Talk:Bayard Rustin/Archive 1

Archive 1

Date of birth

It differs from Find-A-Grave. Lincher 16:41, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Um... Hey

There is some serious problems with this article towards the end, and I don't know enough about this guy to fix it.

So yeah.24.5.241.109 02:17, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Death

Information on Rustin's death should be included. --FIRExNECK (talk) 04:06, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Unsubstantiated article bias allegation

Editor 71.142.219.162 (talk · contribs) placed a bias note on this article which can be removed as long points brought up on the talk page are discussed. There is no note left here so there is no case made. I am removing the unsubstantiated claim. Feel free to discuss anything relevant to the article on this talk page. Also, please provide reliable source references to help evaluate claims. Thanks. --Javaweb (talk) 15:04, 16 March 2011 (UTC)Javaweb

I'm guessing that the bias template was added according to the "Main leader or ..." section just above this, and will respond accordingly.

I added the following quote in the article '... known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. According to Rustin, "I think it's fair to say that Dr. King's view of non-violent tactics was almost non-existent when the boycott began. In other words, Dr. King was permitting himself and his children and his home to be protected by guns." Rustin convinced King to abandon the armed protection.

that is Rustin speaking. I almost added another quote "Watch out Phil - there's a gun in that chair." from when Rustin and (presumably) Phillip Randolph first entered King's home, but it sounds better on the radio than it looks on paper. The upshot is that Rustin taught King non-violent tactics. If this is true, and I believe it is and is taken from a reliable source, then we have to say that Rustin was a leader of the movement, not just one of the organizers. As far as the March on Washington, he was officially 2nd in charge, (after Randolph), but I believe that everybody recognizes that Rustin was the leading organizer. Certainly the LIFE cover gives that impression (Randolph and Rusting standing together). Why is this a potentially controversial topic? I think it's because Rustin was passed over in recognition in the late 1960s - 1970s, because his homosexuality was a complicating issue. Thus other leaders were perhaps raised above him, and now raising Rustin's recognition might be viewed as knocking these other leaders down a peg. I can understand that that might be a bit painful, but we should just stick with what reliable sources say. Feel free to bring in other RS if anybody thinks this is only one side of the story. Smallbones (talk) 16:00, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

citation style for multiple pages from one book

i am finally finding time to read d'emilio's "lost prophet". i anticipate that i'll be adding some material from this book, which i was surprised to see isn't cited as a reference anywhere in the article, and was wondering if anyone had any opinion on the best way to cite multiple pages from the same book? it's not something which seems easy to do gracefully with cite.php, which i otherwise like a lot. if i start adding stuff before hearing some kind of consensus here, i'll just find a way to do it, but i have no strong opinions on the matter, and will gladly revise anything i do to another format if others do have strong opinions. — alf.laylah.wa.laylah (talk) 02:37, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

oh, red face! it is cited, but from the bibliography to the references section. ok, i'll stick with that method. sorry for the bother.— alf.laylah.wa.laylah (talk) 02:42, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi Alf!

Welcome to the writing side of Wikipedia! :)

Look at Tom Kahn and the citation of Rachelle Horowitz's essay, for examples of using the {{harvtxt|Author|Year|p=Page}} template.

Best wishes,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 04:17, 1 October 2011 (UTC);

fabulous, thanks for your help! — alf.laylah.wa.laylah (talk) 16:12, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Text

As a leader of the American socialist movement, Michael Harrington sent Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz to help Bayard Rustin, one of the leaders of the movement for African-American civil-rights movement, who became a mentor to Kahn. Kahn and Horowitz were affectionately called the "Bayard Rustin Marching and Chowder Society" by Harrington. Kahn helped Rustin organize the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington and the 1958 and 1959 Youth March for Integrated Schools.

Homosexuality and Bayard Rustin

As a young man, Tom Kahn "was gay but wanted to be straight .... It was a different world then", according to Rachelle Horowitz.

