BAYARD RUSTIN was born in 1913 in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, and the College of the City of New York. He spent a total of three years at Wilberforce and Cheyney; four more at CCNY. He has no degree.

In a friendly biographical article ("The Lone Wolf of Civil Rights," Saturday Evening Post, July 11, 1964), Martin Mayer described Rustin’s experiences at CCNY: "...Rustin wandered into the Communist Party, and when he came to New York in 1938, it was as an organizer for the Young Communist League. He enrolled at City College [CCNY] ,where for three years ‘I did just enough work to stay matriculated’; his real job was recruiting evening-school students for the [Communist] party .. . . Those first years in New York Rustin gave most of his earnings to the [Communist] party . . . . Hatred for the social system that creates [sic] Haslems kept Rustin in the Communist Party through the Trotsky trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact, which shook out much of the membership. What drove him away was the event that made Communism respectable [sic] for other Americans, the German attack on Russia in 1941."

Mayer quoted Rustin on this alleged break: "I was brought up a Quaker, you know, by my grandmother, and the Communists had become the great peace party. I was working on the campaign against segregation in the armed forces, and the Communists were all for it. Then Hitler attacked, and they became a war party. The line was, ‘Everybody in the anned forces. People’s war. Second front. No domestic issues; forget about discrimination in the Army.’"

After the alleged break with the Communist Party, Rustin sought another job through the good offices of the late Abraham J. Muste. (Muste had long been an influential and inveterate supporter of Communist fronts, projects, and causes. At one time, he had been the National Chairman of the now-defunct Workers Party, a Communist party. Muste, however, found that he could serve the Communists quite effectively by using a "pacifist" gimmick, and, under the banners of "peace" and "non-violence," he acquired a reputation for respectability among those too stupid or too unwilling to see through his hoax. The Conununists, however, never ceased to regard Muste as one of their own. In 1957, when they held their 16th National Convention, the Communists hand-picked Muste to be present as an "impartial observer" and Muste rewarded his comrades by issuing a flattering report of the proceedings. In 1966, Muste was still so committed to his comrades that he endorsed the congressional candidacy of Communist Herbert Aptheker — a fact widely publicized in the Communist press.)

At the time Rustin approached Muste, the latter was the Executive Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The FOR was one of the oldest and certainly the largest leftwing, pacifist group in the United States and its members were urged to join "political movements which aim at the replacement of private

capitalism by a system of collective ownership" — which could be reasonably interpreted as a recruiting call for the Socialist and Communist Parties. Muste gave Rustin a job as Race Relations Director for FOR. Then Muste moved Rustin into the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a demonstrative group of racial agitators which was organized under the auspices of FOR. Rustin became the organizer of CORE’s New York branch, but he soon came to grief as a conscientious objector. Not only was he a "conshie" but he refused to report for "work of national importance" as required by the Selective Service law and he served twenty-eight months in prison.

After World War II, Rustin busied himself in racial agitation. In 1947, he organized the first so-called Freedom Ride through the South. The ostensible purpose was to test compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1946 ban on segregation in interstate travel. For his efforts, Rustin was arrested eighteen times on what he called the Journey of Reconciliation. In that same year, he traveled to India, allegedly to study the Gandhian tactics of nonviolence for national independence. And he prolonged this trip by going to Africa where he met with "nationalist" agitators. In 1948 and 1949, he was arrested several times and he served at least two short jail sentences in New York City and Washington, D.C. in connection with his racial-pacifist demonstrations.

In 1952, Rustin became Executive Secretary of the War Resisters League —a position he still maintains. (The WRL was organized in 1923, mainly through the efforts of World War I conscientious’ objectors. The WRL is affiliated with the War Resisters International which is aetive in more than sixty countries. The WRL claims its inspiration is drawn from

"the Judeo-Christian sense of justice from the anarchist and socialist res~ tance to human exploitation, fro Gandhian nonviolence, from the man American efforts for a better human community [i.e. various leftwing, pac fist and racial organizations]?’

While on a lecture tour in 1953, Rug-tin was arrested by Pasadena, Califor

police for vagrancy and lewdness. He. pleaded guilty to a charge of sex perversion and was sentenced to sixty days in jail. In that same year, Rustin traveled to South Africa and did some racial agitating there.

In 1955, Rustin began a five-year period as a secretary to Martin Luther ~ King Jr. and he helped to organize King’s

Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin continued to hold his position as Executive Secretary to the War Resisters League.

While in the service of King, Rustin, in 1957, attended the 16th National Convention of the Communist Party as an "impartial observer" in the company of his old benefactor Abraham J. Muste. (At that time, Rustin was also a member of the American Forum for Socialist Education, which — in 1957 — was called a Communist front by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.)

