in the U.S. against the Viet Nam war, the man who had
gone to prison rather than fight in World War II refused to oppose the Viet Nam
war in the late 1960’s. The film explains Rustin’s tacit support of the war as
partly due to his friendship with President Lyndon Johnson and partly because
he believed that a stand on the war would only detract from the civil rights
issue — quite the opposite of Martin Luther King’s position, which was that
opposing the war was just as much a part of his moral witness as opposing the
segregation and oppression of his own people, and was therefore an issue on
which he could not compromise.
Thanks largely
due to his otherwise inexplicable refusal to come out against the war in Viet
Nam, in the late 1960’s Rustin became the living symbol of Black
accommodationism and the man the militant “Black Power” activists most loved to
hate. The film included clips from two filmed debates Rustin had with Black
Power leaders, one with Malcolm X in 1962 and one with Stokely Carmichael in
1967. In the latter, Rustin criticized the Black Power movement for calling on
Blacks to carry guns, arguing that it was insane for people to arm themselves
with rifles and knives and think that was
going to defend them against a government armed with bazookas and tanks.
Carmichael in turn attacked Rustin for being willing to work within the
Democratic Party, arguing that America’s two major parties were both “evil” and
Blacks needed to stop making “lesser of two evils” choices at the ballot box.
It’s a debate as old as two-party politics in America; it goes at least as far
back as the formation of the Free Soil Party in the 1840’s by abolitionists who
weren’t willing, as people like Abraham Lincoln were, to align with the Whig
Party as the lesser of two evils on slavery.
A peculiar
aspect of Rustin’s career was his arrest in 1953 in Pasadena for having sex
with two other men in a parked car — which was used against him for the rest of
his life (the film includes a 1963 clip of racist Senator Strom Thurmond using
it to denounce Rustin as a “pervert”) and which no doubt contributed to his
disinclination to stand in the limelight and his withdrawals from the King
circle and other positions where he thought the presence of a convicted sex
criminal would detract from the civil rights issue. The film also covers his
career as a singer (he sang backup vocals on Josh White’s 1940 album Chain
Gang) and his late-in-life relationship
with a white man one-third his age.
For more
information on the screening, please call the Peace Resource Center at (619)
263-9301 or visit the S.A.M.E. Web site at www.samealliance.com
