Bayard Rustin lecture, "Placing the Civil Rights Struggle in the United States in its Proper Perspective," at the University of Iowa, April 24, 1964

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at theUniversity presents a series of programs on Afro-American Culture. These programs are presented as background material for the course, Afro-American Literature. Today's program is a lecture given at the University of Iowa by Bayard Rustin. Bayard Rustin: I should like, tonight, to place the civil rights struggle in its proper perspective, because the civil rights struggle has plagued the United States from its very inception. There is not one moment, not one critical moment in the history of this country when white people were not embarrassed, not a moment when they did not deny themselves, not a moment when they could be themselves, that America could be its self because a fundamental question has never been answered. What about the Negro? Now as a youth, I was taught that the Senate of the United States was the world's highest and most noble deliberating body. Objectively, this is a lie. For even at this moment, even in the year 1964 with Africa and Asia observing it, 100 white men now having their hands the fate of 25 million Negroes in this country with not a single Negro there yet to be a part of those deliberations. I was taught that the declaration of independence was an inspired document. It was, in every sense, the word a moral ambivalence lacking in inspiration that we should declare independence for white men where Black men were in fact tilling the soil and building the nation. Bayard Rustin: The constitution of the United States, I was taught, was a great and noble document. But the moral problem where a group of men can separate themselves because they feel superior and divide other men by a fraction, three fifths, and establish a legislature on the basis of counting some men so that other men could vote. The worm was in the very structure from the beginning. There is nothing that has ever happened that the question has not arisen, but what about the Negro? Kansas wants to come in to the nation, but she cannot be taken in to the nation with any sense of dignity and beauty, because the question must yet be answered. What about the Negro? What is his role to be in it? Bayard Rustin: We permit not one nation to develop here, but two. And we still have two nations divided against themselves. You build an economic system on the back of slave labor and you think you can simultaneously get away with building a totally different kind of economy in the north one with the Negro at the bottom of it. And the question is answered in the most bloody civil war that has been fought anywhere in the history of mankind. For we can't answer what to do with this thing, this less than a man, this Black man. Bayard Rustin: And then Mr. Lincoln makes us great, Gettysburg Address. And we assume now we're going to make one nation. The question still arises, what to do about the Negro. We become so absolutely vulgar, so absolutely politically irresponsible that in 1876, one man leads the country to a successful effort and becomes president. And we are so mixed up. We lie, we connive, we politically play games and give the presidency to the man who didn't win it because he has promised that he knows what to do with the Negro, put him back into slavery, pull the troops out of the south. I want to make it clear, therefore, at the beginning that I am not here as a Negro urging that white people in this great state and university should do a single thing for the Negro. Bayard Rustin: I want you to see that the problem is now and always has been the inability of white people to be honest enough to help themselves, that regardless of the moral problem, what we have permitted to exist in this nation is that white people would prefer to remain ignorant rather than answer the problem. They would prefer to stay poor rather than answer the problem. They should prefer to see their children ill-educated rather than answer the problem. And that there is not a single social good which can occur in this nation until white people join the revolution, which looks as if it is to free Negroes, but is in fact the free white people. That is the problem. Now I warned you, don't believe this because I'm putting it in moral terms. And there is something about college audiences today that are tensely bored by a moral argument that may be sociological and political. Bayard Rustin: The Southern oligarchy, which is now obstructing the civil rights bill is in Congress illegally, undemocratically, from a totalitarian point of view, from a one party system to keep the Negro in his place. But simultaneously, they will not pass any social legislation. President Kennedy could not get aid for your white grandmother. He would not, and president Johnson can not get medical aid for her. Because they cannot give it to you and simultaneously keep the Negro in his place. These are the same men who are anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-labor and who obstruct any efforts at getting social legislation through the Congress of the United States. Until they are wiped out, America cannot make social progress. We think we are very bright when in fact the school system in the United States is one of the most abysmal in any Western country. We prided ourselves on our great scientific endeavor only to find that the Russians who have extreme limitations through their totalitarian system, even with that, were able to get people into space much more vigorously and clearly then we. Bayard Rustin: And one of the factors is, there can never be integrated spoon at this moment. But until there are integrated schools, there can not be quality schools in this country, for this nation cannot afford to support two school systems. Therefore, white children are more brutalized even than Negroes only because there are more of them. Now, if white