In 1958, Rustin organized M.L. King’s march on Washington which the Communists, in The Worker, boasted was one of their projects. Also, in 1958, Rustifl organized a "peace march" to the Soviet Union, under the sponsorship of the leftwing, pacifist Nonviolent Action Cofll mittee against Nuclear Weapons. In Connection with this spectacle, Rustin olganized the Aldermaston Ban~the~BOmb protest in Britain. In 1960, he led a group of his soul-mates in a march aCross the Sahara Desert in a vain attempt to halt the first French nuclear-test explosion.

His flair for international activity has been further demonstrated by his establishment of a Center for Nonviolence in Tanganylka. On another occasion he apologized to the Japanese people for the continuance of United States atomic tests. He has worked with the leftwing, pacifist World Peace Brigade and has been active in the Medical Aid to [Castro’s] Cuba Committee.

Perhaps Rustin’s most spectacular achievement was his direction of the 1963 March on Washington. He was assigned to this task by A. Philip Randolph, a veteran fellow traveler and racial agitator. The March was an effective pressure tactic upon the Congress and the Administration for passage of so-called civil rights legislation. In 1963, Rustin also found time to lead the first school boycott in New York City and he opened up a New York office of the radical leftist Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His activities in 1963 gave Rustin unprecedented national publicity. His past was raked over and he was subjected to some criticism in the press and in Congress. But Rustin defended his pacifist activities as a natural consequence of his earlier Quaker environment. He denied — not under oath —that he had been a member of the Communist Party. As for judgment of his arrest and conviction for perversion, Rustin said: "This must be done by my peers who as you know are the Christian ministers of the Negro communities and the civil rights leaders. They have the responsibility for the moral and Christian leadership of the Negro people." Two of Rustin’s peers — M.L. King and A. Philip Randolph — rushed to his defense, and since that time Rustin’s reputation has been more or less sacrosanct from criticism. In 1964, when Rustin attended a private cocktail party given by the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the UN, Nikolai Federenko, there was scarcely a flurry of criticism. And Rustin blandly explained that he had been invited to the Soviet Union’s UN Mission because of his pad-fist activities in the Committee for Nonviolent Action and his concern and preoccupation with artistic freedom in the Soviet Union.

In the past few years, Rustin has been in great demand as a lecturer. His general theme is to call for a "social and political revolution" in the United States. He has spoken at such campuses as Harvard University and Mt. Mercy College in Pittsburgh. At Stanford University he lectured to two hundred and fifty educators and city officials who were attending a conference on urban school problems. There he offered one of his favorite solutions — those who attend school should not oniy have tuition, books, and incidental expenses paid for by the government but should also be given a salary while in school. On several occasions, he has called for a nation-wide minimum wage scale of two dollars an hour.

Before two thousand at a convention of the American Institute of Planners in Washington, D.C., Rustin called for a party of the left which would be a coalition of labor, civil rights and other groups within the Democratic Party.

It would be futile for Rustin to deny that he is at least a Socialist. In 1964, he solicited funds for the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. In that same year, the LID honored him by reprint-leg, as the first in a series of occasional papers, an article Rustin had written for Contemporary magazine. He has served on the national Board of Directors for the socialist Americans for Democratic Action. He has been actively involved with Liberation magazine, a Socialist publication. He has offered as a dictum:

"The great task before the Negro of the future will require him to hammer at the basic contradictions of our society and work towards its socialization."

Rustin’s pacifist activities have been further expressed in his affiliations with the Peace Information Center and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Of course, he is a vigorous critic of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War, thereby following in the footsteps of his old mentor, Muste, who twice visited Ho chi Minh on missions of "peace and sympathy." (Ho was distraught at the news of Muste’s death in 1967.) There can be no doubt that Rustin has acquired a national recognition accorded few other racial agitators. He has been called a "dynamic social reformer" (Ebony magazine), an "organizing genius" (New York Times), "enough of a realist and enough of a philosopher to fill the bill for the Negroes" (columnist Mary McGrory —who also described Rustin as a rangy, handsome, graying 53-year-old exfootball player), "the most electric man in the civil rights movement" (Boston Herald), "character integrity, and extraordinary ability. . . dedication to high human ideals" (A. Philip Randolph), "brilliant, efficient and dedicated organizer and one of the best and most persuasive interpreters of nonviolence" (M.L. King Jr.).

In his deliberately cultivated and affected British accent, Rustin calls himself a political actionist and a lonely genius who believes "in social dislocation and creative trouble." He is obviously not too happy being an American: "I tell you, brother, I fought it for years, against being American — in my speech, my manner, everything. . . It’s a hard thing for a Negro to accept, being American, but you can’t escape it." Rustin’s fight against being American is not over.