by Olivia Laing
Hagerman was stunned. The next day, he wrote a rather less coherent letter to the director of the Bureau of Prisons, claiming that his ‘plausible, smooth and ingratiating’ new prisoner was planning to instigate an uprising and asking that this ‘extremely capable agitator’ be transferred to Danbury. The letter was accompanied by a report from a junior officer, who said Rustin had sung a strange, subversive song through the prison pipe system, which began by describing ‘the lovely natural scenes and the scented air from the flowers of Louisiana’, but culminated ‘in a tragedy of a human body with bulging eyes being hanged and the air filled with the stench of burning flesh.’ He’d evidently never heard ‘Strange Fruit’ sung by Billie Holiday before.
Hagerman’s feelings about Rustin changed a few weeks later. He’d been persuaded to experiment with desegregating cellblock E for a few hours on Sunday afternoons. Rustin was the only black prisoner to enter the white area, and his presence infuriated a man named Huddleston, who attacked Rustin with a mop handle. His friends tried to break up the fight, but Rustin asked them to stand aside and allowed Huddleston to beat him until the stick splintered, at which point Huddleston broke down and collapsed shaking on the floor. Rustin’s wrist was broken but his spirits were buoyant. In a letter to a friend a few days later, he was far more excited about the operetta he’d organised than the attack, which, he explained, had strengthened his position with the warden by demonstrating the moral authority of non-violent resistance. Can you find me a second-hand mandolin, he finished by asking. He wanted to learn to play sixteenth-century ballads.
All the time, he kept chipping away. Even the movie theatre was segregated. Fine, he wouldn’t watch movies. His letters were censored, or not delivered at all. Very well, he would write more of them and lose his privilege altogether, rather than sink to censoring himself. He wouldn’t ask permission for specific books to be sent to him, either. ‘I shall not help them rob me’, he wrote to his white lover, Davis Platt. ‘They are obstructing justice; they stand between the inmate and his basic rights . . . One ought to resist the entire system!’
He was on the brink of succeeding in his campaign to desegregate cellblock E when a devastating incident occurred. An assistant warden told Hagerman that two inmates had seen Rustin engaging in oral sex. A report was filed, and the prison disciplinary board ordered Rustin into solitary confinement. Insisting it was a frame-up, he clung to his chair until three officers managed to drag him away. A few days later the prison psychiatrist assessed him as ‘a constitutional homo’, adding: ‘the high voice, the extravagant mannerisms, the tremendous conceit, the general unmanliness of the inmate frame a picture . . . that it does not take a Freud to diagnose.’ Though the Lavender Scare was not yet underway, signs of gender transgression were already regarded as official markers of sexual deviancy.
It was the beginning of a dynamic that would recur right through Rustin’s life. In the pacifist and civil rights movements alike, his homosexuality was regarded as an unexploded bomb, capable of jeopardising or even destroying the campaigns in which he played such an outsized role. Unlike Martin, he had no desire for a life of secrecy or self-confinement, and nor was he interested in monogamy. As his colleague Rachelle Horowitz once observed, ‘he never knew there was a closet to go into.’ While his colleagues in the Fellowship of Reconciliation wrote him coercive, distressing letters, begging him to curb his objectionable desires, perhaps even marry a woman, he was in the library, reading the history of non-cooperation, strikes, sit-ins and civil disobedience.
‘For these are our only weapons’, he wrote to a friend. In June 1945, he led a mixed group who refused to eat in the dining room until it was desegregated. ‘We are willing to pay a price for freedom’, he wrote in an open letter to all inmates. That price was transfer to Lewisburg, where he promptly went on hunger strike to desegregate the dining room there, becoming so emaciated that he was tube-fed in the prison hospital. It wasn’t until he was told by Muste about the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August that he decided to stop resisting and serve his remaining time quietly. ‘I am needed on the outside’, he explained in a letter to the warden in which he formally resigned from his acts of agitation (Reich too was horrified by the atom bomb, writing furiously in his diary about the impossibility of such a menacing weapon ever bringing peace, and describing it strangely as a prisoner that kills).
