I think that, in other words, following the election, the major purpose of the civil rights movement are three: Keep in motion and on the streets. Two, broaden the base of the protest by getting many, many more white elements into it. And thirdly, proceed to make demands which are in keeping with…
Catalog
Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin (; March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania, where his family was involved in civil rights work. In 1936, he moved to Harlem, New York City, where he earned a living as a nightclub and stage singer. He continued activism for civil rights. In the pacifist groups Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League (WRL), Rustin practiced nonviolence. A member of the Communist Party before 1941, he collaborated with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement in 1941 to press for an end to discrimination in employment. He was a leading activist of the early Civil Rights Movement, helping to initiate a 1947 Freedom Ride to challenge, with civil disobedience, the racial segregation issue related to interstate busing. He recognized Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen King's leadership. Rustin promoted the philosophy of nonviolence and the practices of nonviolent resistance, which he had observed while working with Mahatma Gandhi's movement in India, and helped teach Martin Luther King, Jr. about nonviolenc
Given the technological revolution, this kind of talk on the part of Negro institutions, merely leads to that atmosphere where Negroes and whites will be fighting in the streets over the few jobs which do exist, or over jobs which do not exist.
If you had 50 Negroes who were willing to sit in the restaurant, go to jail, be beaten, have cigarette ends stuffed down their neck, have their hair clipped, have their hair burned, if they would merely sit, that institution, that restaurant could be changed in a few days.
From 1955 until 1963, the Negro people's attention was given to those things which most highly revealed the basis of their revolt. And the key word is dignity. The one place where it was clear that one was not being treated with dignity was in public accommodations, because they had to come up…
That is to say, we want our slice of that cake. We do not want to change it from vanilla to chocolate. We want that cake, and our share of it, and we want it now. That is the conscious objective of the Negro movement. However the Negro thinks of his effort to integrate, the very fact that the…
The question invariably arises as to what, in fact, is the nature of the civil rights movement today? And I am one who claims that it is, at once, a movement for integration into the American society, as it now exists, and simultaneously a revolutionary movement. If one were to ask the average Negro…
I think the movement contributed to this nation a sense of universal freedom. Precisely because women saw our movement in the sixties, stimulated them to want their rights. The fact that students saw the movement of the sixties created a student movement in this country. The fact that the people…
When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.