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More than 20 years before Muhammad Ali was famously
stripped of his boxing titles and convicted of draft evasion, Bayard Rustin
served 27 months in prison for refusing to fight during World War II. Unlike Ali, whose application for conscientious
objector status was denied, Rustin, a Quaker, had the option of serving in
the Civilian Public Service; Rustin instead chose jail.
Later he would advise the organizers of the 1955
Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott; he also mentored Dr. Martin Luther King on
the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the principles of nonviolent resistance
and even edited many of King’s speeches. Rustin was also the primary
organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. But you won’t read much about Rustin’s work
for civil rights, because, in addition to being an African-American and a
Marxist, he was also homosexual. John D’Emilio, a Rustin biographer and
professor of history and gender and women’s studies at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, will present a lecture on Rustin’s obscure
career at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 16, in the University of Illinois at
Springfield Public Affairs Center. D’Emilio, the author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, calls his subject a man without a home in history.
“If Rustin has been lost in the shadows of
history, it is at least in part because he was a gay man in an era when the
stigma attached to this was unrelieved,” D’Emilio writes in the
book’s introduction. At 7 p.m. the next day, Oct. 17, the author will speak
in UIS’s Brookens Auditorium on the state of gay rights and politics
in the U.S. with a lecture, “Will the Courts Set Us
Free? Reflections on the Same-Sex-Marriage Fight.”
Both events are free and open to the public.
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2007.