Lewisburg was by no means the last prison Rustin saw. Almost as soon as he returned to New York, moving into an apartment with Platt, he began to plan the Journey of Reconciliation, a precursor to the famous Freedom Rides of 1961. The Journey was an attempt to enforce Morgan v. Virginia, a recent Supreme Court ruling that had declared segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional. ‘Unjust social laws and patterns do not change because supreme courts deliver just verdicts’, Rustin wrote emphatically in the Louisiana Weekly. ‘Social progress comes from struggle.’
There’s a photograph of some of the team that went into the South in the spring of 1947, led by Rustin and his white colleague George Houser. They’re smartly dressed in suits, coats over their arms, cases in their hands. Rustin is at the back, taller than the rest, looking dandyish and handsome in a bowtie. They planned to travel for two weeks to Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky, in interracial pairs or threes, the black rider sitting in the white section at the front, and the white rider sitting in the black Jim Crow section at the back. If they were arrested, they were instructed to go peacefully to the police station and there contact the nearest lawyer from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which promised to provide legal support for the campaign.
Rustin sang on the buses, and gave impassioned talks each night in whatever small town the freedom riders found themselves. There were fewer violent incidents than they’d expected until they reached North Carolina. At Chapel Hill bus station they were arrested for violating the local Jim Crow law against integrated travel. A lynch mob of white taxi drivers assembled and the riders had to be rescued by a sympathetic local reverend. The taxi drivers followed, throwing rocks through his windows and threatening to burn down his house. None of the mob were arrested, but despite the best efforts of the NAACP lawyer, the charges incurred by the riders could not be overturned.
On 21 March 1949, while Malcolm X was reading the history of slavery in the library at Norfolk Prison and Reich was being pursued by the FDA, Rustin began a twenty-two-day sentence on a chain gang in Roxboro, North Carolina. His harrowing account, published that summer in the New York Post, mirrors Jacobson’s argument of the same year. The men lived in filth. Each week, they were given a pair of trousers, a shirt, a pair of socks, a single set of undergarments and a towel, which had to last a week of heavy labour in the rain and mud. Everything else – comb, brush, razor, toothbrush, pencil, paper, stamps, cigarettes – they either had to buy, steal or do without. The ten-hour days, punctuated by two fifteen-minute smoking breaks, were physically hard, but often just as pointless as picking oakum or slogging on a treadmill. Rustin’s crew spent one day digging holes they knew another road crew would be ordered to fill.
As Jacobson had observed, the prisoners existed in a sadistic environment controlled in every respect by the guards. The chain gang worked under the aggressive scrutiny of a boss and a guard, the latter armed with a revolver and a shotgun. On his first day, Rustin watched the boss punch several convicts in the face. When a prisoner swore at the convict next to him, the boss suggested the guard shoot at the feet of the next offender and cripple him. ‘Hell no,’ the guard replied. ‘I ain’t aimin’ fer no feet. I like hearts and livers. That’s what really learns ’em.’ Often the guards got so bored they selected a victim to torment. On several occasions, Rustin watched as the guard trained his rifle on a boy named Oscar’s chest, insisting that he dance, and grin as he did it.
Formal punishments were just as unpleasant as they had been back in Wilde’s day. For major offences, men were beaten with a leather strap or placed in
‘the hole’ – solitary confinement in an unlighted cell on a diet of water and three soda crackers a day, from which they emerged pounds lighter but still expected to resume their exacting labours. For minor crimes, prisoners were ‘hung up on the bars’, which meant being cuffed to the vertical bars of a cell in a standing position for days at a time, with short breaks to use the toilet. The men’s feet and wrists would swell, as would their testicles. A horizontal version of this procedure, known as four-pointing, is widespread in American prisons today, particularly in Lewisburg, which has long since abandoned its reformist ideals and is now distinguished by the double-celling of occupants in spaces no larger than the average parking space.
