The common view of Bayard Rustin on the Left is that he was a talented and marginalized organizer in the iconic period of the Civil Rights movement, that he pulled off one of the great American political events in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, and that from the mid-1960s on, he moved to the right, tragically compromised by, amongst other things, his support for Lyndon Johnson’s war effort. The idea that Rustin either supported or did not speak out against the Vietnam War is typically employed to dismiss much of what Rustin wrote and did from the mid-60s. Indeed, I would say that this has been the main impediment to engagement with the volume that Paul Prescod and I recently published with this outfit.
To cut to the chase, this idea—again, the thing that Rustin detractors point to in order to dismiss his post-1963 work and views—is demonstrably false. I am not simply attempting to “complicate” or “unsettle” some pre-existing narrative here; I mean that the notion that Rustin supported the war is a straightforward untruth, spread first by New Leftists but repeated ad nauseam today, deployed to dismiss someone who had more organizing skill and strategic prowess in his little finger than most compile in their entire lifetimes.
About whether or not Bayard Rustin was too wedded to the political possibilities of the Johnson administration, a debate can be had. About whether or not he supported the war, it cannot. Whenever he was asked about the war, he repeated that “as a pacifist, I consider all wars evil.” In the spring of 1967, when King came out against the war, Rustin urged publicly that the conflict in Vietnam “be brought to a speedy end.”
Perhaps my favorite example of the wild disconnect between the reality of Rustin’s views and their caricature by New Leftists comes from June 1965, the month that Staughton Lynd published a scathing article on Rustin in the peace magazine Liberation, on whose editorial board Rustin sat. Lynd accused Rustin of being both a “labor lieutenant of capitalism” and also of advocating a “coalition with the marines” for his stance that leftists ought to attempt politically to seize the apparatus of the Democratic Party. It was the equivalent of declaring all-out war on Rustin as an enemy of the peace movement and of the Left more generally. As Rustin’s biographer John D’Emilio notes, Lynd’s article “displayed all the characteristics of a slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners style of leftist debate”, which “anticipated a style of rhetorical excess soon to become commonplace among radicals.”