people in this country want, in fact, a nation which is dedicated to taking care of the masses of the people of this nation and meeting their social needs, the answer to that is that they must now join in with the Negro and efforts to change the basic assumptions, economic and social on which the society rest. There is no other way. Bayard Rustin: For my friends, we will have a totalitarian one party system in the south unless Negroes can vote. There will be no adequate aid to education, to universities, to raise teacher's salaries, which profoundly need to be raised, until the Negro can vote. And when the Negro votes, many things will change and including a political realignment in this nation, establishing once again, if it can be done so, something different than this Tweedledum, Tweedledee political system in which you are robbed of any decision making where both parties stand for the same thing. Go out and vote and you vote for nothing. There must arise a political institution with a political philosophy in the interest of people, or you have no vote even if you think you have. Bayard Rustin: Secondly, what is the nature of the civil rights crisis today? The civil rights movement is in a crisis because the American society is in a crisis. We have 50 million poor people in this country, and they are not able either to find work or make enough money. This is the only civilized nation, certainly the only one in Western Europe, there is no nation in Western Europe in which you can find what you can find in Detroit, Chicago and New York. Babies being born into the third generation of relief in that family. That is the nature of our problem. This is a revolt in which men are having work taken away from them by automation and cybernation. And the government does not tell the truth. There are not five million unemployed in this country at the present time, there are closer to nine, precisely because the government only counts certain categories. Bayard Rustin: What we are faced with is a situation wherein even the Negro struggle can make no essential progress now, unless there is to be an American revolution for providing for men what they need. And this makes a crisis for the civil rights movement. And I'd like to explain what that crisis is. You will recall that what we now call the civil rights revolution began in 1955 when Mrs. Rosa Parks, a very small Negro seamstress, sat down in a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and refused to move. We had the great bus protests. Dr. King rose to the surface. And for a year, 50,000 Negroes refused to ride. And it electrifies the nation. That was about the right to ride with dignity in your own town. The next great wave in this revolt was the sit-in movement, 1960. That movement was about public accommodations, the right to eat in your home town. The next great wave in this revolution were the freedom rides. That was about the public accommodations, the right to eat and to ride with dignity when you move from town to town and state to state. Bayard Rustin: In the meantime, my friends, the only other place other than public accommodations where there was movement was on schools, but not the segregation of schools, individual token, acceptance of a Negro here and there. [inaudible], a few children in Little Rock, two or three in Virginia, a couple in another state, and then the great fiasco in Mississippi. But you must remember that millions of dollars were spent. Hundreds of people were put in jail. Millions of dollars are still being held in by bail. But then came Birmingham. And when Birmingham came, Dr. King moved over from the problems of public accommodations, which never were fundamental to the Negro people, to what were fundamental. He said, "I want all the schools integrated. I want jobs for all Negros in Birmingham. And I want the ghettos torn up and housing." Bayard Rustin: When Dr. King moved on Birmingham, he moved away from simple segregation and discrimination over to housing jobs and schools. That is to say he moved from those things which society could give us, business as usual, to those things society could not possibly give us so long as the society holds on to its present assumptions. When he moved from public accommodations, which had to do with segregation and discrimination to Birmingham, he added a third problem for the Negro. He asked the Negro to make a judgment upon the total society. It's economics, it's sociology, it's psychology. And to do something about it. Now I have gone into this in some detail, because if you want to understand why the Negro is frustrated, why a Malcolm X appears now, why people call for projects like the Starling, which I did not consider it to be effective, and why young people are angry and bitter. Bayard Rustin: It is fundamentally because they know instinctively that to deal with housing, schools and jobs, which are a judgment on society itself, 25 million Negroes do not possess the economic nor the political power to make progress on these unless other segments of the society are prepared to move. And the frustration springs from that fact. Let me put it another way. I can collect any 100 people who are willing to go to jail to be beaten and make a profound degree of progress around public accommodation. All they have to do is to sit down, go to jail. Some more come in and sit down, they go to jail. Some more come in and sit down, they go to jail. Then the first group which has just come out of jail is willing to go back. Then what happened is that the library must then close down or serve Negro. Those swimming pool has a choice, it closes down or it admits Negroes. The restaurant closes down or it admits Negroes because 100 dedicated Negros were prepared to act. Bayard Rustin: Thank God white people did it with them. I want to show you, however, that white people were not necessary in those first struggles. Think, in your mind, what 500 Negroes could do really to bring about integrated