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H3 Sunday, August 21, 1983 The Washington Post

Bayard Rustin

Continued from Page 7

"I believe you cannot separate what happens to blacks in America from what happens to people seeking justice all over the world," says Rustin. When he went on the "Today" show last year and discussed Afghan refugees, but not Haitians, he deflected the criticism by saying he was calling attention to Haitians through other conferences and committees. 

He hears the complaints about him. And his powerful voice rises as he protests: "Some people don't like honesty. People want you to agree with them."

Some critics, he says, "feel Rustin is running all over the place, concerned with everybody else, not us. I got that very definitely for Black Americans to Support Israel. What people forget is that when I was raising money for Dr. King, a great deal of that money came from Jewish people. They also forget that two Jewish boys, along with a black boy, were murdered in Mississippi. I can't call on other people continuously to help me and mine, unless I give indication that I am willing to help other people in trouble."

He hears and it hurts. Sometimes, he says, he cries.

"The biggest hurt is to be considered an Uncle Tom by your own people. On the door of my house, a Star of David has been printed, I have been called a Jew lover. I don't mind that. What I mind is that the people I love most would misunderstand my motives. I have been accused of getting money from Jews, have been accused of holding certain views because that's what the Jewish community wants me to hold. That hurts me."

He refuses to dwell on the past. "Somebody once asked Rembrandt what was his favorite painting and he said, 'The one I am working on now.' I don't look back. I think it is a considerable waste of energy. Then again someone asked Mr. Randolph when he was going to write his book, and he said 'I am too busy making history to write it'."

Rustin has always wanted the Great March to be the Final March.

In 1963, he was 53, working as the executive secretary of the War Resisters League, and again a close associate of Randolph. The time seemed right. 

The year before had been the most tumultuous in American streets since the Civil War. Black churches were being dynamited. A southern-dominated Congress wore blinders where civil rights were concerned. 

Gov. Ross Barnett turned away three blacks, including James Meredith, at the doors of the University of Mississippi.

In January 1963, George Wallace was inaugurated as governor of Alabama for the first time and vowed, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"

In April, King headed for the Birmingham of Bull Connor and wire services flashed photographs around the world of police dogs attacking blacks. On May 20, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Birmingham segregation unconstitutional. After much debate among the Kennedy cabinet, President Kennedy made a civil rights address on June 11. That next night, Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was gunned down in his driveway. Eight days later Kennedy sent a bill to Capitol Hill asking  for the end of segregation in interstate public accommodations.

Rustin remembers meeting earlier that year with three colleagues. Their conclusion: "We needed a great march to do two things: to close down the period of street protest, and to usher in the period of politics."

Yet it wasn't easy.

Weeks before the march, Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) spent 45 minute on the Senate floor charging that Rustin had been a member of the Communist Party and entering his police record, including his 1953 conviction on a morals charge, into the Congressional Record. That was the wrong tactic, and the organizers closed ranks around Rustin, with King and Randolph defending his integrity and ability.

Rustin chuckles, "that was the best thing he could have done for me. Actually, because I was a homosexual, and because I had been a conscientious objector and because I was a Quaker, Mr. Wilkins had been deeply distressed. He didn't want me as the director of the march because he thought people would do just what they did. But Wilkins ended up being an enormous help."

Rustin remembers other moments:

A discussion among the leaders as to whether Kennedy should address the crowd: Rustin argued against the invitation, believing the march should be a protest - how could you invite the head of the government you were criticizing? The moderate members, arguing protocol over politics and wanting the civil rights legislation passed, seemed to be winning. Then Rustin excused himself from the meeting, went out into the hall, and came back saying "his sources" told him "Kennedy would be stoned." The Rustin style again won the debate.

Inside the march headquarters in a church building in New York: "A week before the march, Mr. Wilkins said to [march transportation director] Rachelle Horowitz, 'Rachelle, I don't want you to say to me what you say to the press. Add up the people coming by train, plane and bus.' Rachelle came up with a number around 100,000. He looked at her, put his arms around her, and said, 'If you are telling the truth, we will have a quarter million people.' Everyone just looked at him. And Mr. Wilkins said, 'I know my people, they are not going to make up their minds until the last minute. I can see a couple waking up and John saying to Mary Lou, 'Girl, we are going to the March on Washington today.'"

A perfectionist, Rustin also got a special order from the New York City police department to allow black officers to work in plainclothes that day in Washington. And he trained them. Horowitz remembers the sessions: "He had these guys from the federation of black officers. He would take these big cops out on the street and instruct them in nonviolence. 'Now you will link hands and quietly encircle the crowd, do not push, do not shove.' At the end they were absolutely docile."

The day became a time for the famous and the anonymous.

While making sure the television camera platforms weren't blocking the view of the Lincoln Memorial, Rustin noticed a woman in a medal-decorated blue suit trying to get on the platform. "And I said, 'Madam, where are you going?' And she said, 'I just got off the plane from Paris, I had a limo waiting for me and I am going up. I am Josephine Baker.' And, of course, I had her taken up immediately," recalls Rustin. He remembers trying to escort Paul Newman up to the stage, but the actor wanted to hang back in the crowd.

And he still has pride in his voice when he talks of another kind of spirit. "Dick Gregory showed me a woman known as Scarlet Mary, a Chicago prostitute. And she had asked Dick for a job for a couple of days. He asked why. She said 'I want to go to Washington with clean money.' She went out and did housework for two days."

But Rustin remembers best the words of Randolph, King and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the president of the American Jewish Congress; he never mentions his own brief oratory, when he and Randolph read what was called "The Pledge." The yeses of the multitude echoed for miles.

The march remains majestic in his eyes, and not just for his own part.

"Mr. Randolph was a man who never expressed emotion, never raised his voice. At the end of the march, I went over to give him a note about the death of W.E.B. DuBois. Mr. Randolph looked at me and I saw tears rolling down his cheeks and I said, 'I knew he was a friend of yours, but I didn't know you knew him so well.' And he said, 'I do not weep for DuBois but for today. I think the time has come that America is ready to accept us.'

"That was one of the great moments of my life that I had been useful in making a man I dearly respected happy."