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**NOVEMBER 22, 2023**
On the Prospect website
Trading Hard Corruption for Soft Corruption
New Jersey's U.S. Senate Democratic primary, likely the end of the
road for twice-indicted Robert Menendez, will be shaped by similarly
distasteful machine politics. BY DAVID DAYEN
Taking Control of the Vehicle
The National Transportation Safety Board wants to mandate anti-speeding
technology. It sounds like a no-brainer, but the opportunities for
cybersecurity breaches are greater. BY JAROD FACUNDO
Washington Tweaks How It Prices the Future
An updated document from the Office of Management and Budget will make
it easier to enact regulations. BY LEE HARRIS
Kuttner on TAP
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**** The Real Bayard Rustin
You owe it to yourself to see the original, not the biopic.
You have probably noticed the buzz about the new biopic
about one of America's
greatest and most often overlooked civil rights leaders, Bayard Rustin.
Maybe you've already watched it.
As biopics go, this one is so-so. It gets the basic details of
Rustin's story right, and the acting is decent. But nobody other than
Martin Luther King should ever try to play Martin Luther King. (Maybe it
can work with J. Robert Oppenheimer or Leonard Bernstein.) And no actor
can equal the real Bayard Rustin.
Fortunately, there is a superb documentary about Rustin himself, the
world he inhabited, and the difference he made. It's perfectly titled
Brother Outsider . The film was
made in 2003 by California Newsreel, produced and directed by Nancy
Kates and Bennett Singer, and deserves your attention. It's a little
hard to find to stream, but you can rent it on Vimeo for $2.99.
Rustin was born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the grandson of
Quakers who raised him. He became a pacifist and a nonviolent agitator
for social justice. One of his heroes was Gandhi. Like other Black
radicals in the 1930s, he briefly joined the Communist Party, which was
one of the very few institutions of that era that was serious about
racial justice.
Rustin was also gay.
As a pacifist, he refused to be drafted in World War II and served two
years in prison. After the war, he was well ahead of his time, getting
arrested for trying to integrate a Southern bus in 1947, years before
the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and the Freedom Rides of 1961.
Arrested, he served 27 days on a North Carolina chain gang, and then
managed to get chain gangs abolished in that state.
What Rustin did best was to organize. When Rustin met the very young
Martin Luther King, who was thrust into leadership of nonviolent civil
disobedience while still in his mid-twenties, the older man realized
that Dr. King was wise beyond his years when it came to moral witness
but knew almost nothing about the practicalities of organizing. Rustin,
then in his mid-thirties, became King's tutor.
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All of this and a great deal more is brilliantly shown in the
documentary, with amazing archival footage. The peak moment of
Rustin's career was the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom. His job was lead organizer of the march. More than anyone else,
Rustin made it happen, from the transportation to the logistics to the
negotiations with other civil rights leaders, police, and a nervous
Kennedy White House.
While we now think of peaceful protest marches on Washington as just
part of the political choreography, until 1963 nobody had ever pulled
one off. Rustin's hero and mentor, the great Black trade unionist A.
Philip Randolph, had threatened such a march in 1941 for equal job
opportunities, but relented when FDR agreed to integrate war production.
Randolph, aging but still active in 1963, is depicted as thrilled that
his march finally happened.
We see Rustin, at the podium, next to Dr. King, as Rustin so often stood
beside leaders who got the limelight, but was not quite a civil rights
celebrity in his own right. Why not? He was a terrific orator. His
opening speech was a fine combination of motivating uplift and the
details of strategy. It was followed by King's iconic "I Have a Dream"
speech.
If King was the prophetic dreamer, Rustin was the practical tactician,
though no less idealistic. As
**Brother Outsider** makes clear, he was often found standing a bit to
the side, because he was both a former communist and gay. King and other
civil rights leaders were courageous in defending Rustin and realizing
his value, but he was not quite right as the face of the movement.
The documentary is superb at giving us a sense of Rustin the person,
with interviews with family members, other leaders, and with two lovers,
one from early in his life and one late. And we see Rustin at one of his
last marches, for LGBTQ rights.
After 1963, Rustin became the head of an institute named for A. Philip
Randolph and financed by the AFL-CIO. As much as any Black leader,
Rustin appreciated the importance of strengthening the coalition between
civil rights and labor. It was Rustin, tragically, who pressed Dr. King
to go to Memphis in 1968 in support of striking sanitation workers.
And in an era of Black Power, Rustin never ceased being a passionate
integrationist. The film shows fascinating rare footage of Rustin in
debate with Malcolm X and with Stokely Carmichael.
It's a history we all should know, in detail, and too important to
leave to the fancies and fantasies of biopics. It's good that the
movie,
**Rustin**, has rekindled interest in his career. But the documentary is
the one to see.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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