Although everyone active in the movement was aware of it, [before 1956] he was never explicitly out of the closet. He took his sexual orientation as an affliction, a source of pain and embarrassment. In part, perhaps, because he was so unreconciled to his longings, he limited himself for a long time to brief encounters. But then he became involved with one of the YPSL’s [young socialists] and was compelled to seek the counsel of a psychiatrist to explain his unfamiliar feelings. The diagnosis, he told me, was “you’re in love.”

Tom Kahn was "very good looking, a very attractive guy" according to longtime socialist David McReynolds, who is also an openly gay New Yorker. Kahn accepted his homosexuality in 1956, the year that Kahn and Horowitz volunteered to help Bayard Rustin with his work in the civil-rights movement. "Once he met Bayard [Rustin], then Kahn knew that he was gay and had this long-term relationship with Bayard, which went through many stages", according to Horowitz, who quoted Kahn's remembrance of Rustin:

When I met him for the first time he was a few years younger than I am now, and I was barely on the edge of manhood. He drew me into a vortex of his endless campaigns and projects.... He introduced me to Bach and Brahms, and to the importance of maintaining a balance in life between the pursuit of our individual pleasures and engagements in, and responsibility for, the social condition. He believed that no class, caste or genre of people were exempt from this obligation.

However, cohabiting in Rustin's apartment proved unsuccessful, and their romantic relationship ended when Kahn enrolled in historically black Howard University. Kahn and Rustin remained life-long friends and political comrades.

Howard University

Kahn, a white student, enrolled for his junior and senior years at Howard University, where he became a leader in student politics. Kahn worked closely with Stokely Carmichael, who later became a national leader of young civil-rights activists and then one of the leaders of the Black Power movement. Kahn and Carmichael helped to fund a five-day run of Three Penny Opera, by the Marxist playwright Berthold Brecht and the socialist composer Kurt Weill: "Tom Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances." Kahn and Carmichael worked with Howard University's chapter of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Kahn introduced his Carmichael and his fellow SNCC activists to Bayard Rustin, who became an influential adviser to SNCC. Kahn and Rustin's emphasis on economic inequality influenced Carmichael. Kahn graduated from Howard in 1961.

Leadership

Kahn (along with Horowitz and Norman Hill) helped Rustin and A. Philip Randolph to plan the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech. For this march, Kahn also ghost wrote the speech of A. Philip Randolph, the senior leader of the civil-rights movement and the African-American labor movement. Kahn's analysis of the civil-rights movement influenced Bayard Rustin (who was the nominal author of Kahn's 1964–1965 essay "From protest to politics"), Stokely Carmichael, and William Julius Wilson.

Notes

References

• D’Emilio, John (2003). Lost prophet: Bayard Rustin and the quest for peace and justice in America. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0684827808. ISBN 9780684827803. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

  Republished as Lost prophet: The life and times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). ISBN 0-226-14269-8

• Horowitz, Rachelle (2007) [2005], "Tom Kahn and the fight for democracy: A political portrait and personal recollection" (PDF), Democratiya (merged with Dissent in 2009), 11 (Summer): 204–251 {{citation}}: External link in |origyear= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |journal= (help)

Homosexuality reference in intro

"Homosexuality was criminalized in parts of the United States until 2003 and stigmatized through the 1990s."

The phrase, "stigmatized through the 1990s," seems a major understatement (given continued stigma). Such a claim would also require a citation. I propose removing from this sentence.

I also intend to add a citation to Lawrence v. Texas. Adkinsc1 (talk) 21:40, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Also, I just reverted what seems like an accurate statement but one that even more clearly requires a citation. Do you propose to remove the entire sentence, or do you have a rewrite on hand?— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 21:50, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

particularly the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam.

We have so far had this sentence:

Rustin criticized the conduct of the war, particularly the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam.

An IP editor keeps changing it to this:

Rustin criticized the conduct of the war, particularly the killing of civilians whilst bombing in North Vietnam.

because of concerns that the first version implies that civilians were intentionally bombed, which the IP feels is not true. My feeling is that the first version does not in fact imply that civilians were intentionally bombed, but that it doesn't even imply anything about Rustin's opinion on the intentionality of the bombing. Further, I don't think that the sentence even implies anything about whether civilians actually were bombed in North Vietnam. All that it seems to me that the sentence implies is that Rustin thought that civilians were being bombed in North Vietnam and that he criticized it. That's my defense of the first version.

