Bayard Rustin

This essay is part of a content series exploring the nations, stories, and themes included in the Museum’s special exhibition The Declaration’s Journey, presented by Griffin Catalyst, on view through Jan. 3, 2027. Click here for more information about the exhibition. 

The Declaration’s Journey traces the transmission of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence across centuries and continents and demonstrates the way individuals and their ideas can influence others. One such individual, featured in the exhibition, is civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.

Born in 1912, Rustin was raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he excelled both academically and as a musician; he paid his college tuition by working odd jobs, including performing music. His interest in social justice began early. In 1941, still in his twenties, Rustin joined the planning committee for a march to protest job discrimination against Black workers. After President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order banning such discrimination, the plans for the march were scrapped.

Later in 1941, Bayard Rustin joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization, as a field secretary. During his time there, he was influenced by the organization’s leader A.J. Muste, as well as Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. Shortly after India gained independence, Rustin traveled there on behalf of FOR. He met with President Jawaharlal Nehru and other Indian leaders and learned about the tactics of nonviolent resistance that had been so critical to gaining their independence. He returned home ready to put those ideas into practice.

Rustin co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) with other activists who had been involved with FOR and influenced by Gandhi's teachings. Throughout the 1940s, CORE organized peaceful demonstrations against segregation, including the “Journey of Reconciliation,” also referred to as the “First Freedom Ride” in April1947. Participants, including Rustin, challenged segregation by sitting in the white section of buses; this inspired similar demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Rustin, along with others, was arrested. In an interview with the Washington Blade in the 1980s, he recalled one of these bus rides,  where a white mother had called Rustin a slur and told the child not to touch him: “If I go and sit quietly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so innocent of race relations that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down quietly that it's going to end up saying, 'They like it back there, I've never seen anybody protest against it.' I owe it to that child that it should be educated to know that blacks do not want to sit in the back, and therefore I should get arrested, letting all these white people in the bus know that I do not accept that.” Rustin was sentenced to 30 days on a chain gang in North Carolina; his subsequent account of his time, published in New York Post, helped lead to the abolition of chain gangs.

Bayard Rustin taught what he had learned about nonviolence in India to others in the movement. Most notably, he tutored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on both the tactics and philosophy of peaceful protest. With King, he was also a critical part of the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization that was profoundly influential to the Civil Rights Movement that coordinated bus boycotts and marches, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963. Organized by Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, the March on Washington brought a quarter of a million people to Washington, D.C. to advocate for civil rights for Black Americans. At the March, King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, a moment highlighted in The Declaration’s Journey. One of the largest political rallies in American history, the March is credited with influencing the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

As an openly gay man at a time when that was not widely accepted, Bayard Rustin was kept largely behind the scenes of the Civil Rights Movement.  Rustin said that, “at a given point, there was so much pressure on Dr. King about my being gay and particularly because I would not deny it, that he set up a committee to explore whether it would be dangerous for me to continue working with him." Nevertheless, Rustin became an advocate for LGBT rights as well as Black civil rights. He insisted, "it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn't I was a part of the prejudice." Rustin died in 1984 and did not live to see the achievement of LGBT civil rights, including the protection of same-sex marriage. In November 2013, 50 years after the March on Washington, his partner Walter Naegle accepted a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rustin's behalf from President Obama.