From protest to politics In the spring of 1964, King was considering hiring Rustin as executive director of SCLC but
Stanley Levison, a longtime activist friend of Rustin's, advised King against it because of what he considered Rustin's growing devotion to the political theorist
Max Shachtman. Other SCLC leaders opposed Rustin due to his sexuality. At the
1964 Democratic National Convention, which followed
Freedom Summer in Mississippi, Rustin became an adviser to the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which was trying to gain recognition as the legitimate, non–
Jim Crow delegation from its state, where Black people had been officially
disenfranchised since the turn of the century (as they were generally throughout the South) and excluded from the official political system. DNC leaders
Lyndon B. Johnson and
Hubert Humphrey offered only two non-voting seats to the MFDP, with the official seating going to the regular segregationist Mississippi delegation. Rustin and the AFL–CIO leaders urged the MFDP to take the offer. MFDP leaders, including
Fannie Lou Hamer and
Bob Moses, angrily rejected the arrangement; many of their supporters became highly suspicious of Rustin. Rustin's attempt to compromise appealed to the Democratic Party leadership. Rustin argued that since Black people could now legally patronize any public restaurant, they needed to be able to afford service financially. He believed a coalition of progressive forces to move the Democratic Party forward was needed to change the economic structure. Rustin "repudiat[ed] the sloganeering of
Black Power" and was especially contemptuous of cultural Black nationalism. became critical of "feel good" cultural nationalist versions of
Black studies.
Nation editor and
Harvard Law Professor
Randall Kennedy later said that in his the later 1960s onwards, Rustin criticised radical leaders such as
Stokely Carmichael,
H. Rap Brown and
Huey Newton, took the side of the mostly white and Jewish
United Federation of Teachers in its racially polarising
1968 New York City teachers' strike, and continued "to promote integration and nonviolent coalition politics." Kennedy adds that while Rustin had a general "disdain of nationalism", he had a "very different attitude toward Jewish nationalism" and was "unflaggingly supportive of
Zionism".
Labor movement: Unions and social democracy Rustin increasingly worked to strengthen the labor movement, which he saw as the champion of empowerment for the African American community and for economic justice for all Americans. He contributed to the labor movement's two sides, economic and political, by supporting labor unions and social-democratic politics. He founded and became the director of the
A. Philip Randolph Institute, which coordinated the AFL-CIO's work on civil rights and economic justice. He became a regular columnist for the AFL-CIO newspaper. During the 1960s, Rustin was a member of the
League for Industrial Democracy. He maintained his membership for decades, and became vice president during the 1980s. On the political side of the labor movement, Rustin increased his visibility as a leader of the American movement for
social democracy. In early 1972, he became a national co-chairman of the Socialist Party of America. In December 1972, when the Socialist Party changed its name to
Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA), Rustin continued to serve as national co-chair with
Charles S. Zimmerman. In his opening speech to the December 1972 SDUSA Convention, Rustin called for the party to organize against the "reactionary policies of the Nixon Administration" and criticized the "irresponsibility and élitism of the 'New Politics' liberals". In 1970, Rustin called for the U.S. to send military jets to aid Israel against
Arab states in the
War of Attrition; referring to a
New York Times article he wrote, Rustin wrote to Prime Minister
Golda Meir, "I hope that the ad will also have an effect on a serious domestic question: namely, the relations between the Jewish and the Negro communities in America." Rustin was concerned about unity between two groups that he argued faced discrimination in the U.S. and abroad, and also believed that Israel's democratic ideals were proof that justice and equality would prevail in the Arab territories despite the atrocities of war. His former colleagues in the peace movement considered this a betrayal of Rustin's nonviolent ideals. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a human rights and
election monitor for
Freedom House. In 1976, Rustin joined the anti-communist
Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which promoted
Team B's controversial intelligence claims about Soviet foreign policy, using them as an argument against arms control agreements such as
SALT II. The same year, Rustin was a member of the executive committee of the
Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel group. Rustin maintained his strongly anti-Soviet and anti-communist views, especially with regard to Africa. In 1977, he and
Carl Gershman (a former SDUSA director and future
Ronald Reagan appointee) co-wrote the essay "Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power", in which they decried Russian and Cuban involvement in the
Angolan Civil War and defended the military intervention by
apartheid South Africa on behalf of the
National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (
UNITA), writing, "if a South African force did intervene at the urging of
black leaders and on the side of the forces that clearly represent the
black majority in Angola, to counter a non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political judgment is this immoral?" Rustin accused the USSR of a classic imperialist agenda in Africa in pursuit of economic resources and vital sea lanes, and called the
Carter administration "hypocritical" for claiming to be committed to the welfare of Black people while doing too little to thwart Russian and Cuban expansion in Africa. In 1979, as co-chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, he travelled to
Rhodesia with a Freedom House delegation to
observe its
election, the first after the end of
white rule, reporting positively on it.
