[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Democracy Now!'s Tribute to Bayard Rustin

[Brussel, Morton K]

Not infrequently Democracy Now! runs off the rails. I can remember well how disgusted I was with Bayard Rustin and his support of the Vietnam war by the U.S. .
It is a disgrace that those actions of his are unmentioned in the Democracy Now! piece.

--mkb

On Aug 12, 2013, at 10:32 AM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: <turbulo at aol.com<mailto:turbulo at aol.com>>
Subject: Democracy Now!'s Tribute to Bayard Rustin
Date: August 12, 2013

I sent the following e-mail to Democracy Now! in response to a tribute to Bayard Rustin they did this morning. The occasion was a posthumous award
Rustin is about to receive at the White House.

While rightly lauding the courage and commitment of Bayard Rustin as a founder and organizer of the civil rights movement, this morning’s tribute left out a less stellar side of his political career. By the mid 1960s,Rustin had sold his soul to Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party, acting to keep the civil rights and anti-war movements within the political bounds prescribed by the administration, and to red bait and exclude all elements deemed too radical by the cold warriors. He used his considerable influence to undermine the first big march against the Vietnam War in 1965 because its organizers refused to bar the participation of communists and other left-wing radicals. He opposed MLK’s 1967 Riverside Church address condemning the war. In his view, silence in the face of the wholesale slaughter of a people fighting for its independence was not too high a price to pay for remaining within the good graces of the slaughter’s chief perpetrator, in hopes that Johnson might do more for civil rights. It was Rustin’s role as a policeman for the White House that sullied his name in the eyes of the radical activists of that era, of which I was one. His posthumous accolade from Barack Obama comes as no surprise. In his older years he was a shining example the kind of housebroken “radical”that the president would no doubt like to see followed today. Rustin’s early role as a fighter deserves to be remembered. So do his later accommodations to power.  --Jim Creegan
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