school. For here, you are not contending with a merely prejudiced man who doesn't want you in his theater or his bus. To improve the school system, you will need billions of dollars from the federal government. No 500 people can get that by an action project, but by the development of a political movement dedicated to a political program. Bayard Rustin: Think, if you will, what it means when a Negro climbs of crane at the world's fair, because Negroes were not hired there to help build the fair. Or what does it mean in Cleveland if a minister lies down in front of a tractor? Even if he is killed, that lying down and climbing is not a problem. It is a symbolic act to call attention to the fact that a program is needed. But you cannot put Negroes back to work by mere demonstrations, for in a situation where automation and cybernation are gradually creeping into the society taking work from men, because a new revolution is upon us, more serious to the human personality than ever the industrial revolution was. What problem do you have that the Negro movement can involve itself in to get work? Bayard Rustin: What is needed now for men to go to work is that the American people revolt. Revolt because they know that the private sector of this economy and the tax cut cannot put men back to work. The private sector will not do it. And the revolt which we have is to insist that the public sector of this economy insist that men be given work with dignity and trained for it. It means for them all that when millions of young people being thrown out of work with no machine and President Johnson comes through with a war on poverty. There is no war in President Johnson's plans unless he wants to have it with BB rifles. With millions of people are unemployed, he talks about training young people to be useful. Now I want to ask you a few questions. Now we want to pick these people up and put them in CCC camps and train them to be useful. Bayard Rustin: Nobody in, Washington, in his right mind believes that they are playing anything but games. They are throwing sand in our eyes. It is as phony as the first 100 days of World War II, which we then call the quiet war, the unseen war. And for a simple reason, there is evidence that every youngster in the United States who entered high school to become a typist or a bookkeeper this year, by the time he is a junior, three fourths of them will not be needed. So you say, "Okay, Mr. Rustin, that's that. Now, let's see." But if in the middle of their training to become bookkeepers we find out they're not going to be needed, we can then train them to be medical technicians. Well, I want you to know that in New York City and in many other cities in the world, the medical technician is on his way out. Bayard Rustin: Well, you say, "Then we can train them to be medical technicians. What do you think might do?" The answer is that what makes the Johnson program ridiculous is that nobody but nobody in Washington knows what to train young people for, Black or white. Because we refuse to recognize that if you do not have planning in the economy, you do not know what to train these future people for in light of automation and cybernation. And therefore we have to have a revolt not of Negro people, but of all people that there shall be planning so that our young people should know what they are being trained for in future, so that they can become educated. And then there is a 19th century school system we have, which has fundamentally built the dump people out in the street after they've finished high school to be able to do absolutely nothing, or to train them to go to college where even there are a great number come out and have not the slightest idea what they're going to do with life. Bayard Rustin: I am not joking nor do I want the applause from the least creative students. But I am not joking when I tell you that year after year, my telephone rings and college people say, "Mr. Rustin, can you help me find work?" And I say to them, "What can you do?" And instead of telling me what they can do, they tell me what courses they took. I took sociology, or I took creative writing, or I took something else. Friends, I am not joking. In the kinds of society in which we live, we must have more planning and definition of what people have to do. That is a revolt against the 19th century concept of what the educational institutions are. Bayard Rustin: Now, Mr. Whitney Young of the Urban League has come out with the idea that the only way Negros can catch up is through preferential treatment. Now, my friends, I'm all for preferential treatment on a moral grounds. Obviously people who are so terribly mistreated as the Negroes ought to be given some preference. But having said that, I wanted to drop that preferential treatment as quickly as possible into the wastepaper basket. Because a society which will not give white aging people hospitalization, will never give Negroes economic special treatment. Furthermore, I don't even want Negroes to have it. What if there was a white man standing here who is out of work and has no milk for his children, and a Negro here who is out of work with no milk for his children. I will not ask for preferential treatment for the Negro in shooting the facial fight over the few jobs which are left. I say to them, "Join hands white and Black brother, and fight to create a political movement which will put all men back to work at a decent wage. And that the government must now become an employer." That is a revolt. Bayard Rustin: Now my friends, in this period, what happens to the Negro is the most terrifying thing. Those people who call for that stolen are good friends of mine whom I know very well. Why did they call for it? Simply because they are so desperate and they faced these facts. 10 years after 1954 when Supreme Court decision said Negros were finally to be treated equally, there are more Negroes unemployed than there were in 1954. 