Bayard Rustin and The Civil Rights Movement

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/elizabethan-songs-negro-spirituals/id327620658

I'm sure they'd appreciate it!

I've found points on both sides, but so far have not found much directly from him stating one way or another.

Somehow I suspect he'd think these turf wars were trivial.

...from the civil rights movement in the first place. But I agree, he would have thought that.

And he would have been right, except for one poster's insistence that the Civil Rights movement could not have happened without believers - and clearly Christians in particular.

Rustin would have absolutely disagreed with that, no matter what nit rug thinks he's going to pick.

The black church and the civil rights movement were seriously intertwined. It is absurd to say that they were mutually exclusive. The first paragraph in your OP makes that case. Where did that first sentence come from? It is the antithesis of all that follows.

Rustin was a great leader of the socialist movement--which does not make him an atheist.
He helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was Gay at time when that was resisted in the church and out. But he persisted to believe that his pacifism came from his early life in the church, and remained a partner of ML King.

In the other thread, you are confused as to why people might not be out as atheists so we wouldn't know if they were atheists working on the civil rights movement.

But now, it makes perfect sense to you that if he were gay, that would be the reason why he wasn't associated with the church.

You're a peach.

Here's the link in the OP:

http://blacknonbelieversofchicago.org/bnoc/node/5

http://blacknonbelieversofchicago.org/bnoc/node/5

I suggest you take your disagreements with the content and send it to the Black Nonbelievers of Chicago to tell them they're wrong.

http://rustin.org/?page_id=2

I saw it a few weeks ago. At work, no less. And how did I manage that, you might ask?

Well, it was completely legit. My employer encourages us to form groups of like-minded people to do various extracurricular stuff.

In this case, the gay employees group showed the docu, but also tied it in to Black History Month, so the audience was very diverse. Also very BIG - the room was nearly full, which is unusual for these things. But "these things" are usually stuff like bake sales or plant sales etc.

The documentary didn't mention atheism - I was hoping it might. At one point Rustin says he's a pacifist because his grandmother was a Quaker and she had a big influence on him.

Also a lot of good info about Rustin's harassment by racist politicians.

Unfortunately Rustin himself provided some of the ammo. He was busted in 1953 for "public indecency." He was caught in a car, with two men, apparently in flagrante.

The docu shows his original arrest report - he was busted on Green St. in Pasadena, CA. Jebus! That's the very middle of Pasadena - in fact, nowadays the site of the Pasadena Civic Center.

Pasadena is still a conservative, old-money town today and I imagine it was a lot more so in 1953. Amazing.

And to some of our posters in here...cough...most likely Rustin would automatically qualify as an atheist. He was a real card-carrying member of the Communist Party in the 1930's.

Anyway, the documentary is well worth watching for a look at a very complex man.

I might even have spotted some of my relatives in it. That would be the guys wearing the sheets.

Thanks for that.