Bayard Rustin, if he were still alive, would turn 100 years old on March 17. Among Martin Luther King Jr.'s inner circle during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the run-up to the March on Washington, Rustin rarely stepped into the spotlight and labored mostly behind the scenes before 1963.
In truth, Rustin, who died in 1987 at age 75, may have been the one essential ingredient in the mix that miraculously gelled in the 1960s to bring down Jim Crow. He was the civil rights movement's master strategist, a visionary with an abiding commitment to nonviolent action who created the blueprint for huge advances in the cause of racial equality.
“He was an intellectual bank that civil rights and political leaders could go to for ideas,” said Michael G. Long, editor of I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters (City Lights), scheduled to be released on the centennial of his birth.
Nonviolent protest, the mass march, coalition building, strategically placed open letters to presidents, cultivating reporters, schmoozing influential federal officials, evolving from protest to politics — all of these movement staples and more sprang from the fertile mind of Bayard Rustin.
“He had a genius for this,” said Julian Bond, a longtime Georgia legislator and chairman emeritus of the NAACP, in an interview with The Root. Bond, who wrote the foreword for the book, added, “He'd come into a situation like Montgomery saying, you need to do this, you need to do that. He'd have these suggestions that made a tremendous difference in the outcome.”