CIVIL RIGHTS THE RIGHT WAY

Anderson does not seem to have omitted much, factually speaking, from the book. And after all, simply taken by itself Bayard’s career makes a pretty fascinating story. Born in 1917 and raised a Quaker, he was for a brief time a Communist, but made his first full-scale professional commitment to pacifism. Though he was much admired as a singer and thought by many to have a real future as a musician, he went to work for the peace movement in 1941 (and was a conscientious objector in World War II). For a time in the 1940s he was employed as a field representative of A. J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, and subsequently, after a personal failing out with Muste, he switched to the more activist War Resisters’ League.

From there he moved on to the civil-rights movement, where he was to become — at least for a few happy moments in the ultimately unhappy period that came to be known as The Sixties — a national hero. He had fairly early on been to India, too late to meet his hero Gandhi but in time to have become a trained disciple of Gandhi’s satyagraha, nonviolent civil disobedience. And largely as a result of Bayard’s influence and instruction,

satyagraha would become the technique of choice for the successful defeat of legalized racial segregation in the South.

Among those Bayard tutored in the methods of nonviolent resistance were a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. and a group of black kids, led by one Stokely Carmichael, who constituted themselves the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

From the publicity point of view, of course, Bayard’s highest achievement was as the organizer of the great March on Washington of August 1963, a feat he pulled off brilliantly despite terrible constraints of time and manpower and in the teeth of the fears of many established civil-rights leaders that not enough people would show up and that those who did would cause trouble. That march, of course, not only turned out to be a success beyond everyone’s, including Bayard’s, highest hopes but became a kind of pivotal moment in American history.

During all this time, Bayard was also traveling back and forth to Africa a good deal. In addition to becoming a leading collector and connoisseur of African art, he was engaged in an effort to teach democratic principles to various independence movements and their leaders. (Perhaps preeminent among these were two who appear to have flunked the course — Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, whose governments, once in power, could have brought Bayard very little in the way either of satisfaction or hope.)

After the defeat of Jim Crow, Bayard decided that it was time to get beyond the old civil-rights tactics. He sought to build a coalition with the labor movement and the white working poor in order to tackle the next, and far greater, need of the black community, which was for economic opportunity. The decision to move, in his words, “from protest to politics” would set him at odds with many if not most of his old civilrights comrades, very much including SNCC, who were ever more militantly (and ironically) embarked on a course of separatism. Similarly, his advocacy of a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War became a stumbling-block to his relations with many if not most of his old friends in the peace movement, who were far from dismayed by the prospect of a North Vietnamese victory. And finally, in both spiritual and practical keeping with all of the foregoing, he became passionately engaged in international human-rights work, traveling, for instance, to take food and medicine to the refugees imprisoned at the Thai-Cambodian border. All in all, a rich and fruitful life, full of purpose, and much (and much- deserved) honor.

Jervis Anderson seems, like a good paleontologist, to have put the skeleton together. But what he was afraid, or because of timidity incapable, of dealing with was the fact that Bayard was a rogue, full of appetite and mischief — as men too large of spirit to be contained by any “role” often are. And who can tell where such largeness comes from? Perhaps in his case it came from knowing things about life that most of the people his political commitments put in his way — pacifists, civil-rights activists, social democrats, and trade-union leaders-did not. He was a man, for instance, who spent his childhood thinking that his grandparents were his parents and that the girl who was in fact his mother was his elder sister. He was a homosexual, once caught in flagrante and sent to jail for it, and thus was always considered a potential embarrassment to the causes he served (hard as such an idea might nowadays be to credit). He spoke with an odd affectation, which several interviewees in the book refer to quite mistakenly as an “English accent” but was more like a signal of his never-to-be-abandoned apartness. Moreover, his truest tastes, for music, art, and finery along with carousing and laughter, by themselves were bound to provide him with a more complex sense of the good and true than were to be found in his political commitments, however wide-ranging and humane.

Whatever the reason for it, in any undertaking or discussion, no matter how close to his heart, Bayard stood always at his own oblique angle, sniffing and ready to disrupt. Sometimes these disruptions would be simply restorative of sanity. How many times during the kind of political discussions where the air grew dark with confusion and cross-purposes did Bayard, ever the participant/outsider, manage in a few short sentences to impose his own clarity? How many times was incipient ugliness-in quarrels particularly between blacks and Jews — averted by his way of standing outside and changing the subject?

But Bayard’s capacity for disruption was hardly confined to such noble purposes. Anyone who really knew him knew that he was bound sooner or later, in one way or another, to slip the bonds of dignity. It seems that either the friends of Bayard interviewed for this book were too pious to discuss this aspect of his subject with Jervis Anderson, or he was too pious to discuss it with his readers. Whatever the case, piety was, and is, too prissy, too mingy an attitude to take toward his memory. Bayard himself hated the prissy — prissy people and prissy ideas. He drank too much and smoked too much and simply could not stand to be proper for too long.

Once, when I was with him in Israel during the summer, he responded to the warning of an Israeli that in the desert heat it was imperative to drink great quantities of water with a W. C. Fields-like expression of outrage at the very idea that anyone should suggest he drink water. It was then explained to the already bewildered Israeli that in America this man was a great leader of his people and a great credit to his race.

Bayard loved scenes like that and took every opportunity to create them. On another occasion, on a flight from Madrid to New York, he spent the entire trip throwing spitballs at me. As with the Israeli, an already bewildered stewardess was informed that this particular passenger happened to be a great civil-rights leader.

Moreover, the older he got, the more liberated — probably because the appearance of decorum once required by the civil-rights movement had been lifted from him. On his 60th birthday he declared, “Baby, sixty is marvelous!” And on his 75th, he confided to me that what he wanted engraved on his tombstone was “This nigger had fun!”

In other words, Bayard Rustin was far bigger than the list of his accomplishments. Indeed, by the time he died most of the organized community he had served so brilliantly, along with most of the politicians subservient to that community, had, to their own great loss, turned their backs on him. Nor would the labor movement of George Meany and Lane Kirkland, in which he had invested so much of his hope for the betterment of the black poor, survive him by very many years, but would instead be taken over by his enemies, labor’s mischievous left wing.

Bayard’s greatest accomplishment was himself. And there has surely been far less of the world’s sum of fun and saving laughter since his death. That is why one puts this book down hoping that some day before too long some close friend of Bayard’s will complete the job of recording his life with a long and full and genuinely evocative memoir.

Midge Decter is the author of three books and hundreds of essays.