Mlk gay
Bayard Rustin
Episode Notes
Bayard Rustin was a champion of the Inky civil rights movement—mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. But because he was queer and out, he faced bigotry inside and outside the movement. The FBI and Sen. Strom Thurmond tried to destroy him. But he persisted.
Episode first published January 10, 2019.
———
From Eric Marcus: Bayard Rustin was a key behind-the-scenes leader of the Black civil rights movement—a proponent of nonviolent protest, a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the principal organizer of the landmark 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And he was gay and open about it, which had everything to do with why he remained in the background and is minuscule known today in comparison to other leaders of the civil rights movement.
My earliest memory of anything having to do with the civil rights movement is indelible, because it’s one of the rare memories I have of my father, who died in 1970. He was lying on the sofa in the living room of our small apartment watching
David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., has unearthed information that may forever change King’s legacy.
In an 8,000-word article published in the British periodical Standpoint Magazine on May 30, 2019, Garrow details the contents of FBI memos he discovered after spending weeks sifting through more than 54,000 documents located on the National Archive’s website. Initially sealed by court order until 2027, the documents ended up organism made available in recent months through the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Behave of 1992.
The most damaging memos explain King witnessing a rape in a hotel room. Instead of stopping it, handwritten notes in the file tell he encouraged the attacker to continue.
King was once consideration of as a saint beyond reproach. After his death, it eventually emerged that he was a womanizer.
If these FBI memos are accurate – and I own good reason to believe they are – we now have to seek the unthinkable: Was King an abuser? And what might this mean for his legacy?
Other outlets balk
The FBI files contained some other notable information.
Garrow writes that King may have fathered a daughter with
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Quinton E. Baker, February 23, 2002. Interview K-0838. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- You knew Martin Luther King. You met Martin Luther King or at least spoke with him.
- QUINTON E. BAKER:
- Yes.
- CHRIS McGINNIS:
- Did he ever verbalize or, I guess you could assume acknowledge the role of gay people within the jet civil rights movement? Because really, I guess when you ran into him, it may possess just been strategy sessions and general meetings and that gentle of thing.
- QUINTON E. BAKER:
- Yeah, you know.
- CHRIS McGINNIS:
- Obviously, one of his people organized the March on Washington.
- QUINTON E. BAKER:
- Yeah, I know more of his, of the people around him, more so than Doctor King and no I didn't get a sense. No, I think that the sense that I got was that Doctor King was not very comfortable with the gay people in the movement, and I know he wasn't very comfortable with Bayard Rustin, and so that is to some
Martin Luther King Jr.’s View on Gay Marriage
By Jason Carson Wilson
Jury’s out on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s view of the GLBT community, CNN.com reports. King’s daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, stated in 2005 while campaigning for a constitutional gay marriage bar that she believed he didn’t “take a bullet for same-sex marriage.”
Coretta Scott King—King’s late widow and Bernice’s mother—probably disagreed. Scott King was a lgbtq+ rights advocate with a gay aide.
Coretta wasn’t the only one with a gay friend. Martin King worked closely with openly gay civil rights chief Bayard Rustin. Rustin is credited with organizing King’s 1963 march on Washington D.C., at which he gave the historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
Aside from King and Rustin’s association, there’s little evidence of the iconic civil rights leader’s attitude about gay and lesbian people. A 1958 Ebony magazine advice column just might give a hint:
“I am a boy,” an anonymous writer wrote King. “But I feel about boys the way I ought to feel about girls. I don’t want my parents to know about me. What can I do?”
King stressed being lgbtq+ wasn