What Would Baynard Rustin Say?

Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) civil rights leader and peace activist is the subject of a PBS documentary, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (www.rustin.org), that premiered on national PBS Program, Point of View (POV) on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January. There will be repeat telecasts.

He organized the March on Washington in 1963. Almost 10 years prior to the March, Bayard was a crucial advisor to Dr. King in the Montgomery bus sit-ins. He taught the 25-year-old Martin Luther the mechanics of running a non-violent civil disobedience campaign (first step: get rid of your armed guards!).

A decade before that, in the 40s, he worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) pioneering (in North America) the strategy and tactics of non-violent civil disobedience. FOR was a group of Quakers and other citizens, black and white, who were active against racial segregation. Dynamic in figuring out and debating ideas about civil protest and disobedience they used their bodies for protest and change by sitting together as black and white in buses and restaurants in the South. Often arrested, offering non violent response in the teeth of violent abuse and intimidation, at times their actions inspired or shamed people and establishments into changing their ways.

Among the many interesting things about Rustin is his inspiration for non violent civil-disobedience from Gandhi, whose principles he learnt and first put to practice with the FOR, and which he would debate, in subsequent decades with political personalities who belonged to the generation after him. He argued for integration versus an aggressive self segregation with Malcolm X and non violence and political participation versus a militant nationalism with Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers.

Sitting in Union Square Park in Manhattan I was talking with Mridu Chandra, a television producer who co-produced the documentary, about how Gandhian ideas of using the body for protest received an inspired response from Rustin, an activist and a black man who was openly gay throughout his life and career.

She wrote her MA thesis at the University of Chicago on Gandhi’s idea of resisting imperialism through the body (do not wear it, eat it, live it). She made the point to me that civil rights activists explicitly and implicitly used Gandhian ideas. Gandhi rejected the value system of the imperialists claiming we were not conquered but gave ourselves over to the conqueror because we wanted capitalism and modernity. To make his point about resisting colonialism and telegraph the message to India and the world he gave up his city garb, lived in a village and looked like a villager.

Many activists, and Bayard being among the pioneers, believed in making their body the vehicle of their protest, as well as its symbol.

It struck me from the images of Rustin’s life, as well as from the images of other civil rights leaders, activists and personalities from the era of the civil rights movement, all images abundant in the documentary, how they tailored their image to their cause. Black men and women would dress up as middle class professional people for protest, demanding middle class rights, the right to sit in desegregated bus, restaurant, movie theatre, demanding for their
children the right to attend a desegregated school and university. The images of black men in suits and women in skirts hauled away and/or hosed down for the cause of a non-violent struggle for civil rights readily made sense to the whole world.

It was moving to my parents’ generation in South Asia, who were in their mid-20s in the mid-1960s in the post-colonial era that people who look middle class were denied a middle class living because of the color of their skin.

Union Square Park where I was sitting having a conversation with the co-producer of the documentary, is the venue for present day protests and public meetings like the Communist party parade, worker party parades, marches against poverty, post September 11th peace marches. We talked about why today’s activists do not inspire the world. In our casual GAP knockoffs and Old Navy clothes, we convey the idea that we are rebelling against suburban middle class proprieties.

That look is an essentially meaningless image for someone in Karachi, Mumbai or Kuala Lumpur.

In these times its especially important that people in the south, if they catch an image over tv, over the internet, are moved by the fact that in New York and Washington occur anti war rallies and protests against globalization.

I wonder how the cause of non-violent protestors, mostly white and middle class, who protest at the World Bank headquarters in D.C (say, the protest organized in late September) or the anti-war protest in Central Park, in New York (on October 6th, on the anniversary of the start of the US bombing of Afghanistan) can create images that are potent in a global context. Do people, say in Karachi, Pakistan, where local papers regularly carry headline news of IMF conditionalities, as well as analysis linking them to rising prices of utilities, find inspirational images of people who protest these policies in Washington? Whether CNN circulates these images is not an issue in a world where Al Jazeera carries what CNN will not and alternative news outlets are on many a city dwellers’ fingertips in ubiquitous Karachi cybercafes.

I find the question of the poetics of the images of non violent protest compelling when it is becoming clear that many in Karachi certainly see Al Qaeda as a violent response to globalization. I claim that by pointing to the election sloganeering from the Pakistani elections. It does not escape many Pakistanis that Al Qaeda is bad for the business of multinational corporations and that Al Qaeda did bring down something called The World Trade Center.

As Arundhati Roy recently coined it in a piece in the Guardian: its a battle between Al Qaeda and Al Fayda (the forces of global profit). In a world transfixed by this duality how does non-violent civil disobedience symbolize its values?

I think Bayard Rustin would have been very interested in the issue of how violence may be having a more potent image these days than non-violent protest.