Soviet Jewry movement The plight of Jews in the Soviet Union reminded Rustin of the struggles of African Americans. Soviet Jews faced many of the same forms of discrimination in employment, education, and housing, while also being prohibited from emigrating. After seeing the injustice Soviet Jews faced, Rustin became a leading voice in advocating for their movement to Israel. In 1966 he chaired the Ad hoc Commission on Rights of Soviet Jews organized by the Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews, leading a panel of six jurors in the commission's public tribunal on Jewish life in the USSR. The commission collected testimony from Soviet Jews and compiled it in a report delivered to the secretary-general of the United Nations. The report urged the international community to demand that Soviet authorities allow Jews to practice their religion, preserve their culture, and emigrate from the USSR at will. He co-sponsored the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry. Rustin worked closely with Senator
Henry Jackson on the
Jackson–Vanik amendment, legislation that restricted U.S. trade with the Soviet Union due to its treatment of Jews.
Gay rights Rustin's romantic relationships were mainly with men. said, "I never had any sense at all that Bayard felt any shame or guilt about his homosexuality. That was rare in those days. Rare." He was an advocate for people with
HIV/AIDS, and because of his public works, he may have come out to the public. Rustin no longer hid his sexual orientation from others. Because same-sex marriage was not legal at the time, Rustin and Naegle undertook to solidify their partnership and protect their union by
adoption. In 1982, Rustin adopted Naegle, 30 years old at the time. Naegle said that Rustin: {{Blockquote|was concerned about protecting my rights, because gay people had no protection. At that time, marriage between a same-sex couple was inconceivable. And so he adopted me, legally adopted me, in 1982. That was the only thing we could do to kind of legalize our relationship. We actually had to go through a process as if Bayard was adopting a small child. My biological mother had to sign a legal paper, a paper disowning me. They had to send a social worker to our home. When the social worker arrived, she had to sit us down to talk to us to make sure that this was a fit home. Rustin testified in favor of the
New York City Gay Rights Bill. In 1986, he gave a speech titled "The New Niggers Are Gays", in which he asserted: Also in 1986, Rustin was invited to contribute to the book
In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. He declined, saying: I was not involved in the struggle for gay rights as a youth... I did not "come out of the closet" voluntarily—circumstances forced me out. While I have no problem with being publicly identified as homosexual, it would be dishonest of me to present myself as one who was in the forefront of the struggle for gay rights... I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter. As such, it has not been a factor which has greatly influenced my role as an activist.
Later years and the conservative movement Commentary editor-in-chief
Norman Podhoretz had commissioned "From Protest to Politics" in 1965.
Nathan Abrams, in his book about Podhoretz and
Commentary notes that Rustin was a "strange addition" to the magazine as a Black leftist. The magazine later promoted the
neoconservative movement, which had implications for civil rights initiatives as well as other economic aspects of society. Rustin wrote an article attacking the
Black Panthers, an example of the magazine's increasing focus on combating the
New Left. As
Commentary moved further to the right in the 1970s, and the Civil Rights era Black-Jewish alliance fragmented, Abrams notes that Rustin became "conspicuously absent" from its pages, a sign of this divergence. Because of these positions, many of Rustin's former colleagues in the civil rights movement, especially those connected to
grassroots organizing, criticized him as a "sellout". Biographer
John D'Emilio rejects these characterizations, and "portrays the final third of Rustin's life as one in which his reputation among his former allies was routinely questioned. After decades of working outside the system, they simply could not accept working within the system." ==Death==