How a controversial lifestyle sidelined a civil rights leader

Bayard Rustin was the key organizer of the August 1963 March on Washington -- the "I Have a Dream" march -- and two years later was at the White House when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. But within just a couple of years, he had been pushed to the sidelines. It was a pattern, as John

D'Emilio presents it in his sensitive but probing biography, "Lost Prophet," that repeated throughout Rustin's lifelong career as an activist in the peace and civil rights movements. Rustin's associates, writes

D'Emilio, "recognized him as a master strategist of social change." But Rustin was a homosexual, and, as D'Emilio makes tragically clear, his sexual desires "brought him trouble repeatedly" and led to abandonment by friends, mentors, and allies. D'Emilio is a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was the founding director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Policy Institute. From that professional background, he explores with authority the impact Rustin's homosexuality had on his chosen political missions.

An important occasion -- both for Rustin and for D'Emilio's approach to his subject -- occurred during Rustin's imprisonment for refusing to cooperate with the World War II draft.

Rustin was sent to the federal prison at Ashland, Ky., and almost immediately began a campaign to desegregate the prison.

" `Everything seemed to be going along very well here,' " Ashland warden Robert Hagerman wrote his superiors in the federal Bureau of Prisons, " `until Bayard Rustin arrived about three weeks ago.' " Rustin had already organized the other war resisters and was recruiting supporters among the prison's black inmates. He is " `an extremely capable agitator,' " Hagerman reported.

Some five months after arriving at Ashland, Rustin secured an interview with Hagerman and presented him with a detailed plan for gradually integrating the prison. But even as Hagerman indicated that he was prepared to move ahead, and Rustin was writing fellow inmates that "we have reason to rejoice," prison officials confronted Rustin with charges of sexual misconduct. Rustin denied the charges, even after witnesses provided prison officials with explicit testimony.

The incident, D'Emilio writes, "effectively disrupted the campaign against racial segregation" -- and dismayed Rustin's supporters.

" `You have been guilty of gross misconduct, specially reprehensible in a person making the claims to leadership and -- in a sense -- moral superiority,' " wrote pacifist leader A. J. Muste to Rustin. " `You were capable of making the "mistake" of thinking that you could be the leader in a revolution of the most basic and intricate kind at the same time that you . . . engaged in practices . . . which a person with a tenth of your brains must have known would defeat your objective.' "

"The crisis provoked by his sexual behavior," writes D'Emilio, "prompted a season of intense spiritual struggle." Citing the biblical parable of the prodigal son, Rustin sought and received forgiveness, and after his release following the war, he returned to the staff of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation.

This incident comes early in Rustin's life and his lifelong career as a social and political activist -- he was 33 at war's end -- but

D'Emilio devotes just over a tenth of his text to it, and the reader will see in D'Emilio's focus on it the forces that pulled at Rustin for the rest of his life, again and again pushing him out of the picture. Rustin took up the cause of African decolonization, but in January 1953, while on a nationwide lecture tour, he was arrested on morals charges in Pasadena, Calif. Rustin was now a public figure, at least in the pacifist community, and his arrest and conviction forced his resignation from the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

It was "a pivotal event," D'Emilio writes. It "trailed Rustin for many years afterward. It severely restricted the public roles he was allowed to assume. Though he fought his way back from the sidelines, he did so at a price. As both the peace and civil rights movements grew dramatically over the next decade . . . Rustin's influence was everywhere. Yet he remained always in the background, his figure shadowy and blurred, his importance masked."

When black leaders met in July 1963, to plan the March on Washington, an event originally proposed by Rustin, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins made it clear that Rustin could not be its director. "He's got too many scars,' he informed the meeting. Rustin won a key role only because the veteran civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph installed himself as director and brought Rustin along as his active deputy.

The march was "perhaps the greatest [day] of his life," D'Emilio writes, but he was again left behind as King and other civil rights leaders became increasingly involved in the antiwar movement.

"As the 1960s hurtled to a close," D'Emilio writes, Rustin was still "prominent enough to warrant" a New York Times Magazine profile. But the headline -- "A Strategist Without a Movement" -- "[summed] up the central dilemma of Rustin's situation." He turned his attentions overseas, observing Third World elections, among other activities, and died in August 1987.