<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textcase="02">I Must Resist</TitleText> <TitlePrefix>I</TitlePrefix> <TitleWithoutPrefix>Must Resist</TitleWithoutPrefix> <Subtitle textcase="02">Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters</Subtitle>

City Lights Books onix@onixsuite.com 20130216 eng

GCDS-9780872865785 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100330920 02 0872865789 03 9780872865785 15 9780872865785 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textcase="02">I Must Resist</TitleText> <TitlePrefix>I</TitlePrefix> <TitleWithoutPrefix>Must Resist</TitleWithoutPrefix> <Subtitle textcase="02">Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters</Subtitle> 1 A01 Rustin, Bayard Bayard Rustin About Bayard RustinBayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 17, 1910 and was raised by his maternal grandparents.Rustin was deeply influenced by the religious and political beliefs of his grandmother, Julia Rustin. A pacifist, Julia was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and some of its leaders, such as William Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, sometimes stayed with the family while on their tours of the country.As a young man Rustin campaigned against Jim Crow laws in West Chester. One of his school friends later said: "Some of us were ready to give up the fight and accept the status quo, but he never would. He had a strong inner spirit."In 1932, Rustin entered Wilberforce University. Founded by white methodists in 1856 for the benefit of African Americans, the university was named after William Wilberforce, one of the British leaders of the campaign against the slave-trade. However, he left in 1936 without taking his final exams.Rustin moved to Harlem and began studying at New York City College. He soon became involved in the campaign to free the nine African Americans that had been falsely convicted for raping two white women on a train. Known as the Scottsboro Case, Rustin was radicalized by what he believed was an obvious case of white racism. It was at this time (1936) that Rustin joined the American Communist Party. As Rustin later pointed out, "the communists were passionately involved in the civil rights movement so they were ready-made for me."Rustin had a fine voice and sang in local folk clubs. In September, 1939, Rustin was recruited by Leonard De Paur to appear with Paul Robeson in the Broadway musical, John Henry. However, the show was not a success and closed after a fortnight.In 1941 Rustin met the African American trade union leader, A. Philip Randolph. A member of the Socialist Party, Randolph was a strong opponent of communism and partly as a result of his influence, Ruskin left the American Communist Party in June, 1941.Rustin helped Randolph plan a proposed March on Washington in June, 1941, in protest against racial discrimination in the armed forces. The march was called off when Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 barring discrimination in defence industries and federal bureaus (the Fair Employment Act).Abraham Muste, executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), who had also been involved in planning the March on Washington was impressed by Rustin's organizational abilities. In September, 1941, Muste appointed Rustin as FOR's secretary for student and general affairs.In 1942, three members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Rustin, George Houser and James Farmer, founded the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Members of this group were pacifists who had been deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau and his theories on how to use nonviolent resistance to achieve social change. The group were also inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. The students became convinced that the same methods could be employed by blacks to obtain civil rights in America.As a pacifist, Rustin refused to serve in the armed forces. On 12th January, 1944, Rustin was arrested and charged with violating the Selective Service Act. At his trial on 17th February, he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Other members of Congress on Racial Equality, including George Houser, Igal Roodenko and James Peck, were also imprisoned during the Second World War for refusing to join the United States Army.While serving his sentence, Rustin organized protests against segregated seating in the prison dinning hall. He explained his actions in a letter to E. G. Hagerman, the warden: "Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) On can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it."Rustin was released from prison on 11th June, 1946. He immediately joined with George Houser in planning a campaign against segregated transport. In early 1947, CORE announced plans to send eight white and eight black men into the Deep South to test the Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate travel unconstitutional. The Journey of Reconciliation, as it became known, was to be a two week pilgrimage through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.Although Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) was against this kind of direct action, he volunteered the service of its southern attorneys during the campaign. Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP's legal department, was strongly against the Journey of Reconciliation and warned that a "disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved."Members of the Journey of Reconciliation team were arrested several times. In North Carolina, two of the African Americans, Bayard Rustin and Andrew Johnson, were found guilty of violating the state's Jim Crow bus statute and were sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang. However, Judge Henry Whitfield made it clear he found that behaviour of the white men even more objectionable. He told Igal Roodenko and Joseph Felmet: "It's about time you Jews from New York learned that you can't come down her bringing your niggers with you to upset the customs of the South. Just to teach you a lesson, I gave your black boys thirty days, and I give you ninety."The Journey of Reconciliation achieved a great deal of publicity and was the start of a long campaign of direct action by the Congress of Racial Equality. In February 1948 the Council Against Intolerance in America gave Rustin and George Houser the Thomas Jefferson Award for the Advancement of Democracy for their attempts to bring an end to segregation in interstate travel.After the arrest of Rosa Parks in December, 1955, after she had refused to give up her seat to a white man, Martin Luther King, a pastor at the local Baptist Church, decided to organize a protest against bus segregation. It was decided that from 5th December, black people in Montgomery would refuse to use the buses until passengers were completely integrated. Rustin was asked to go to Montgomery to help organize this campaign.Martin Luther King was arrested and his house was fire-bombed. Others involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott also suffered from harassment and intimidation, but the protest continued. For thirteen months the 17,000 black people in Montgomery walked to work or obtained lifts from the small car-owning black population of the city. Eventually, the loss of revenue and a decision by the Supreme Court forced the Montgomery Bus Company to accept integration and the boycott came to an end on 20th December, 1956.Rustin was now King's main adviser and together they formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The new organization was committed to using nonviolence in the struggle for civil rights, and SCLC adopted the motto: "Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed."In 1963 Rustin began organizing what became known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Rustin was able to persuade the leaders of all the various civil rights groups to participate in the planned protest meeting at the Lincoln Memorial on 28th August.The decision to appoint Rustin as chief organizer was controversial. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP was one of those who was against the appointment. He argued that being a former member of the American Communist Party made him an easy target for the right-wing press. Although Rustin had left the party in 1941, he still retained his contacts with its leaders such as Benjamin Davis.Wilkins also feared that the fact that Rustin had been imprisoned several times for both refusing to fight in the armed forces and for acts of homosexuality, would be used against him in the days leading up to the march. However, Martin Luther King and Philip Randolph insisted that he was the best person for the job.Wilkins was right to be concerned about a possible smear campaign against Rustin. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, had been keeping a file on Rustin for many years. An FBI undercover agent managed to take a photograph of Rustin talking to King while he was having a bath. This photograph was then used to support false stories being circulated that Rustin was having a homosexual relationship with King.This information was now passed on to white politicians in the Deep South who feared that a successful march on Washington would persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to sponsor a proposed new civil rights act. Strom Thurmond led the campaign against Rustin making several speeches where he described him as a "communist, draft dodger and homosexual".Most newspapers condemned the idea of a mass march on Washington. An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune warned that: "If Negro leaders persist in their announced plans to march 100,000-strong on the capital they will be jeopardizing their cause. The ugly part of this particular mass protest is its implication of unconstrained violence if Congress doesn't deliver."The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28th August, 1963, was a great success. Estimates on the size of the crowd varied from between 250,000 to 400,000. Speakers included Philip Randolph (AFL-CIO), Martin Luther King (SCLC), Floyd McKissick (CORE), John Lewis (SNCC), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), Whitney Young (National Urban League) and Walter Reuther (AFL-CIO). King was the final speaker and made his famous I Have a Dream speech.Rustin was highly valued by the trade union movement, and when the AFL-CIO decided in 1965 to fund a new civil rights organization, the Philip Randolph Institute, he was asked to be its leader. Names after his close friend, Philip Randolph, Rustin worked for the organization until 1979.In his final years Rustin was active in the gay rights movement. In 1986 he claimed: "The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated."Bayard Rustin died in New York on 24th August, 1987.