10 years after the decision, there are more Negroes, and the reasons are not all segregation and discrimination, I'm giving you facts and not the reason for it. There are more Negroes in segregated schools than there were in '54. 10 years after the Supreme Court decision, the housing conditions for Negros are intensely worse than they were in '54. And in this atmosphere, the Negroes secondary leadership from the streets says, "There is something wrong with those who have been leading us, and there's something wrong with the methods that they have been using this nonviolence. It's got to go. We want to get tough now." Bayard Rustin: A young man said something with sounds amusing to me, but I almost cried. He said, "Mr. Rustin, everything you said about the stallings is absolutely correct, but this is no time for logic." He said, "The only thing we're going to be able to do is give them hell regardless of color, race or career. Just raise hell with everybody. Roy Wilkins first, Jim Farmer first. I'm sick." Now he is sick because conditions have made him sick. These tactics grow from the desperation of the fact that the Negro now knows he has a job which is a truly revolutionary one, and that he does not have the political and economic strength to deal with it. Therefore, he will turn more and more to gimmickism, not because he wants to turn to gimmickism, but because there are no powerful allies in the society awake and ready to move with him to carry on the revolution for the poor of this country with the civil war reconstruction period never accomplished for Black or white pull. Bayard Rustin: That is the revolution which has yet to be carried on. And there's no one to help the Negro. The labor movement as a labor movement is not doing it. The churches as the churches are not doing it. There is no great movement in the universities such as there are in every country in the world where there is a great revolution. They are led by students. American students are docile. They have led nothing, except for Negro students. Therefore, my plea tonight is not to urge you to give money for the poor Negroes, or isn't it terrible that civil rights are in such a state? I say to you, "Come and grasp hands with the American Negro and put up a fight to give dignity to America's 50 million pole in a row." And what is a war? In World War II, somebody sat down in Washington and planned to the last detail, the prosecution of that war. Bayard Rustin: It did not begin with, "Now, how do we save our economic system?" It did not begin with, "Well, now, shall we produce this or that?" It says, "What is necessary? What facilities do we have? How do we organize them?" And the machinery began to roll. A war on poverty and for the uplift of the American people must proceed in the same way, not in dribbles. What is our problem? Who is involved? What resources are necessary? And leave all other questions to be secondary ones. And if this cannot happen, I am here to tell you that the Negro can not proceed very much further. And if it does not happen, he will have to move violently, destructively, in order to assert the dignity which he must now assert whether anyone else is willing or not. But now, I spent my whole life dealing with the problems of tactics. And I discovered that whenever anyone in any situation doesn't have the machinery for doing the thing in a right way, he will always do it in an undemocratic way if he has his mind to do it. Bayard Rustin: Now, the pyramids would not have been built by slave labor if they had had machine. They didn't have machines, therefore they used to save labor. The Negro will resort to the most extremist tactics for one reason, that there are not sufficient white groups in movement to make it possible for him to use intelligent tactics. Therefore, my appeal to all white people is come into the movement, join it, not because it's a Negro movement or to help white people, but to help lift this country to a new standard of democracy. Bayard Rustin: Now to show you how this works, friends, already the movement of the Negro is the basis of almost every creative thing which has happened in this country since '55. McCarthyism disappeared from the American campus, and political discussion permitted to return to it only because the Negro students were in the streets of the south and you had to react to it. You overcame your fear of McCarthyism and brought politics back to the campus. The so-called war against poverty, even with some 40 million whites in poverty, would never have been wedged by the president if the Negro people had not been in motion. The effort to petrify the one party of the south depends on the Negroes staying in motion. Bayard Rustin: Now my friends, every society which has made progress has made progress finally because people stayed in motion and because they engaged in direct action and civil disobedience. Where there is no civil disobedience in a democracy, you are in trouble. And where the concept is not held to dearly, you are in trouble. In Germany, if only the Germans had believed in civil disobedience, perhaps 6 million Jews would not have been killed. The fact of the matter is at Nurnberg, we chopped off heads of thousands of journalists because we said, "Why did you not create civil disobedience?" When they gave us the arguments that they were following what the law said to do. Bayard Rustin: Every movement has been won in the streets, never in the legislative halls. When women wanted to vote, you young people won't remember, but I remember. They chained themselves to the white house. They laid down on the stairs in the white house. They marched in the streets. They laid down in the streets. They had certain days on which they wouldn't cook for their husbands. You talk about disruption. People at that time were calling it ungodly because it attacked the family structure. How do you think the labor movements were built in this country? They were built because in 1937 to 1938, men went