King and nonviolence (and Rustin and FOR)

When I was minoring in African American Studies in college, I learned about civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. We were told that he was a close confidante, adviser, and assistant to Dr. King. Rustin was a dedicated and effective organizer, and some accounts even informed us that he was gay and had a history of association with the Communist Party.

What I never knew - until recently - was that he was also the Race Relations Secretary of FOR (from 1945 until he was unfortunately fired when his sexuality was publicly exposed in 1953). And I also didn't understand how important FOR was to informing King's strategies on nonviolent resistance. Here Rustin tell his story:

In August of 1945 I left Lewisburg Penitentiary, where I had been in jail as a conscientious objector. I had gone in to prison in 1942 for three years' term. Given good time, I was able to come out in August of 1945, at which time I went back to work for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, with which I had been associated since 1941. At this time I also was beginning to give a great deal of my time as director of the Civil Rights Department of the Fellowship of Reconciliation — FOR — to CORE [Committee on Racial Equality]. Now, CORE had been founded within the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and great numbers of blacks had cooperated with the CORE direct action. But when war came, the many blacks who were working in CORE and who were not pacifists did not want CORE to remain within the FOR, because the FOR was a pacifist organization and they did not want to be associated with a pacifist organization in war time. So there was a decision made that CORE should become independent. Even though CORE was independent of the FOR, the FOR paid my salary to do a great deal of the work organizing CORE, and a good bit of the years from 1945 to 1955 were spent as field director of CORE — which meant that I traveled all over the country creating all kinds of demonstrations, sit-ins in restaurants, theaters, hotels, barber shops, and the like.

- “The First Freedom Ride:” Bayard Rustin On His Work With CORE

In 1947, Rustin co-organized the first freedom ride, known as the Journey of Reconciliation (at left), which ended when Rustin was arrested in my hometown of Chapel Hill and sentenced to a month on a brutal North Carolina chain gang. Perhaps most importantly, in 1955 he went along with FOR Field Secretary Glenn Smiley (seen below left, with King in Mongomery) to assist Dr. King with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

It was in Montgomery that Rustin and Smiley met with King and helped give him a deeper understanding of the moral and strategic underpinnings of nonviolent direct action.

King was first introduced to the concept of nonviolence when he read Henry David Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience as a freshman at Morehouse College. Having grown up in Atlanta and witnessed segregation and racism every day, King was ‘‘fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system’’ (King, Stride, 73).

In 1950, as a student at Crozer Theological Seminary, King heard a talk by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University. Dr. Johnson, who had recently traveled to India, spoke about the life and teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi, King later wrote, was the first person to transform Christian love into a powerful force for social change. Gandhi’s stress on love and nonviolence gave King ‘‘the method for social reform that I had been seeking’’ (King, Stride, 79).

While intellectually committed to nonviolence, King did not experience the power of nonviolent direct action first-hand until the start of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. During the boycott, King personally enacted Gandhian principles. With guidance from black pacifist Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, King eventually decided not to use armed bodyguards despite threats on his life, and reacted to violent experiences, such as the bombing of his home, with compassion. Through the practical experience of leading nonviolent protest, King came to understand how nonviolence could become a way of life, applicable to all situations. King called the principle of nonviolent resistance the ‘‘guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method’’ (Papers 5:423).

- The King Encyclopedia: Nonviolent Resistance