31 December 2023
”Rustin,” the new film about Bayard Rustin, brings Rustin out of the shadows. He was an indefatigable nonviolent educator and Martin Luther King’s mentor. He was organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. He was gay and kept out of sight. In producing the film “Rustin,” Barack and Michelle Obama seek to make his contributions visible.
In 2013, Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the movie’s trailer, the former president says, the film “is not only about him. It’s about the thousands of ordinary folks from all walks who showed the world what America looks like at our best.”
Obama highlights a little-noted aspect of the March on Washington: it made Black citizenship visible. Dignified, disciplined, and nonviolent, the marchers were civic examples needed in our time of bitter polarization and Washington dysfunction.
At age 18, I participated in the March. My father, Harry George Boyte, urged me to come. After directing the Atlanta Red Cross and becoming active in school desegregation, he joined Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1963 as the first white person on staff, before the March. Stretched out in a sleeping bag on his hotel room floor, I heard King practice “I Have a Dream” hours before he gave it.
The speech was inspiring, but I was most impressed by the marchers – truck drivers, sharecroppers, maids, students, preachers, teachers and many others. The Program Notes conveyed the message: “The Washington March is a living petition of the scores of thousands of citizens of both races. It will be orderly but not subservient … proud, but not arrogant …nonviolent but not timid.”
The Program Notes made a contrast like political theorist Margaret Canovan’s distinction between “mobs” and “publics.” Publics, she argued, have political sobriety: “an exceptional degree of political realism and common sense, together with a remarkable capacity to exercise self-restraint and put shared long-term interests above private interests and short-term impulses.” The notes put it: “In a neighborhood dispute there may be stunts, rough words and even hot insults; but when a whole people speaks to its government, the dialogue and the action must be on a level reflecting the worth of that people and the responsibility of that government.”
Blacks’ citizenship developed through years. Rustin taught Blacks and whites nonviolence in “movement schools” in the 1940s. James Lawson’s Nonviolent Institutes brought nonviolence to hundreds of young organizers. In his 1965 essay, “From Protest to Politics,” Rustin, calling for a shift from protest against segregation to a nonviolent movement for social equality, said “institutional transformation” was necessary. He would have known about the Rosenwald movement, which educated well-known figures like John Lewis, Coretta King, Maya Angelou, Medgar Evers and thousands of local leaders.
In a forthcoming article, I tell the story of this effort. Booker T. Washington convinced Julius Rosenwald about the dismal state of Black education. Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck and a Jewish leader concerned about social justice, created a fund at Tuskegee Institute that provided one-third the cost of building a school or library. Communities came up with the rest. They built more than 5,000 schools and thousands of libraries, centers of community pride. They educated more than one-third of African American students during Jim Crow. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank after World War II found direct correlation between education in Rosenwald schools and decrease in the racial achievement gap.
Rosenwald schools and libraries were what Sara Evans and I call “free spaces”: sites where people learn democracy and hone civic skills to cross divisions. Rosenwald organizers found supportive white professionals and educators who supported Black educational advance and rural whites to use the libraries.
Leila Treuhaft-Ali, a Yale student, researched the network of Jeanes Teachers, who shaped pedagogies and libraries’ civic role. “Citizenship education encompassed the whole student, including his or her personal life, intellectual attitudes, social activity, and relationships with others,” she described. Teachers “pioneered a pedagogy of Black citizenship which encouraged Black children to feel responsible for solving problems in their communities and also for questioning white supremacy.”
It fed into the hundreds of adult citizenship schools sponsored by SCLC’s Citizenship Education Program (CEP), for which I worked. From 1961 to 1968, local folks were trained at Dorchester Center, returned to their communities, and created citizenship schools in Rosenwald schools, beauty parlors, libraries, churches and elsewhere. Participants learned how to organize voter registration drives and address community problems.
They also learned citizenship, “some-bodiness” as King put it in his Nobel Prize speech.
Dorothy Cotton, director of CEP, described the goal: “We intended to establish and deepen the concept and awareness of ourselves as citizens. I would always say, ‘You will discover your capacity and your obligation to help solve the problems we face in communities, as a people, as a society. If things are going to change, you will have to change them.’”
It’s a legacy of citizenship we need to remember more than ever.
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Harry C. Boyte, Ph.D., is co-founder and senior scholar in Public Work Philosophy, Institute for Public Life and Work.