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Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin Quotes

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Famous Bayard Rustin Quotes

“The civil rights movement is evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement--an evolution calling its very name into question. It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality. From sit-ins and Freedom Rides we have gone into rent strikes, boycotts, community organization, and political action. As a consequence of this natural evolution, the Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socioeconomic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs but human needs generally.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“We are indeed a house divided. But the division between race and race, class and class, will not be dissolved by massive infusions of brotherly sentiment. The division is not the result of bad sentiment, and therefore will not be healed by rhetoric. Rather the division and the bad sentiments are both reflections of vast and growing inequalities in our socioeconomic system--inequalities of wealth, of status, of education, of access to political power. Talk of brotherhood and "tolerance" (are we merely to "tolerate" one another?) might once have had a cooling effect, but increasingly it grates on the nerves. It evokes contempt not because the values of brotherhood are wrong--they are more important than ever--but because it just does not correspond to the reality we see around us. And such talk does nothing to eliminate the inequalities that breed resentment and deep discontent.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“Economic and social deprivation, if accepted by its victims as their lot in life, breeds passivity, even docility. The miserable yield to their fate as divinely ordained or as their own fault. And, indeed, many Negroes in earlier generations felt that way. Today young Negroes aren't having any of this. They don't share the feeling that something must be wrong with them, that they are responsible for their own exclusion from this affluent society. The civil rights movement--in fact, the whole liberal trend beginning with John Kennedy's election--has told them otherwise. These young Negroes are right. The promises made to them were good and necessary and long, long overdue. The youth were right to believe in them. The only trouble is that the promises were not fulfilled.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“As the civil rights movement progressed, winning victory after victory in public accommodations and voting rights, it became increasingly conscious that these victories would not be secure or far-reaching without a radical improvement in the Negro's socioeconomic position. And so the movement reached out of the South into the urban centers of the North and the West. It moved from public accommodations to employment, welfare, housing, education--to find a host of problems the nation had let fester for a generation. But these were not problems that affected the Negro alone or that could be solved easily with the movement's traditional protest tactics. These injustices were imbedded not in ancient and obsolete institutional arrangements but in the priorities of powerful vested interests, in the direction of public policy, in the allocation of our national resources. Sit-ins could integrate a lunch counter, but massive social investments and imaginative public policies were required to eliminate the deeper inequalities.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“Civil disobedience is urged not to destroy the United States but because the government is now poorly organized to achieve democracy. The aim of such a movement always will be to improve the nature of the government, to urge and counsel resistance to military Jim Crow in the interest of a higher law--the principle of equality and justice upon which real community and security depend.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“The needs of the black community for adequate jobs, housing, and education can be met only by developing a political strategy that will attract a majority of Americans to a program for social change. There are whites who are unemployed and white workers whose real income is steadily decreasing as the cost of living rises. Both these groups share with blacks the desire for increased and upgraded employment opportunities. Let us build a movement with them. there are whites living in substandard housing and paying exorbitant rents. Their children attend schools that are overcrowded and understaffed. They share with blacks the desire for massively funded programs of housing and education. Let us build a movement with them also. And there are those more affluent whites of liberal persuasion who sincerely desire social justice. They too should be our allies. These are positive points around which a political majority can be built. Such a strategy is the only means by which black people will achieve social and economic equality within the context of contemporary American society.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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