Bayard Rustin’s long-time partner spoke to BuzzFeed News about a new fund that he hopes boosts the work of LGBT activists he sees as Rustin’s successors.
Bayard Rustin today is best remembered as the organizing force behind the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave the famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
Robert Abbott Sengstacke / Getty Images
But Rustin, whose role in the civil rights movement was long downplayed because he was gay, was also an international activist whose work spanned five decades and five continents.
One of his earliest international efforts was supporting India's independence movement in the 1940s. As a staffer with the interfaith peace organization Fellowship of Reconciliation, he first visited several months after the assassination of independence leader and philosopher of non-violence Mohandas Gandhi.
In this picture from 1948 Rustin speaks with Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister after it won independence from Great Britain in 1947.
Courtesy of Walter Naegel.
Last month, a new project was launched to honor Rustin's international legacy as well as his work in the 1980s speaking out for LGBT rights. Called the Rustin Fund for Global Equality, it will provide direct support for LGBT rights abroad.
Started by veteran HIV, LGBT, and human rights activists, the fund's first fundraising goal is to raise $10,000 by mid-September for the Jamaican LGBT rights organization J-FLAG, organizer Kent Klindera told BuzzFeed News. Jamaica, which just celebrated its first pride festival this year, has high rates of anti-LGBT violence in the Americas and still has a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality on its books.
The fund "represents the idea that you can start out small," said Rustin's partner, Walter Naegel, in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "Just because you're small and you don't know where it's going to lead doesn't mean you shouldn't make the attempt."
Naegle — pictured in the center of this photograph from 1986 with Rustin and South African anti-apartheid activists — told BuzzFeed News that many LGBT activists in hostile countries are in a situation not unlike the one Rustin himself faced when he first started organizing protests against segregation in the U.S. South in the 1940s.
"Sometimes you can really be a lone voice out there in the wilderness speaking. That's really where Bayard often was in the 1940s... You see that these movements can build on the shoulders of earlier activists," Naegel said. Rustin believed "change can especially happen from the ground up."
Courtesy of Walter Naegel
