Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D'Emilio

Author:John D'Emilio
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-05-11T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN “Ours Is Not a World-Shaking Project” 1960-1962

DEVASTATING AS THE BREAK with King was, Rustin’s situation was very different from what he had confronted after Pasadena. This time he had a place to which he could return. To the WRL, Rustin was a treasure. Ed Gottlieb, the chair of its executive committee, told Randolph that whenever it released Rustin to work in the civil rights movement, “his absence is a real loss.” McReynolds agreed: “He was very important to us. We reaped a lot of benefits from Bayard.”1

Still, the return was very much a letdown. For all the respect that Rustin’s leadership brought to the WRL, the organization remained very small. Its annual budget in 1960 was just under $20,000. Many days the work seemed like little more than menial labor. “Bayard was right in there with me and Jim [Peck],” DiGia recalled, “stuffing envelopes and sealing them, and then we had to go up to the damn post office, two blocks away. He would say something like this: ‘Thirty years in the movement. And what am I doing? I’m carting these envelopes to the post office.’ He would joke about it, but it was true.”2

Nor did pacifism tug at Rustin’s heart or provoke his strategic imagination in the way it once had. His commitment to nonviolence remained as strong as ever. Indeed, the experience of the sit-ins confirmed it for him as the leading edge of a new social order. When he paused to assess the prospects of the Southern civil rights movement, the aspirations of his people for freedom were beginning to seem reachable. But a world without war and violence had the appearance of a utopian dream.

At the start of the 1960s, as Rustin rejoined his pacifist comrades, the peace movement in the United States faced a curious mix of opportunities and obstacles. No one questioned that the movement was experiencing a revival, that the repressive years of the early cold war were over. Though they were still the work of a few, the nonviolent direct action campaigns of the late 1950s had been dramatic and visible. On Northern campuses, young activists had formed the Student Peace Union. SANE had grown by leaps and bounds since its founding in 1957. In May 1960, it had packed Madison Square Garden with over 20,000 supporters of a nuclear test ban. Yet peace campaigners remained vulnerable. Shortly after SANE’s Madison Square Garden rally, the organization faced an attack by Thomas Dodd, an anti-Communist senator from Connecticut. Dodd claimed that Communists had infiltrated SANE and demanded that it purge itself of subversives. A panicked leadership attempted to comply, but then SANE found itself torn by bitter internal conflicts and never regained momentum. The rhetoric of the cold war still exerted enormous power.

Nor did the election of a Democrat to the White House portend better days. In the closing weeks of the 1960 campaign, Rustin had described himself and other New York pacifists as “deeply troubled to find both Nixon and Kennedy avoiding a serious debate on foreign policy.

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