What was the point, Rustin wondered. It was plain no one would be improved or cured by this kind of treatment, but it also left society unprotected, since ‘these men and thousands like them return to society not only uncured but with heightened resentment and a desire for revenge.’ The prison was plainly an inescapable system for generating free labour, continuing the practices of slavery under the guise of punishment. Many of the men left without a cent and were back within days, arrested for the crime of vagrancy.
Rustin’s experiences led him to the same conclusion as Jacobson: that retribution or deterrence was not only inhumane, but pointless too. Violence perpetuated violence, maintaining a cycle of limitless revenge and robbing people of the capacity to behave like human beings. The only principle on which a successful prison could be founded was rehabilitation. What would happen if the men among whom he’d been confined were given meaningful work and education, medical care and proper food, he asked his readers. ‘If the law of cause and effect still operates in human relations, the answer seems clear.’
*
But nothing is clear in human relations. We all want many things, and those things do not always correlate or align. While Rustin’s account of his experiences on the chain gang did bring about a reform of North Carolina’s penal practices, the next time he entered a prison was not as a consequence of his political beliefs, and it did not enlarge his or anyone else’s freedom. On 12 January 1953, he was giving a lecture in Pasadena. Later that night he was walking through the city when he encountered two white men in a car, both twenty-three. Perhaps he propositioned them, or some flirtation occurred, but the upshot was that he was found by the police in the car, in the act of giving the passenger oral sex. All three men were arrested on a morals charge and sent to Los Angeles County Jail. It was reported in national newspapers and Rustin was forced to resign from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Right to the end of his life, he still swore he’d been the victim of entrapment.
If you haven’t heard of Bayard Rustin, this arrest is the reason. It served to destroy his reputation, casting a long and inescapable shadow over the remainder of his career. He went on to become one of the great architects of the civil rights movement, but though he made alliances with multiple organisations and ran some of the movement’s most significant campaigns, he never held a major leadership role. Because of the prejudice that attached to his sexuality, this brilliant strat-egist and tactician had to operate beneath the threshold of visibility, subject to ongoing exclusion and erasure even as he sought to liberate other bodies from the prisons they were in.
In 1955 Rustin was invited by activists in Montgomery, Alabama to help engineer a planned boycott against segregation on the city’s buses. If the Journey of Reconciliation had established a working method for the civil rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycott ignited it, creating an unstoppable wave of resistance across the nation. While he was in the city, Rustin was introduced to a charismatic young preacher, only twenty-six but with a striking gift for public speaking. Though Martin Luther King Jr. had read Gandhi, he didn’t fully understand non-violent direct action. It was Rustin who served as his mentor, introducing him to the principles and practices of pacifism. At the time King still had guns and armed guards in his home, and Rustin encouraged him to dispense with them, explaining that violence could only ever kindle more violence (this belief would form a major point of contention with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, who believed that the state-sanctioned ultra-violence of white supremacy made self-defence essential).
Before he started work with the King family, Rustin laid out his personal history, explaining the circumstances of his arrest and how it made him a potential liability. King, he thought, had never met a gay person before but nor was he willing to dispense with this charismatic source of experience and guidance. During the late 1950s, the two men worked closely together to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a network of community groups that fought segregation, with King as its first president.
It wasn’t until the turn of the decade that their relationship was brought up short. One of the many ways the civil rights movement was undermined was a concerted campaign to discredit its leaders through revealing evidence of sexual infidelities. King, who had many extra-marital affairs, was particularly vulnerable to this mode of attack. In 1960, the African-American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell tried to shut down a demonstration that Rustin was organising at the Democratic convention by threatening to announce Rustin and King were lovers. It wasn’t true, but King’s advisors warned him it would be wise to distance himself from Rustin and cancel the protests, rather than risk evidence about his own sexual history leaking out to a hostile press. Aware that King was ‘torn’, ‘distressed’, ‘uneasy’, and sensible of the higher purpose of their work, Rustin resigned from the SCLC.
