Sins of Omission

I was happy to see a new children’s biography of Bayard Rustin when I was unpacking the latest shipment of books this morning. There have been two others: Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement by James Haskins (Hyperion, 1997) and No Easy Answers: Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement by Calvin Craig Miller (Morgan Reynolds, 2005), and both have presented Rustin’s sexuality as an important part of his biography.

The new one by Larry Dane Brimner, We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin (Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills, 2007), is nicely designed, with a lot of black-and-white photographs. I had high hopes for it.

Unfortunately, there is no mention in the text that Rustin was gay, a fact that he was open about throughout his life. There’s no mention of his arrest and imprisonment for consensual sodomy (i.e. being gay) in California in 1953, no mention of him being forced to resign from SCLC in 1960 because of his sexuality, and no mention of him being purposely written out of the history of the 1963 March on Washington, even though he, along with A. Philip Randolph, was one of two principle organizers. Brimner’s story of Rustin’s role in the struggle for civil rights ends in 1963. But the real story did not end there. He continued the fight for human rights until his death in 1987, often in the context of gay rights.

Rustin’s homosexuality is mentioned in an author’s note at the end of the book, but only as an explanation as to why he has remained so invisible in the history of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. It’s too bad the author and/or publisher didn’t have the courage to tell that part of his story. In this day and age, there’s no excuse for erasing the gay part of Rustin’s soul in a biography for children.