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<< There is no freedom that is not freedom for all. >>

Now is the time for listening and learning from Black voices.

There are many who have guided our organization – and countless more whose voices deserve to be amplified. Today we are paying tribute to one: Bayard Rustin.

Bayard Rustin was the chief architect of the March on Washington – and a beloved board member of the International Rescue Committee. He was a proud Black man, a proud gay man, a master organizer, a public intellectual, a tireless resister, teacher and enactor of change.

His entire life was spent confronting injustice and refusing to accept the status quo.

Bayard Rustin was born in 1912 to a single mother, and learned the tenants of activism through his grandmother’s Quaker faith. As a young man he campaigned against racial discrimination — including labor inequality and segregation in the military — while laying plans for boycotts, early Freedom Rides, and the March on Washington years before they took effect.

"If we desire a society in which men are brothers, then we must act towards one another with brotherhood. If we can build such a society, then we would have achieved the ultimate goal of human freedom." – Bayard Rustin

By the time Rustin met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he was already well-versed in Gandhi’s tactics. He was the person who taught Dr. King about India’s independence mobilization strategies. Rustin’s ability to think critically and cross-culturally proved invaluable. The March on Washington garnered over 200,000 participants and was a turning point in the Civil Rights movement. Rustin coordinated everything from logistics, to messaging, to handling of press, to delivering action items to the current administration.

"The proof that one truly believes is in action." – Bayard Rustin

Rustin had a “compassionate compulsion to assist those denied decency,” said Liv Ullmann, who sat with him on the Board of Directors of the International Rescue Committee. Here at the IRC, Rustin helped form our modern U.S. Refugee Resettlement program. He saw human progress and the fates of oppressed individuals as linked: Civil Rights inextricable from LGBTQ Rights, inextricable in turn from the rights of refugees. He wrote op-eds on behalf of refugees, wrote letters to U.S. presidents, and traveled with the IRC to refugee camps worldwide.

"In visits to [refugee] camps, Bayard often went his own way. He did not want to be briefed but would wander among the refugees, find someone who spoke some English, and get to know a particular family ... Then he would rejoin the group, sometimes with his new friends, and have not statistics or generalizations but specifics about individuals to give detail to the more general picture." – Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement, Daniel Levine

Bayard Rustin stood for humanity. He showed us that this work is interconnected and long term. It takes place over lifetimes: individually, nationally and internationally.

We are committed to doing this work. And will be here to do it alongside you.

In Solidarity,
The International Rescue Committee


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