Currently on view at the Schomburg:
Gordon Parks: 100 Moments
Through December 1, 2012
Photo via ralston smith on Lockerz
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REMEMBERING BAYARD RUSTIN
One year before Bayard Rustin’s death, he wrote a letter to Joseph Beam, editor of In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Rustin declined an invitation to contribute to the project which featured writings and interviews with black gay men, and felt it was necessary to explain why.
“My activism did not spring from being gay, or for that matter, from my being black. Rather it is rooted, fundamentally, in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. Those values are based on a concept that of a single human family and the belief that members of that family are equal.”
He also noted that his coming out experience was not voluntarily, he was forced out of the closet. And while he had no problem with being publically identified as homosexual, to present himself as someone at the forefront of the gay rights movement would be “dishonest.”
Rustin advocated for a politics of inclusion until the end of his life. “Bayard Rustin: The Elder in the Village,” Beam’s unpublished interview of Rustin appears in Beam’s papers in the Schomburg Center’s Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division. The nine-page document percolates with Rustin’s untainted vision of equal rights for everyone, and offers a glimpse into the heart of an American legend.
Join the Schomburg Center as it celebrates Bayard Rustin’s centennial with these three free events:
—By Steven G. Fullwood, Co-curator of the exhibition GMAD at 25: A History in Words and Images, and Project Director for the Black Gay & Lesbian Archive, Schomburg Center