out and sat down. Sees property, would not leave it. Locked the owners out of their own factories. That's the reason the labor movements got built. Bayard Rustin: In fact, my friends, Americans have such short memories. That tea party in Boston didn't take place in a nice little room. Those colonials went out to the streets, took that blasted tea and threw it in the river. We were consumed with civil disobedience. Let us not forget it, for it is the ultimate means by which law is kept meaningful. Because it is civil disobedience which finally destroys old law by creating a new community of thinking and feeling as of which new law grows. Bayard Rustin: Now, my friends, were in for a hot summer. There will be all kinds of devilment done. I do not expect that this will all run smoothly. A revolution is not like making a dress where you've cut a path and you turn it over it says, sew here with a certain stitch, and you do it. And then you've cut up this way and it says, based here... Our revolution is like this. All kinds of things happening at all times. You never know who's who. One day, somebody's for against the stolen, the next day somebody whispers to him and now he's for it. And the next day he's got 10 people who say they're for it, but they're not. And the next day somebody wants to do this. Oh, it's a frightful business if you don't have good nerves, buddy. Bayard Rustin: But finally, the revolution which we are in is a spiritual revolution. How can we sit going about our business? What has happened to us morally when we permit the poor, 50 million of them in this country, to exist hidden under a bushel? What's has happened to us? The Negro revolt is a part of the great revolt throughout this entire world against violence. And long, long after the Negroes have their rights because the true American revolution has been won for all men, the thing which will be remembered, and thank God that it will be remembered, is the method by which the Negro struggle. Bayard Rustin: And the problem with Negro violence today is not that it isn't justified. As this world goes, if anybody is justified in using violence, it's Negroes. The problem is deeper than justifying violence. It is that we are living in an age where the use of violence is capable of totally destroying us. Not only physically, I'm not talking about the H-bomb now. I'm talking about the kind of destruction which comes when you have a small world as a result of the transportation and communications. In that kind of small world, the cement of that tight society, the thing which holds its bricks together is a dedication to non-injury. And therefore, if the Negro can hold on to his commitment to nonviolence, he is making a contribution to the entire world. And if he is to do that, and I am saying this particularly to every Black face in here tonight, do not oppose the injustice to Negros merely. For if you opposed the injustice to Negros merely, you are no better than the white person who would brutalize you. Because of your concern is for yourself, if you ever got power, you would treat him the way he has been treating you. Bayard Rustin: What one must oppose is injustice itself, wherever it is, and first of all, in himself. So that a leadership for the revolt is made, which could not use injustice, because if it ever got power, because its whole struggle has been to eliminate the injustice first of all in itself. A Jew in Germany who fought Hitler because Hitler was harming Jews, and who escaped and came here is not in the struggle for Negro rights. The Jew who struggled against Hitler because he was opposed to all injustice, if he is here, is in the Negro struggle. And so I say to my friends, that while there are many problems that we have to face, I will go forth from this place believing not only in nonviolence, because no minority can get away with violence, but also because I want that the Black people in their wider lives who are joined together in this great struggle should make a deeper contribution to man. A contribution to the concept of non-injury. Bayard Rustin: I was saying this afternoon, that just the filibuster goes on much longer, Dr. Martin Luther King is thinking of going to Washington and going on a fast, a situation in which he could die. But if he does, I am certain to some Catholic, some Protestant and some Jewish clergymen will join him. And if they fast quietly, they're together, and the world knows that they are prepared to suffer on to death for others, a new spiritual elements enters the picture that no political maneuvering can be compared with. For one is of this world and is of this world and all of this. And therefore I pledge to you that in my leadership in this movement to the degree that I have it, I continue to hold onto the idea that the Negro must stay in the street. He must struggle. He must be bold. He must make people angry. He must pause some people to become disaffiliated. But he should join the hands of white people in the struggle under the slogan, we struggled vigorously, but we are dedicated to the non-violent idea. Bayard Rustin: That beat us if you will, put dogs on us if you will, bomb our churches if you will. But we pledge that we shall not harm one hair of one head of one white person. For it is written that only good overcomes evil. We as Black people cannot turn that around. That it is better to forgive than to be revengeful. We cannot turn that around. But by so holding onto the principle of nonviolence, we may yet help to lead the entire world, not Black men alone out of the childish notion that evil can somehow give birth to goodness. Speaker 1: That was a lecture given at the University of Iowa by Bayard Rustin. This series of programs on Afro-American Culture is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University as background material for the course Afro-American Literature. This has been a recorded presentation of the broadcasting service of the university of Iowa.