He was brought back into the fold in 1963 to run the March on Washington, ‘the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation’ (Malcolm X saw it rather differently, decrying ‘the Farce on Washington’, which he thought was rapidly taken over and controlled by the white establishment). The ongoing controversy around Rustin’s sexuality meant he was swiftly demoted from official organiser to deputy. Despite this more discreet position, the white segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond still tried to use Rustin as a tool to discredit the march. On 13 August, with fifteen days to go, he launched an attack in the Senate, reading out the entirety of Rustin’s police record and jail booking log. ‘The conviction’, he bellowed, ‘was sex perversion.’ By reciting it inside the Senate, he ensured it was logged in perpetuity in the Congressional Records, where it can still be read today, a malevolent memento of an era that has only just passed.
This time, at least, the organisers stood by Rustin. It was he who insisted that King speak last, a touch of theatre that he hoped meant the massive crowd would not disperse early. He was right. Two hundred and fifty thousand Americans were in the Mall when King spoke on the afternoon of 28 August 1963, sweltering in their Sunday best as he set out his dignified encapsulation of all the movement’s hopes. In ‘I Have a Dream’, he imagined a day in which his own four children would not be judged by the colour of their skin but the content of their character, at long last liberated from the prison of the body.
The problem for Rustin was that at this moment in time, homosexuality was not understood either as part of the inheritance of the body or as a valid choice for what you might want to do it with it. Instead, it was regarded as a component of character, which is to say a personal weakness rather than a source of solidarity and common struggle. Years later, he observed that though the civil rights movement was rife with affairs and promiscuity (‘the crap that was going on in those motels . . . was totally acceptable’), it was only homosexuality that was regarded as a moral failing.
To be both black and queer was, he thought, to spend time on two crosses, existing in a punishing blind spot that even Reich had refused to address. Like his friend James Baldwin – who was kept off-stage at the March despite being the movement’s most eloquent commentator, and who was likewise subject to rampant homophobia from those who shared his skin colour and rampant racism from those who shared his sexuality – Rustin was an outsider in every camp. He was still furious about it, right to the end of his life
. A few months before he died, in the summer of 1987, he told an interviewer:
There is no question in my mind that there was considerable prejudice amongst a number of people that I worked with. But of course they would never admit that they were prejudiced. They would say that they were afraid that it might hurt the movement. The fact of the matter is, it was already known, it was nothing to hide. You can’t hurt the movement unless you have something to reveal . . . They also said any more talk would hurt me. They would look at me soulfully and say, surely you don’t want to go through any more humiliation? Well, I wasn’t humiliated.
One of the most admirable things about Rustin is that he refused to serve as his own jailer, declining to live inside the closet even if he was ostracised or punished. His story viscerally demonstrates that prison is not simply an institution, but the concrete embodiment of a set of attitudes that control behaviour on the outside, too. Like Malcolm X, Rustin refused to obey, which gave him a kind of freedom, even when he was behind bars.
But to acknowledge that the prison extends far into society is not to diminish the power of the institution itself. By the time Rustin made this statement, the carceral landscape in America had become far more oppressive than when either he or Reich were serving time in Lewisburg. The Bureau of Prisons officially dropped the policy of reform in 1975 and in 1984 the Sentencing Reform Act abolished parole in federal prisons. The consequence was rapid overcrowding, since far more people stayed in the system for longer. At around the same time, the War on Drugs, rollbacks on welfare, higher sentences for minor crimes, minimum sentencing and a three-strike policy in many states created a substantial increase in the number of people sent to prison, despite a declining crime rate. Many of these changes disproportionately affected black people, creating a prison population that replicated the hateful old pattern of slavery.