August 28 - Remembering Bayard Rustin

On this day in Labor History the year was 1963.  That was the day one of the most important stands for justice and equality took place in United States history.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” to a quarter-million people in Washington D.C.  But did you know that one of the main organizers for the march was a man by the name of Bayard Rustin?  Rustin is often left out of the history books because he was gay and because of earlier communist affiliations.  He was born in 1912, and raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was raised in the Quaker tradition, and his commitment to peaceful, non-violent protest continued into the Civil Rights Movement. Rustin joined the Young Communists League in the 1930s, a time when Communist organizers were some of the few people actively speaking out about racial injustice in the United States.  After he left the YCL, Rustin spent a brief time as the youth organizer for a March on Washington planned in the 1940s.  This movement was led by one, A. Philip Randolph.  The planned march was aimed at putting pressure on President Franklin D. Roosevelt to desegregate work at industries with federal wartime manufacturing contracts.  When President Roosevelt agreed to issue an order desegregating these jobs, the planned march was called off.  But the idea for the march lived on, and became a reality during the Civil Rights Movement.  Rustin went on to work in the labor movement.  He became the founder and first director of the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, which focuses on tearing down the walls of discrimination in work places and within the labor movement