Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
By John D’Emilio
Free Press, 568 pages, $35
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
By Barbara Ransby
University of North Carolina Press, 470 pages, $34.95
In 1956 and 1957, the lives of Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin decisively intersected. In the wake of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., Baker and Rustin, two veteran activists, fleshed out a plan for a new civil rights organization. Over the next decade, that organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with Martin Luther King Jr. at its helm, became arguably the most important organization in the fight for racial equality in America.
This was but one example of the influence that these two remarkable individuals had on their times. Baker and Rustin may not have made many headlines themselves, but–as two excellent biographies, written by historians at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reveal–they numbered among the most important actors in the most important social movement in American history.
The recent publication of Barbara Ransby’s “Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision” and John D’Emilio’s “Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin” points to the growing maturity of the study of the civil rights movement. Both biographies are the best available on their subjects. Both are the products of exhaustive and imaginative research, and each biographer has uncovered fascinating new information. And both are rich studies that draw extensively on the proliferating scholarship on the black freedom struggle of the past quarter-century to make connections and offer insights unthinkable in the immediate aftermath of the 1960s.
Together these biographies demonstrate the wide range of activity, largely forgotten today, in the generation before the most active phase of the modern civil rights movement. Roughly three-fifths of Ransby’s and D’Emilio’s biographies cover the lives of their subjects before 1960, and much of that coverage addresses pioneering civil rights work.
Baker was nearly a decade older than Rustin. She was born in 1903 and raised in the South. Her mother, with her abundant self-confidence and exacting standards, influenced her immensely. After attending college in North Carolina, Baker moved to New York City in 1927, where she lived until she died in 1986 and where her fundamental education began. The glow of the Harlem Renaissance continued to radiate well into the 1930s. Harlem was, Baker recalled, ” ‘a hotbed of radical thinking,’ ” and she was never more alive.
By 1940 she was well versed in left-wing perspectives, and she had also developed her ideas on grass-roots organizing and group-centered leadership working with the Youth Negroes’ Cooperative League, an experience that would shape the advice she offered young black activists during the sit-in crusade of 1960. She then joined the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the most powerful civil rights organization of the time. She soon became the director of branches, which led her to travel across the country, listening to ordinary black Americans, urging local branches to be more active and seeking, as she would throughout her life, to bring diverse people together in a common struggle.
Rustin also came of age in New York City. Born in 1912 in Chester, Pa., and raised by his grandparents, Rustin was a precocious youth. By the time he graduated from high school, he was a star athlete, a top student and a gifted singer. There were, however, few opportunities for a young black man in Depression America, even one as talented as Rustin. He attended two colleges, bounced around, and in 1937 set out for America’s largest city, where he would live until he died in 1987 and where, much like Baker, his real education unfolded.
For a time, Rustin joined the Young Communist League, but he soon became disillusioned with the Communist Party. In the early 1940s he turned to A. Philip Randolph (who would be a mentor and friend for the next 40 years) and his March on Washington Movement, which proposed the first mass civil rights protest in the nation’s capital, and then to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization that believed in direct action. As a key member of the group’s staff, Rustin increasingly became involved in race-relations work, spreading the word about non-violent resistance across the country. During these years he did as much as anyone to bring a Gandhian perspective to an American audience.
The late 1940s and early 1950s–the height of McCarthyism–were not the best years for Baker and Rustin, but as the assertiveness of Southern blacks rose in the mid-1950s, both activists were well-qualified to help give definition to the emerging modern civil rights movement. Both believed that the Montgomery bus boycott had opened a new chapter in the black freedom struggle and that the SCLC, the organization they had helped create, could help spark mass insurgency across the South. Baker became the SCLC’s first executive director, while Rustin was a key early adviser.
But Baker did not share Rustin’s robust enthusiasm for the SCLC’s charismatic leader, Martin Luther King. Baker had long come to believe in the necessity of activism from below, and she decried the cult of hero worship that surrounded King. As Ransby writes, “Baker believed that when ordinary people elevate their leaders above the crowd, they devalue the power within themselves.”Rustin, on the other hand, viewed the young minister as just the kind of leader that the burgeoning movement needed, especially after he had helped tutor King in Gandhian non-violence.
Rustin and Baker were superb organizers, but they favored different approaches to generating and sustaining a mass movement. Baker, Ransby argues, believed in the centrality of popular participation and the transforming effect of that participation on individuals. Her outlook not only hastened her departure from the SCLC, but it infused another new civil rights organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or “Snick” as it was called). Founded in spring 1960 as the student sit-in movement convulsed the Jim Crow South, SNCC, nudged by Baker, stayed independent of existing civil rights groups, practiced participatory democracy and sent organizers like Bob Moses into the field to help develop leaders among local people in the toughest counties in rural Mississippi.
Rustin, more than Baker, thought in terms of mobilizing support for national legislation and a broader progressive coalition. He was the organizational genius behind the March on Washington in late August 1963, an amazingly successful mass mobilization. His influential 1965 essay, “From Protest to Politics,” outlined his program for the civil rights movement, a program that alienated him from Black Power exponents and the anti-Vietnam War vanguard.
Even as Ransby and D’Emilio feature the impressive talents and remarkable achievements of Baker and Rustin respectively, they also expose the traditionalism of the movement their subjects did so much to shape. Baker constantly ran into the sexism of male civil rights leaders, whether it was Walter White of the NAACP in the 1940s or King of the SCLC in the late 1950s. Stark limits were placed on the role she could play in these organizations. But because of her commitment to social change, Baker, according to U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, ” `performed and acted as a feminist,’ ” even if she did not embrace that label. As a result, she became an inspiring role model to a host of women, black and white, who helped ignite the modern feminist movement in the 1960s.
That Rustin was gay ensured that he would remain to some extent in the background or “in the shadows,”in D’Emilio’s words, especially after a highly publicized arrest on a morals charge in 1953. From that point on, enemies of Rustin–and of the civil rights movement–would seek to use his sexual identity against him and taint anyone associated with him.
“Lost Prophet” is the first book to fully probe Rustin’s sexuality, and D’Emilio’s forthright discussion of it helps resolve puzzling questions about the trajectory of Rustin’s career. A mesmerizing speaker, a skilled writer and gifted organizer, Rustin, it seems, should have ranked among the most widely known activists of his time. In a highly homophobic age, however, that was not to be, and Rustin would have to cope with great setbacks in his life, often triggered because of his sexual identity.
D’Emilio’s deft treatment of Rustin’s sexuality and its repercussions is one reason the activist emerges here as a highly complex, fully rounded man. D’Emilio masterfully tells the life of a person who knew many “triumphs and trials” and whose arena of social activism was so wide for so many years. In pursuit of social justice and peace, Rustin volunteered in local struggles and organized protests on other continents.
Ella Baker, despite Ransby’s skills as a biographer, remains more of a mystery. There are fewer clues to be uncovered about her personal life, in large part because she was so silent on these matters. Some of Baker’s close acquaintances never knew, for instance, that she had been married for more than 20 years. Ransby is understandably careful in drawing conclusions about Baker’s personal life, and ultimately she is most interested in Baker’s ideas. Ransby views Baker as an ” `organic’ intellectual” whose fundamental perspectives came not from formal study but from lived experience, and her passionate and demanding book offers a striking, thorough exposition of Baker’s expansive, radical, humanist vision.
Together these biographies make clear–as Baker’s and Rustin’s many friends and admirers have long known–that the lives of these two Americans were not just central to their own times but have great relevance in the 21st Century.
