![]() ![]() And while he spent decades at the cutting edge of the racial-protest movement, often as its most radical tactician, he ended as the most unyielding adversary within the civil-rights movement of black militancy and separatism. As a leftist, though he spent a brief period in the Communist youth movement, he evolved into a devoted opponent of Communism, becoming the leader of the most anti-Communist tendency within the American Left. ![]() He was an ardent pacifist who eventually turned against the pacifist movement, alienated by its moral absolutism, its fecklessness, and its isolation from the main currents of democratic activism. What makes Rustin’s career especially interesting, if also difficult to capture within conventional political categories, was not just his ability to connect these streams but the shifts and turns he took within them. To each he made a luminous, indispensable contribution. More than any other figure, he occupied a central place in each of the three major streams of American social protest: pacifism, the ideological Left, and the movement for racial equality. But Rustin’s role in that event hardly exhausts his importance. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and that spurred passage of the most important civil-rights legislation in the nation’s history. PERHAPS THE archetypal democratic activist of the last century, Bayard Rustin is best known as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, the famous demonstration that was highlighted by Dr. ![]()
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