Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio, Free Press, 564 pages, $35
AS the civil-rights movement of the ’60s recedes into distant memory, historical accounts of that landmark struggle tend to focus on such iconic figures as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. That’s left a lot of key figures increasingly consigned to footnotes.
Perhaps the most important civil-rights leader in danger of being forgotten is Bayard Rustin, the organizational genius of that turbulent conflict. Thankfully, John D’Emilio has remedied that with his excellent biography, a recent finalist for the National Book Award, aptly entitled “Lost Prophet.”
Rustin is best remembered, when remembered at all, as the man who put together the landmark 1963 March on Washington, at which King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. But he was so much more, and D’Emilio finally makes the case for according him the recognition he was long denied.
Part of the reason for Rustin’s relative anonymity is that he was deliberately kept on the public sidelines for fear he’d prove an embarrassment, despite his tactical brilliance. He was a onetime Communist, a committed pacifist who went to jail rather than be drafted during World War II and a homosexual who scandalized the movement when he was arrested in 1953 on public lewdness charges.
Yet people like King, in particular, found it impossible to ignore Rustin. As D’Emilio notes, this lifelong radical, “more than anyone else . . . brought the message and method of Gandhi to the United States.” In the process, “he presided over the transformation of direct action tactics from the cherished possession of a few initiates to its embrace by millions of Americans.”
One of the fascinating aspects of this book is its illuminating detail on the many bitter rivalries within the civil-rights movement that undercut the notion of a united struggle. The March on Washington, for example, nearly didn’t happen, because of initial resistance from groups like the NAACP.
Rustin also was the first to anticipate that public protest, in and of itself, could not bring about social change. So he wrote a manifesto, “From Protest to Politics,” that addressed how blacks “might move from the margins of the political system to the centers of power.”
To this end, he allied himself with the labor movement, which bankrolled him in later years. But the increasingly militant “black power” groups disowned him, suggesting this most radical of leaders “had lost his radical edge,” D’Emilio writes, when in fact they failed to appreciate the practical radicalism of his proposals.
He was marginalized further when, despite his pacifism, he refused to denounce the Vietnam War – both because it would have cost him his union funding and because he remained committed to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society domestic vision.
D’Emilio, who has written six books on gay history, focuses on Rustin’s sexuality. And, indeed, Rustin is now being rediscovered by gays as one of the earliest public figures to acknowledge his homosexuality.
“Lost Prophet” amply delivers on D’Emilio’s insistence that “a biographer could not ask for a more compelling subject than Bayard Rustin.”