My criticism of the second version is that it is unnecessarily circumlocutory and that it is inaccurate. It is impossible to tell from the second version how the civilians were killed. Perhaps they were stabbed to death while there was bombing in North Vietnam. The sentence doesn't rule this out. Perhaps they died of malnutrition, again, one cannot tell from the second sentence. Most ironically, the second version doesn't even rule out the possibility that the civilians were intentionally killed by the bombs. If the first version implies intentionality then so does this one. Also the second version, in its urgent need to eliminate "libel" (to quote an early edit summary involving this change) makes it unclear who's doing the bombing. Maybe from the second version the civilians were killed while they, the civilians, were bombing in North Vietnam. In any case, even apart from the fact that it's an unnecessary change, the second version is not coherent and it's certainly poorly written. Thus I think that we should stick with the first version.

This could be settled more easily with a source. I can find sources for Rustin's critical support of the war and for his criticism of the conduct of the war, but nothing for the bombing of civilians in particular. That the statement is true can be seen from accounts of Rustin's debates with SDS and other new lefties about protests, some of which mention indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the need to protest it. I can't find anything that puts this in Rustin's mouth explicitly though.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 16:03, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Lacking feedback here, I went ahead and quoted from a fundraising letter Rustin sent to WRL members to show exactly, in his own words, what about the war he criticized, thus evading the issue of what was actually happening in the war, which I feel strongly is not something which needs to be worked out in Bayard Rustin's WP article.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 17:00, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Main leader or just one of the organizers

All my readings on the guy claim he was the head organizer or main organizer, not just one of the many. I think this needs to be changed on the page, but i didn't want to start an edit war. I think that its a problem that his importance is usually marginalized in mainstream society, so changing this page to reflect the truth is super important. So what do people think? MATThematical (talk) 19:46, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

• if its not clear i was referring to the Washington march. MATThematical (talk) 19:47, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Just one of literally hundreds of civil rights strategists-nothing more. And, for the record, he and the late Rev. James Bevels organized the "Children's March" together. Both got the idea first employed by The Mahatma Ghandi! --199.219.160.30 (talk) 17:35, 2 November 2012 (UTC)Veryverser

...and Gandhi got the idea from that Walden Pond guy. And, more to his notability Rustin introduced King to active nonviolence and convinced him it was effective...and isn't that one of primary things King is known for. --Javaweb (talk) 03:22, 3 November 2012 (UTC)Javaweb

Sodomy Laws

I think that Rustin was arrested on lewd behavior charges. Indecent exposure charges typically involved displaying an erect penis to another male in a mens room, at least according to the biography of John Nash. Antisodomy laws (which often also prohibited fellatio) existed in Texas and the U.S. military through the 1990s.

Could anybody check the charges on which Rustin was arrested (and convicted), provide links to a description, and then find out when the acts were decriminalized?  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 20:01, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I'll go back and watch Brother Outsider again on Netflix (now that I know it's an option) so I can pause. They said aloud that the charge was "lewd vagrancy" and showed a typed form that listed "sex perversion." I'll go back and look. Lawikitejana (talk) 02:33, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

Wilberforce departure

I'm watching Brother Outsider right now but have no option to pause. I had just finished reading the section on his early life and found it odd that his departure from Wilberforce before final exams was unexplained, and wondered if he was asked to leave. Just then, I turned my attention again to the documentary, where he had just finished saying that, indeed, he was asked to leave. Because of having my attention on the article, I missed hearing why he was asked to leave; whatever it was -- politics, sexuality, something else -- we should find a citation and put it in the article. The way it stands now, it makes it sound as if he left wholly of his own accord. Lawikitejana (talk) 02:16, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

I believe he was asked to leave because he organized a strike at the school to protest the bad quality of the food. Teammm ^talk
_email 04:57, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

Speak truth to power

This story [1] suggests that Rustin coined the phrase in 1942. Is it worth including. Tigerboy1966  08:02, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately I can find it in a 1926 book "The American Federationist, Volume 33, Part 2" --Erp (talk) 14:27, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Adoption citation/reference is missing

This article makes no mention of the fact that Rustin legally adopted Walter Naegle as his son. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.175.230.112 (talk) 20:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

This needs a citation from a Reliable Source to be included. Parkwells (talk) 19:45, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Balance?

