What Bayard Rustin means for American democracy

Gays Are the New Niggers: 40 years after the Stonewall riots, what Bayard Rustin means for American democracy Those who declare “Gay is the New Black” want to link the gay rights movement to the civil rights movement. Yet the slogan is full of internal contradictions and historical incongruities. Comparing the experiences of black folks and gay folks in the U.S. has outraged intellectuals, religious leaders, and politicians inside the black community. It has outraged, for instance, Rev. Irene Monroe. She identifies three cardinal sins of whiteness plaguing the gay-marriage movement:

1. exploiting black suffering and experiences to legitimate its own;
2. rallying against heterosexist oppression while remaining silent on its own white-skin privilege;
3. appropriating the content of the black civil rights movement but discarding the historical context.

Rev. Monroe is right: If there is to be a black-and-gay coalition, it will have to listen to her. We can start to listen by remembering Bayard Rustin. Rustin, an openly gay black man, helped introduce Gandhian nonviolence to the African American civil rights movement. His pacifism landed him in jail for refusing to participate in World War II. He was part of first Freedom Rides in 1947, helped to found the Congress for Racial Equality, and was National Field Sercetary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Rustin was among the most famous advocates of Gandhian nonviolence in the 1930s and 1940s. Gandhi himself once summoned him to a conference in India. Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he served as key advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., giving him the chance to train Dr. King in the philosophy of nonviolence as a way of life. However, Rustin’s sexuality was not without controversy or consequence in the civil rights movement. Under the cover of night in the trunk of a car, he was unceremoniously evacuated from Montgomery because a reporter threatened to expose Rustin’s sexuality and past communist affiliation in the press. Worried that his presence could hurt the bus boycott, King and Rustin agreed that it would be best if Rustin left town. Still, Rustin continued to advise King. He designed the organizational structure of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was the main fundraiser for the organization in its early stages. When King decided to call a march on the 1960 Democratic Convention, the party dispatched Congressman Adam Clayton Powell to stop it. Powell manufactured a sexual relationship between King and Rustin. Telling King that he was going to leak the story to the press if King did not back down from his plans to march, King relented and Rustin resigned. Nevertheless, as a seasoned veteran in nonviolent philosophy and direct action, Rustin was tapped to plan the 1963 march on Washington, D.C. In an interview, noted labor leader and Executive Director of the march A. Philip Randolph called Rustin “Mr.-March-on-Washington.” In the weeks before, however, Senator Strom Thurmond took the Senate floor and denounced Rustin’s leadership and, with it, the civil rights movement as a whole. It was a 45-minute speech. Presenting pages upon pages about Rustin’s activism and his arrest for having sex with two men in car in a California park, he called Rustin a “communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual.” As news of Rustin’s arrests continued to surface, particularly the arrest for “moral indecency,” there were calls for him to withdraw from planning the march. Both in the press and behind closed doors, Randolph, King, and the other civil rights leaders expressed their utmost confidence in Rustin, and he continued to lead the day-to-day organizing. The platform that launched Dr. Martin Luther King and the modern civil rights movement on the world stage was organized by an openly gay black man. The march created the context for the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later. Bayard Rustin’s authority to speak on the convergence of gay rights and civil rights is indisputable. He helped build the civil rights movement and suffered for being an openly gay black man at the same time. Rustin’s 1986 speech, “The New Niggers are Gays” insists on the connection between gay rights and civil rights. Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new “niggers” are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change—. The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people. To say that gays are the new niggers is not to say that black oppression has disappeared. To claim that black folks are fully enfranchised and free is simply not true. Stark racial and economic disparities continue to exist in the United States, regardless of who is in the White House. Legislative onslaughts and public disdain against queer folks invites them into the community of niggers. By carrying the racial epithet beyond race, Rustin insists that blacks and queers share a common quest to save democracy. He calls us to look critically at the ways in which racism and heterosexism are two heads on the same devil. In the essay “From Montgomery to Stonewall,” Rustin continues to unearth the common roots of civil rights and gay rights. The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York was raided frequently by the New York City police for being a gay bar. But on June 28, 1969, a “routine” raid turned into a riot. Black, brown, and white folks — lesbian, gay, queer, and in drag — began to fight back against the systematic persecution, mocking and attacking the police. Supporters of the Stonewall patrons gathered outside in solidarity. News reports and eyewitness accounts of the Stonewall riots say that folks in the streets began to sing, “We shall overcome!” Soon after, all hell broke loose. Police, Stonewall patrons, and their supporters engaged in a brawl. That night, black and white queer folks were beaten together as niggers. Reality and metaphor should not be lost to one another. For Rustin, the events at Stonewall are part of a protest tradition in line with women’s rights, civil rights, and anti-war demonstrations. That was the beginning of an extraordinary revolution, similar to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in that is was not expected that anything extraordinary would occur. As in the case of the women who left the Russian factory, and in the case of Rosa Parks who sat down in the white part of the bus, something began to happen, people began to protest. They began to fight for the right to live in dignity, the right essentially to be one’s self in every respect, and the right to be protected under law. In other words, people began to fight for their human rights. Gay people must continue this protest. For oppressed communities around the world, the civil rights movement is a model for their unique and particular struggles. Although geography, pigmentation, class, religion, and capacity to self-organize may differ, they hold in common the structures of relegation and resistance. The police of conservative, racist, and homophobic forces wield literal and legislative billy clubs. Queering Democracy The absence of the word “slavery” in the Constitution is telling. 