Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, was crucial to the movement
By Steve Hendrix
t was around this point in August 1963, in the sweltering days before the March on Washington, that Eleanor Holmes Norton was waiting for someone to say something really nasty about her boss.
She was a march volunteer. The boss was Bayard Rustin, the march’s chief organizer and the man widely viewed as the only civil rights activist capable of pulling off a protest of such unprecedented scale. And he was gay. Openly gay. That year again? 1963.
''I was sure the attacks would come because I knew what they could attack Bayard for,'' says Norton, now the District's nonvoting delegate to Congress.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom will be forever known as the day that ensured the success of the civil rights movement and launched the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the highest pantheon of American champions. Next week, on the 48th anniversary of the march, King will be anointed into that ultra selective fraternity of national leaders memorialized on the Mall.
But for hundreds of civil rights veterans, Aug. 28 will also always be Bayard's Day, the crowning achievement of one of the movement's most effective, and unconventional, activists.
''When the anniversary comes around, frankly I think of Bayard as much as I think of King,'' says Norton. ''King could hardly have given the speech if the march had not been so well attended and so well organized. If there had been any kind of disturbance, that would have been the story.''
In the weeks before the march, planners were checking off details by the thousand: buses booked, speeches vetted, slogans written, portable toilets rented. At the Harlem headquarters, Rustin toggled between the political (brokering podium time for dozens of competing groups) and the practical (determining whether peanut butter or sandwiches with mayonnaise would stand up better in a Washington August).
Between phone calls, he drilled the hundreds of off duty police officers and firefighters who had volunteered to serve as marshals. He made them take off their guns and coached them in the techniques of nonviolent crowd control he had brought back from a pilgrimage to India.
''We used to go out to the courtyard to watch,'' says Rachelle Horowitz, a longtime Rustin lieutenant who served as the march's transportation coordinator. ''It was like, see Bayard tame the police.''
Horowitz and his other disciples, meanwhile, waited for someone in the enemy camp to notice that the only thing bigger than the responsibilities on Rustin's shoulders were the targets on his back.
The 53 year old known at the time as ''Mr. Marc -on Washington'' was a lanky, cane swinging, poetry quoting black Quaker intellectual who wore his hair in a graying pompadour. He'd had a fleeting association with a communist youth group in the 1930s and had been a Harlem nightclub singer in the 1940s (and was still given to filling corridors and meeting rooms with his high troubadour tenor). He had gone to prison as a conscientious objector during World War II he used his time there to take up the lute and had been jailed more than 25 other times as a protester.