The following is a sample profile from the book Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints by Daneen Akers.

Bayard Rustin

As the sun rises on Wednesday, August 28,1963, people are gathering in Washington, D.C. They have come from all over the country to march in one of the most important protests in the history of the U.S. This is the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, drawing attention to the injustices Black Americans face at a time when much of the country is still segregated. Segregation keeps Black people in separate schools, restaurants, motels, movie theaters, and more. Black and White people even use different drinking fountains and bathrooms, with the better ones reserved for White people. A movement demanding that Black Americans be treated as equals to White Americans has been growing for more than a hundred years.

A charismatic and powerful preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of many leaders of this Civil Rights movement. Later this day, a crowd of at least 250,000 people will listen to him give a speech that will become famous as his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The March on Washington powerfully showed Congress that people wanted Civil Rights legislation. It also demonstrated that the movement was well organized. The movement, and its brilliant chief organizer, worked hard to make sure that the day’s turnout and speeches would have an impact. At the end of the day, the chief organizer of the march was deeply satisfied that the details had worked out so well. He had thought about everything from how many bathrooms they needed to provide to the signs marchers would hold. And, he had also found a large team of volunteers who stayed late into the night, picking up every piece of trash before going home.

But this man largely stayed out of the news. He was forced into the background because he was a gay man, and, being gay was something most people didn’t talk about in 1963. In fact, being openly gay was illegal then, and people who were known to be gay faced a lot of prejudice. Today, we can remember this hero that history forgot: His name was Bayard Rustin.

Bayard was born in 1912 in Pennsylvania and raised by his Quaker grandparents. Quakers are a group of Christians who believe deeply in peace and justice, nonviolent methods to work for peace, and the equality of all people. Bayard gave credit to his faith for his life-long work. “My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being Black,” he said. “Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grand- parents who reared me. Those values are based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal.”

A major teaching of Quakers is pacifism, the belief that war is wrong. As a Quaker, Bayard did not believe in using violence, even in times of war. Instead, he used nonviolent ways to resist policies and laws he believed were wrong. He refused to register for the draft to become a soldier in World War II because he was a pacifist. For this, he was sent to federal prison in 1944. While in prison, he worked to organize other inmates to protest segregation rules that prohibited Black and White prisoners standing in line or eating together.

In April of 1947, not long after his release from federal prison, Bayard rode a bus through several southern states with 15 other men. They were Black men and White men traveling together, which made this trip uniquely dangerous. Their goal was to test a new law about people traveling through more than one state. The Supreme Court had just ruled that these people, called interstate passengers, did not have to obey state rules that required segregated seating. Under segregation, White people sat in the front of buses and Black people sat in the back. Bayard and his friends planned to make sure that bus drivers in the South were following the new law.

But people in Chapel Hill, North Carolina were so angry about Black men and White men sitting together on buses that Bayard was arrested along with several of his travel companions. The vehicle carrying them to await trial was followed by two cars full of angry White men, and one of Bayard’s companions was assaulted. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, the North Carolina court ruled that since they were not traveling interstate that exact day, they were not technically interstate passengers, even though their overall trip schedule was interstate. Bayard was tried and sentenced to 30 days of hard labor on a chain gang.

Bayard’s time in the chain gang was both difficult and motivating. The hot sun beat down on him, the guards were cruel, and the work exhausted him. But even in these difficult conditions, he noticed the songs the prisoners sang to keep their spirits up. Bayard loved music and had studied music in college. When he was released and home again in New York, Bayard wrote about his brutal treatment on the chain gang for a New York City-based newspaper. His report helped end the practice of chain gangs for the next 60 years. (Unfortunately, this practice is returning in some parts of the U.S.)

Bayard next traveled to India to study nonviolent resistance from Mahatmas Gandhi. Gandhi’s decades-long, nonviolent campaign opposing British rule in India had succeeded when India and Pakistan became independent. Bayard wanted to immerse himself in the principles of nonviolent resistance that had led to the overthrow of an empire. Nonviolence means more than just not using physical violence. It means taking peaceful action to bring about change, including sit-ins, marches, hunger strikes, boycotts, picketing, and more. The larger goal of nonviolent resistance is to convince the people doing harmful, racist, and violent acts that their actions are wrong. People aren’t seen as the enemy in nonviolent movements; instead, the ignorance that leads to harmful acts is the enemy.