20% of would-be citizens were not worthy of naming in the most sacred text of American civil religion. For another two centuries, this silencing of black human beings would continue to haunt American democracy. Six hundred thousand people died in war as the nation came to grips with its silence. It would take almost another century for the nation to hear the voices of the descendants of slaves in their cry for full enfranchisement. W. E. B. DuBois noted that “the gift of black folks” to the democracy is that they appropriated the very terms of American democracy’s sacred texts. The original intent of the Founding Fathers was not the enfranchisement or acknowledgement of the full humanity of black people, but black people called them to task for their words. The black freedom struggle understood the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as both the standard of and aspiration to what it means to be fully human on American soil. While their experiences where not the same as white Anglo-Saxons, who were rejecting over-criminalization, religious intolerance, and British taxation without representation, African Americans shared in their desire to be free and full citizens in the new democracy. The “niggers” took the language of democracy as the terms of their liberation. The evangelization of slaves was intended to make slaves docile and obedient, but African Americans learned to read the Bible with a hermeneutic of suspicion. Whites, after all, had used scripture to justify slavery. The story of the cursing of Ham by Noah and Saint Paul’s command that “slaves be obedient to your masters” were staples in the slave master’s theology. The slaves responded by seeing themselves as the children of Israel who needed to be delivered from bondage. They learned to appropriate the experience of Biblical Jews as America had appropriated the vision of itself as the New Zion. Their spirituals are rich religious texts, describing a liberating theology. “Over my head I hear freedom in the air — there must be a God somewhere,” they sang, and: Oh Freedom Oh Freedom Oh Freedom over me Before I be slave I’ll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free Bayard Rustin, a Quaker, recorded albums of songs like these to raise money for the civil rights movement and other social justice causes. He used the spirituals to hold the anti-democratic demons at bay. The Bible and Christianity had been intended to sanction their oppression and pacify them in the midst of the oppression. But black folks appropriated the biblical narrative and the sacred civic texts to affirm the right to be free. They read the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other. On a cross constructed with these two existential beams, the bodies of black people and their allies hung for the remission of the founders’ original sin. The problems of appropriation and religion have been negotiated by black folks for four centuries in the United States. That’s why other oppressed groups — in this case, queers — come to see black folks as models for what it means to be a self-actualized people confronting discrimination. The U.S. civil rights movement set the stage for the queer rights movement because of its power and grace when confronted with the ugliness of prejudice, hatred, and violence. In a word, black folks queered democracy. Black and queer folk share in existential themes of oppression. In its plainest sense, “queer” means to be at odds with the prevailing society. Because of these shared themes of oppression, being black is queer and being queer is black. Naming (faggot and nigger), vigilante violence/hate crimes (Mathew Shephard and Emmitt Till), legislative disenfranchisement (Plessey vs. Ferguson and Prop. 8), hyper-sexualized stereotypes, and housing and employment discrimination have sought to undermine the humanity of both groups. And, for both, much of it has been done and justified by religion. No, the historical and contemporary experiences of black and queer folks not are the same. They are clearly different — but not dissimilar. Their similarity carries a moral obligation to compare struggles and stories, to forge an existential identification between the oppressed groups. Oppressive forces across time and space, and across race and class, share in the same brutal methods. In the past, black folks were the chief victims of moral outrage and political warfare; queer folks are today. Gay folks can learn from the hermeneutic of suspicion that black folks applied to the Bible and the Constitution. If queer folks come to read the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other, they too begin to reclaim the liberating promise of these texts. Rustin, however, places the burden of proof on the queer community. There are responsibilities that come to those who claim to be oppressed. Indifference to the suffering of other human beings cannot be a part of one’s own struggle, he admonishes. The queer community cannot work for justice for only itself. It must, self-critically, reject all forms of prejudice. He writes that a society that denies school children food will never grant gay rights. By the same logic, a society that rejects universal health, embraces pre-emptive war, and houses more black men in prison than in college will never grant queer folks their God-given rights or their rights as democratic citizens. To share in the hateful legacy of “nigger” requires generosity on the part of black people. We must be freely giving of the gift we have given democracy for over four centuries. In same manner that Rustin and others marched and were beaten for everybody’s democracy, we must continue to extend the hand of freedom and the history of hope to the queer community. We have so much to teach: how to be persecuted but not forsake our democratic values, how to be cast down but not out, and how to meet legislative setbacks with existential victories? The black and queer communities face these questions together after the passage of California’s Proposition 8 last year and after the renewal of the Defense of Marriage Act on the watch of the first African-American president. A dreadful term with so much ugly history is the very window through which we can begin to see each other’s humanity. All niggers — historical and contemporary — must join forces to achieve freedom for all. Rustin places a moral challenge on those on those in the struggle: “Every indifference to prejudice is suicide because, if I don’t fight all bigotry, bigotry itself will be strengthened and, sooner or later, it will return on me.” Ed. Note: This essay was originally published online at KillingtheBuddha.com. Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou is Senior Minister of Lemuel Haynes Congregational Church (UCC) in South Jamaica Queens, New York. He is a third-generation ordained Elder in the Church of God in Christ. Rev. Sekou holds fellowships with the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Institute for Policy Studies. His forthcoming book is Gods, Gays, and Guns: Religion and the Future of Democracy.