*Biographical information obtained from www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk 2 A01 Bond, Julian Julian Bond Julian Bond authors the Foreword of I Must Resist.  Bond is an American social activist and leader in the American civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bond was elected to both houses of the Georgia legislature, where he served a total of 20 years. He was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1998 to 2010. 3 B01 Long, Michael G Michael G Long Michael G. Long is an associate professor of religious studies and peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College and is the author or editor of several books on civil rights, religion, and politics in mid-century America, including Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall and First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta and resides in Highland Park, Pennsylvania.Long's books have been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, USA Today, Book Forum, Ebony/Jet, and many other newspapers and journals. He has appeared on C-Span and NPR, and his speaking engagements have taken him from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to the Houston Public Library, to the City Club of San Diego and the Metropolitan Club in New York City. 01 eng 516 01 Published on the centennial of his birth, and in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington, here is Bayard Rustin's life story told in his own words.Bayard Rustin has been called the "lost prophet" of the civil rights movement. A master strategist and tireless activist, he is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the U.S. He brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the American civil rights movement and played a deeply influential role in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolence. Despite these achievements, Rustin often remained in the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era.Here we have Rustin in his own words in a collection of over 150 of his letters; his correspondents include the major progressives of his day - for example, Eleanor Holmes Norton, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker, and of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.Bayard Rustin's eloquent, impassioned voice, his ability to chart the path "from protest to politics," is both timely and deeply informative. As the Occupy movement ushers America into a pivotal election year, and as politicians and citizens re-assess their goals and strategies, these letters provide direct access to the strategic thinking and tactical planning that led to the successes of one of America's most transformative and historic social movements.[A note from editor Michael Long: I thank Nancy D. Kates and Bennett Singer, co-producers/directors of Brother Outsider, for my use of material in their excellent documentary about Rustin. I am especially grateful to Question Why Films, co-owned by Kates and Singer, for my use of an interview that Kates conducted with Dr. Robert Ascher. -- ML]With a foreword by Julian Bond.Praise for I Must Resist:"A vital addition to the history of the civil rights movement by an exceptionally determined, vital and creative force who was invaluable to Martin Luther King Jr and A. Philip Randolph among many others." -- Nat Hentoff"Rustin was a life-long agitator for justice. He changed America - and the world - for the better. This collection of his letters makes his life and his passions come vividly alive, and helps restore him to history, a century after his birth. I Must Resist makes for inspiring reading." -- John D'Emilio, author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin"Bayard Rustin's courageously candid letters, most of which have never before been available to researchers, provide fascinating glimpses into the private life of one of history's most reticent public figures." -- Clayborne Carson, Founding Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University"These letters - poetic, incisive, passionate, and above all political in the broadest meaning of the word - span almost four decades not only of Bayard Rustin's life but of the emotional and spiritual life of America. There is hardly a social justice movement during this time in which Rustin was not involved from pacifism to ending poverty to battles for sexual freedom. Michael Long's brilliant editing has created a compelling historical narrative and reading these letters is to be witness to the ever-evolving conscience that guides our country's endangered, but surviving, commitment to freedom." -- Michael Bronksi, author of A Queer History of the United States"Bayard Rustin was a committed but very complicated person. This marvelously annotated collection of letters explain the spirit, and evolution of the thoughts and actions of an often overlooked key figure in the 20th century civil and human rights movement." -- Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought, University of Pennsylvania, and former Chair United States Commission on Civil Rights"I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters provides fascinating insights into Bayard Rustin's activist life. It includes hundreds of letters in Rustin's own words that reveal his tireless and brave efforts to promote American civil rights, as well as his personal tragedies. All aspects of Rustin's experiences are captured in these letters, including his struggles with opponents dedicated to silencing him as an international symbol of nonviolent protests against racial injustice. This remarkable and deeply moving publication is a must-read." -- William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University 02 Hot off the press: Bayard Rustin's life story told in his own words through his intimate correspondence, published on the centennial of his birth. 