The Civil Rights Identity of Bayard Rustin
![handle is hein.journals/tlr82 and id is 1149 raw text is: Texas Law Review
Volume 82, Number 5, April 2004
Articles
The Civil Rights Identity of Bayard Rustin
Devon W. Carbado* and Donald Weise**
Introduction
Bayard Rustin was the consummate civil rights strategist and
humanitarian.' Indeed, he shaped the course of social protest for some thirty
years.2 First as political adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. and later as leader
of the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin influenced the black protest
agenda in ways that few activists had before him or would even after his
death.3 For example, Rustin helped to integrate nonviolent direct action into
the civil rights movement, and if he were remembered for nothing more than
this, his reputation would be enshrined in African-American protest and legal
history.4 But he was also well-placed among the powerbrokers of organized
* Professor of Law and Director of the Critical Race Studies Concentration, UCLA School of
Law, Los Angeles, California.
Research Fellow and Chief Archivist, Huey P. Newton Foundation, Oakland, California. For
comments on or conversations about this Article, we thank David Garrow, Catherine McKinley,
Mitu Gulati, John D'Emilio, Laura Gomez, Mariah Wilkins, George Chauncey, Leti Volpp, Randall
Kennedy, and Evelyn White. UCLA Law School's Hugh and Hazel Darling Law Library and, in
particular, Charles D'Itri and Jonathan Phillips, provided invaluable research and editorial
assistance. We also thank the board and staff of the Texas Law Review for their careful editing.
1. See, e.g., JERVIS ANDERSON, BAYARD RUSTIN: TROUBLES I'VE SEEN 357 (1997) (quoting
Vernon Jordan: [Rustin] was the consummate adviser to the entire civil rights leadership.... He
was chairman of the ideas committee for us all.... He was our intellectual bank, where we all had
unlimited accounts.); Eric Pace, Bayard Rustin Is Dead at 75; Pacifist and a Rights Activist, N.Y.
TIMES, Aug. 25, 1987, at Al (quoting Roy Innis: [Rustin] influenced all of the young leaders in the
civil rights movement, even those of us who did not agree with him ideologically.).
2. See Pace, supra note 1; Stephanie Harrington, Bayard's Children: The Prodigal Sons: Will
They Come Home?, VILLAGE VOICE (New York), Oct. 13, 1966, at 1 (identifying civil rights
leaders Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, and Courtland Cox as Bayard's
children, politically speaking, and dubbing Rustin the nation's top civil rights strategist).
3. See, e.g., BAYARD RUSTtN, THE REMINISCENCES OF BAYARD RUSTIN 4-139 to 4-140 (Ed
Edwin & Walter Naegle eds., 1988) [hereinafter ROBR] (recounting how Rustin and Martin Luther
King, Jr. repeatedly discussed nonviolence and how these discussions influenced King).
4. A full ten years before the 1963 March on Washington for which Rustin is well known,
Oxford University Press inquired whether Rustin was interested in writing a memoir. Letter from
Carroll G. Bowen, Assistant Editor, Oxford Univ. Press, to Bayard Rustin (Dec. 9, 1953), in THE](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/tlr82&div=39&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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