Bayard Rustin, RIP.Bayard Rustin, RIP BAYARD RUSTIN was an attractive man, soft-spoken, bright, perceptive. He was born in Pennsylvania of West Indies Negro stock, and in due course studied at the London School of Economics The School is a member of the Russell Group, the European University Association, Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Community of European Management Schools and International Companies, The Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs as well as the Golden , from which he emerged first a socialist, then a Communist. Along the way, he gave up communism and became a Quaker. For over two years, during the war, he did service as a conscientious objector conscientious objector, person who, on the grounds of conscience, resists the authority of the state to compel military service. Such resistance, emerging in time of war, may be based on membership in a pacifistic religious sect, such as the Society of Friends . His big moment as an activist came in 1963. It was he who was the primary organizer of the March on Washington at which the Reverend Martin Luther King had his dream, which ended with affirmative action affirmative action, in the United States, programs to overcome the effects of past societal discrimination by allocating jobs and resources to members of specific groups, such as minorities and women. . But in between came the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act Voting Rights Act Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1965 to ensure the voting rights of African Americans. Though the Constitution's 15th Amendment (passed 1870) had guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” of 1965. For a time, Bayard Rustin's name was holy in black circles. But not for very long. He disdained the demagogy dem·a·gog·y n. The character or practices of a demagogue; demagoguery. demagogism, demagoguism, demagogy of much of the black leadership. And, in return, he was accused of being more interested in Israel and in white Protestant intellectuals than in black progress. That this was not so was irrelevant to the neglect he suffered. He did not leave a corpus of thought to guide American blacks through the century. But his quiet disposition to hard work, to nonviolence and self-help, was a model for black behavior, of the kind that waits there to be discovered. The larger community, black and white, will miss him; should miss him more than it will. |
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