Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

Bayard Rustin is one of the most important figures in the history of the American civil rights movement. Before Martin Luther King, before Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working to bring the cause to the forefront of America's consciousness. A teacher to King, an international apostle of peace, and the organizer of the famous 1963 March on Washington, he brought Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence to America and helped launch the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has been largely erased by history, in part because he was a gay African American man. In Lost Prophet, acclaimed historian John D'Emilio tells the full and remarkable story of Rustin's intertwined lives: his pioneering and public person and his oblique and stigmatized private self. Based on more than a decade of archival research and interviews with dozens of surviving friends and colleagues of Rustin's, Lost Prophet is a triumph. Rustin emerges as a hero of the black freedom struggle and a singularly important figure in the lost gay history of the mid-twentieth century. John D'Emilio's compelling narrative rescues a forgotten figure and brings alive a time of great hope and great tragedy in the not-so-distant past.

Widely acclaimed as a founding father of modern black protest, Rustin reached international notoriety in 1963 as the openly gay organizer of the March on Washington. Long before the March on Washington, Rustin's leadership placed him at the vanguard of social protest. His gay identity, however, became a point of contention with the movement, with the controversy embroiling even King himself. Time on Two Crosses offers an insider's view of many of the defining political moments of our time. From Gandhi's impact on African Americans, white supremacists in Congress, and the assassination of Malcolm X to Rustin's never-before-published essays on Louis Farrakhan, affirmative action, and the call for gay rights, Time on Two Crosses chronicles five decades of Rustin's commitment to justice and equality through his letters, speeches and interviews.

"These letters—poetic, incisive, passionate, and above all political in the broadest meaning of the word—span almost four decades not only of Bayard Rustin's life but of the emotional and spiritual life of America." (Review from Michael Bronski) In I Must Resist we have Rustin in his own words in a collection of over 150 of his eloquent, impassioned letters; his correspondents include the major progressives of his day—including Eleanor Holmes Norton, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. The book is divided into 20 chapters, the editor Michael G. Long made these distinctions, each covering a span of time and covering the entirety of Rustin's adult life.

A compilation of Bayard Rustin's Radner lectures given at Columbia University in 1974, Strategies for Freedom is Rustin's summary of the history of the civil rights movement until 1976, his assessment of the core beliefs of the organizing of the late 1950's and early 1960's, and his condemnation of Black separatist movements that arose in the late 1960's which moved away from non-violence as a core principle.