While he was in India, Bayard came to believe even more deeply that nonviolent resistance was the only way to win true equality for Black Americans and to win over the hearts and minds of the majority of White Americans. He believed that people who cared about changing unjust systems needed to become troublemakers for the higher good. “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers,” he said. “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies. And we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”

Once he got back to the U.S., Bayard got involved with the Civil Rights movement and its leaders, including Dr. King. In fact, Bayard convinced Dr. King that nonviolence was an ideology, or a philosophy of life, that could work for the movement. He also convinced Dr. King not to use armed bodyguards or to keep guns at his home for self-protection because the leader of a nonviolent resistance movement could not prepare to use violence while preaching nonviolence to his followers. Other leaders of the growing Civil Rights movement questioned Bayard’s role. Many of them had prejudices against gay people. But Bayard became a trusted advisor to Dr. King, both for his practical knowledge of nonviolent techniques and his magnificent organizing skills. The March on Washington, which Bayard planned in only eight weeks, was a brilliant culmination of his decades of non- violent resistance work on behalf of racial reconciliation and equality.

Bayard loved all people, and while he worked for much of his life on civil rights for African-Americans, he also worked as a human rights activist in many other countries, including India, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. He cared deeply about refugees and helped bring awareness to the hardships faced by refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Haiti. And these are just a few of the many freedom and equality projects he worked on! Bayard believed that humans are all part of the same family. “We are all one,” he said. “And if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.”

Bayard Rustin died in 1987. In 2013, 50 years after the historic March on Washington, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive. Bayard’s partner of 10 years, Walter Naegle, was on hand to accept the award that honored Bayard for being one of America’s “greatest architects of social change.” Finally, history is starting to remember Bayard Rustin, who taught us how to be “angelic troublemakers” on behalf of peace, freedom, and the shared humanity of us all.

How might you be an “angelic troublemaker” in your community?

Glossary Terms

Activist
A person who works for some kind of social change, from gathering signatures to keep a local library open to marching to protest an unfair law.

Chain Gang
A group of prisoners chained together to perform physically challenging work as a form of punishment.

Christian/Christianity
A person who practices Christianity, the Abrahamic Religion based on the teachings of Jesus, a first-century Jewish teacher. While there are many different types of Christians who vary widely in belief and practice, all find the life and teachings of Jesus to be of central importance.

Civil Rights
The basic rights that every citizen has under the laws of the government.

Equality
The idea that everyone should be treated the same under the law; many social movements are about helping government systems and laws treat all people equally.

Gay
A person who can fall in love with someone of the same sex.

Ideology
The beliefs that guide an individual in their thinking about the world and how it should operate.

Nonviolence
The use of peaceful activities, not force or violence, to bring about positive change; the goal is always to help the people currently doing harmful things to see how what they are doing is wrong and change, so people are never seen as the enemy but bad, harmful ideas are the enemy.

Pacifism
The belief that committing any act of violence, including war, is never right, and that non- violent methods in the pursuit of peace should be used instead; a major belief for some religious groups such as Quakers.

Picketing
A form of protest in which people gather, often holding signs with messages about their concerns, to draw attention to a cause or an injustice.

Prejudice
Judging a person negatively without knowing anything about them except that they belong to a particular group of people (such as an ethnic group or religion).

Quaker
A member of The Religious Society of Friends, a movement within Christianity that was founded in 1650 and whose values include peace, integrity, and community; known for being Abolitionists, key members of the Underground Railroad were Quakers.

Segregation (racial)
Separating people based on race, with lesser rights and privileges for some people; many countries have had race-based segregation. In the U.S., racial segregation was legal until 1964 with non-White people having much less access to public spaces, education, land ownership, public office, and legal rights. The many effects of segregation are still felt today.