Bayard Rustin Marches Free
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2022
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
June 11, 1946. Bayard Rustin walks out of the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary after serving a sentence for conscientiously objecting to WWII. A pacifist organizer, his efforts reach the ears of Mahatma Gandhi, who invites him to India. And Rustin never looks back. Soon he’s mentoring a young Alabama preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as Rustin thrust into the middle of a Civil Rights Movement. But Rustin’s enemies want him gone, and the entire movement along with him. So how does this one man become responsible for the national reach and spread of active nonviolent resistance? And why, as the chief architect of the historic 1963 March on Washington, is his name not more known?
Special thanks to Walter Naegle, Bayard Rustin's partner and the current executor of his estate, and John D'Emilio, professor emeritus of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:05.1 | History this week. June 11, 1946. |
| 0:13.5 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:17.5 | Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in rural Pennsylvania is surrounded by rolling fields of farmland. |
| 0:24.0 | The kind of fields where a man can't hide. But Bired Rustin doesn't have to hide. |
| 0:30.6 | He's leaving prison today as a free man. And in any case, Bired Rustin is not the hiding type. |
| 0:40.0 | He was incarcerated in the first place because he refused to hide his beliefs. |
| 0:44.7 | Even with World War II raging and patriotic fervor at its peak, |
| 0:48.8 | Rustin refused to fight. He'd grown up a quaker in Westchester, Pennsylvania and had been a pacifist since |
| 0:55.4 | he was a child. That made him a conscientious objector. Not just to World War II, but to every war. |
| 1:03.4 | For this, he'd been arrested, convicted, and sent to federal prison. |
| 1:09.2 | From the beginning, prison officials haven't known quite what to make of Rustin. |
| 1:14.0 | When he first arrives, they note in his file, it is believed that this inmate will continue to bring |
| 1:20.1 | up racial problems in this institution, as has been his practice before being committed here. |
| 1:25.6 | His adjustment in this institution is doubtful. As time goes on, Rustin's file turns up many |
| 1:33.1 | signs that, indeed, he does continue to bring up problems in the prison. He's disciplined for |
| 1:40.3 | getting fellow inmates to protest things like the state of medical care, the policies on mail, |
| 1:45.7 | the fact that the cafeterias are segregated. You can feel in the record that the prison officials |
| 1:51.6 | are just no match for him. They write that one day at lunch, he refused to line up with the |
| 1:57.2 | other black inmates. Instead, started to deliver an oration on his opinions of segregation, etc. |
| 2:04.0 | He was told to line up as required, but this he refused to do. Eventually, they transfer |
| 2:12.3 | Rustin to the lower security farm camp and finally release him. But even at this last moment, |
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