08 "The letters in this book, which represent only a portion of Rustin's prolific output, provide a detailed, vivid, and often surprising look into his life and mind. They reveal Rustin's commitment to speaking the truth to power, which he encouraged in correspondence with students, citizens, and politicians, including every president from Truman to Reagan."-Jim Nawrocki The Gay & Lesbian Review 08 "Rustin... was willing to challenge orthodoxies left, right, and center. And therein lay his greatness."-Thomas D. Hamm Friends Journal 08 "This past March, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Bayard Rustin's birth, this collection of letters to and from Rustin written over almost a half-century was released. The second letter in the book is 'Rustin to the FOR Staff,' dated September 12, 1942, when Bayard was a field secretary for the organization, and includes these words, 'In many parts of this country I have found men completely cut off from a knowledge of pacifism. This is an indication that there may well be millions of men who would be eager to follow the truth if they could but hear it. ... I therefore have a deep concern when I hear many FOR people across this nation say that they feel they ought to be still at this time. I believe this is the time to say louder and more frequently than before the truth that war is wrong, stupid, wasteful, and impeding future progress and any possibilities of a just and durable peace.' It seems remarkable how applicable these sentiments of 70 years ago seem today in the midst of the Afghanistan war and the use of drones and secretive military forces in other parts of the world." Fellowship Magazine 08 "Collected from over more than four decades, these letters are a reminder that one man can make a difference. . . . culled with care by editor Long, who also provides scene-setting historical and cultural annotations." -- Richard Labonte, The Rainbow Times The Rainbow Times 08 "This collection of letters sheds light on one of the great overlooked activists of the 20th century. Each letter is prefaced by a paragraph providing context, helpful for those who don't have a deep knowledge of the events of that era. . . . His letters--some 150 are collected here chronologically--reveal an eloquent, persuasive activist, unafraid to challenge so-called authority figures when he encountered injustice."-PGN Staff Philadelphia Gay News 08 "In I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters, editor Michael G. Long assembles an impressive narrative of Rustin's remarkable achievements, helping on this 100th anniversary of his birth to revive the complex legacy of the civil rights struggle's hidden man." --Edward Ericson, Jr., City Paper City Paper 08 "In commemoration of the centennial of his birth, a new book, I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life In Letters, (edited by Michael G. Long) has just been published. It is a volume that is rich in Rustin's wisdom and highly relevant to today's debates over issues from gay rights to affirmative action."--Richard Kahlenberg The Chronicle 08 "Despite the fact that Rustin was pivotal to the civil rights movement, including organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he is not nearly as well known as others in the movement. This collection of Rustin's letters aims to set straight the record on his enormous influence. The foreword by Julian Bond lays the groundwork with an overview of Rustin's life and the beginnings of his lifelong resistance to social injustice. The collection of 150 letters, arranged chronologically, reflects Rustin's resistance to racism in the U.S. and anticolonialism in India and Africa. His politics (socialism) and sexual orientation (homosexual)  compelled him to stay in the background of the American civil rights movement. He was an adherent of nonviolence even as he aggressively pushed for change through protests, boycotts, marches, rallies, sit-ins, and other tactics, which sometimes put him at odds with others in the movement. Editor Long precedes each letter with historical context to reflect the state of national and world affairs from 1944 to 1987, reflecting as well Rustin's own personal life as he writes of music, art, books, and his struggles with his sexual identity. Among his correspondents were Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, President Eisenhower, the New York Times, and J. Edgar Hoover."- Vanessa Bush Booklist Online 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100330920/extras/IMustResistExcerptCL.pdf 04 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100330920/images/87286100330920L.gif 07 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100330920/images/87286100330920S.gif 01 04 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100330920/extras/MustResistQ_A.pdf 01 04 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100330920/extras/MustResitAnCon.pdf http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100330920 City Lights Publishers 01 City Lights Publishers 20120301 08 16 oz City Lights Books 01 WORLD 20 20120301 01 02 19.95 USD