While William Julius Wilson's work is really important, and he has affirmed some of Rustin's concerns about developing problems and needs in the African-American community, it strikes me that too much space in this article is devoted to him and his books, especially as most have been published since Rustin's death. Perhaps it would be useful to move the Wilson section down in the article, at least to where it is appropriate in terms of chronology and his first book - 1978. Otherwise, I think this section really pulls away from what is basically an article about Rustin.Parkwells (talk) 19:51, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

William Julius Wilson Overload

This article jumps the shark on William Julius Wilson. It's clearly become a shill page, promoting Wlson's books beyond any mention of Rustin. And the callouts to the accolades that Wilson's books have received are creepy.

Can we delete or profoundly shorten this section?Iasonaki (talk) 03:38, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

• Of course. Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 07:48, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

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Israel policy

Paragraph 4 of the #Foreign policy section reads

In 1970, Rustin called for the U.S. to send military jets in the fight against Arab states by Israel; referring to a New York Times article he authored, Rustin wrote to Prime Minister Golda Meir…

which is based on a book review of Rustin's letters:

The greatest betrayal for many peace activists occurred in 1970 when Rustin sided with Israel by calling for the U.S. to send military jets in the fight against Arab states; referring to a New York Times article he authored, Rustin writes to Prime Minister Golda Meir "…

Since 1970 is midway between Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War it's unclear whether it means a potential fight in that year is meant, or a late-breaking controversy over a 1967 article, or whether Rustin wrote in 1970 that the US should have sent jets in 1967. I hope someone will eventually look at the book itself and add dates for both the NYT article and the letter to Meir. Sparafucil (talk) 21:14, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

From Google Books, Rustin wrote to Meir on July 7 1970 and she responded 21 July 1970, however the letters are not reproduced therein as I got no hits for salient parts of "...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." but I did find "page 375 is not a part of this book preview", which seems to be the meat of the mention.

The passage should at least change "article" to "advertisement" because that's what the quote refers to and is found in other sources mentioning it, such as Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color also on Google Books, as an "ad". In terms of ads, I can only find primary sources for what appear to be rebuttals ran four months later, common search results only yield a New York Times advertisement, from November 1, 1970, "An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel".

Yet, according to Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement by Daniel Levine on pp 224-225 (Google books) it does seem to reference an atemporal request by Israel for aircraft. It also says that the June ad was run by the A. Philip Randolph Institute, not by Rustin himself. So maybe, as jets are not "use it or lose it", it was not a specific war, but a generic or pending request for military aid and 1970 seems correct. JesseRafe (talk) 22:18, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

George Lawrence

The lead section mentions George Lawrence of "In Friendship", but George Lawrence is a disambiguation page and the George Lawrence referred to here does not have an article. In fact, while Google confirms he was the chairman of "In Friendship", the small number of results seems to indicate he is likely not very notable in general. Now there are a few options:

• red link - something like George Lawrence. But since that page might never exist, the red link may not be justified, and it doesn't look appealing in the lead.
• unlink - but then a reader might wonder who this person, who is apparently important enough to be mentioned in the lead, is.
• remove mention of him in the lead - but he is only mentioned in the lead, not anywhere in the rest of the article, which is also true for "In Friendship" itself.

Any thoughts? Lennart97 (talk) 10:48, 10 December 2020 (UTC

I decided to go for George Lawrence (civil rights activist). Lennart97 (talk) 19:55, 17 December 2020 (UTC)