(via petitedeath)

the-milk-eyed-mender:

secrethistoriesproject:

12. Bayard Rustin

What do a ‘Communist draft-dodging homosexual sex-pervert’ and a ‘Civil Rights hero’ have in common?

Well, for starters, they’re sometimes the same person.

Bayard Rustin was an activist and teacher who played a key role in the Civil Rights movement. His accomplishments included:

• Rustin moved to New York after spending time at university and in teacher training, and quickly became active in civil rights politics. He registered as a conscientious objector to World War II, and went to California to help protect the interests and properties of Japanese-Americans who were interred for the duration of the war.
• He worked on the campaign to defend the Scottsboro Boys, and was an early worker on the campaign for desegretation on public transport. In 1942, he was arrested for the first of many times for repeatedly refusing to move from the front seat of a bus when asked to do so.
• In 1947, he helped organise the first of the Freedom Rides, sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an interfaith and mixed-race pacifist group. He was arrested while on the Ride and served twenty-two days in a chain gang in North Carolina
• In 1948, he travelled to India to learn from Gandhi’s pacifist independence movement. 
• In 1956, he went to work as a close advisor to Dr Martin Luther King, passing on the techniques of non-violent resistance that he learned from the Gandhian movement. 
• And finally, he was the main organiser of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the event at which Dr King made his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech (link is to video). It was in no small part thanks to Rustin’s careful organisation (of everything from bus marshals to bathroom facilities) that the march was able to stay peaceful and non-violent.

So why have you never heard about Bayard Rustin in history class? 

Because Bayard Rustin was gay. 

(or, perhaps more accurately, because Bayard Rustin was openly gay and not particularly interested in keeping quiet about it).

In 1953, he was arrested in Pasadena, California for having consensual sex in a parked car with two male partners. He was intially charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct: the charges were later altered to a lesser count of ‘sex perversion’, to which he pleaded guilty. After his conviction, he was asked to leave the FOR,and he was later shunned by many members of the civil rights movement.

It’s important to remember that this may not have been completely due to the homophobia of the other civil rights leaders — they were acting under  the fear of being smeared or blackmailed by right-wing opposition (after all, these events were taking place at the height of McCarthyism). Their fears weren’t ill-founded, either — in 1963, right-wing Senator Strom Thurmond lectured Congress on Rustin’s ‘Communist draft-dodging homosexual sex-pervert’ ways. Some opponents even threatened to circulate rumours that Rustin and Dr King were having an affair. 

Nevertheless, Rustin never seems to have been inclined to deny his sexuality or to keep it a secret. Rachelle Horowitz, a fellow March organiser, commented that she thought ‘he’d never heard there was a closet’.  Immediately after his removal from the FOR Rustin briefly saw a psychiatrist, Dr Robert Ascher, but seems to have quickly given up on the idea of attempting to ‘cure’ himself of being gay. He continued to have male partners, and formed a long-term relationship with Walter Naegle in the late 1970s which lasted until the end of his life. As the litany of his achievements above suggests, he also managed to overcome the stigma of having been arrested for his sexuality. After being dismissed from the FOR, Rustin became secretary of the War Resisters’ League, and later worked as a secretary to Dr King.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin continued to work for civil rights — and among those rights were gay rights. He was one of the first thinkers to begin comparing the post-Stonewall gay rights movement to the Civil Rights movement, and in 1986 he gave a speech entitled ‘The New N****** Are Gays’ — a statement that I’m not going to comment on aside from saying that I think he was much more qualified to have an opinion about the topic than I am. He also worked to found Project South Africa, a programme which sought to connect concerned Americans with groups working for democracy in SA. By the time of his death in 1987, his FBI file stretched to over 10,000 pages.

At a time when post-1960s white American society was settling into cosily mythologising the history of the Civil Rights movement into a non-threatening, happy story of ‘Rosa Parks sat down on the bus because her feet were tired and then racism was over, hooray’, Rustin continued to ask difficult questions, cause trouble and demand more from his society — and for that, I sort of have to love him. 

More:

PDF of Rustin’s essay ‘From Montgomery to Stonewall’ plus a pamphlet authored by him preparing marchers for the 1963 March: http://www.illinoisprobono.org/calendarUploads/Rustin%20Documents.pdf

Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner, speaks about his life: http://rustin.org/?page_id=11

Detailed bio of Rustin from ‘Waging Nonviolence’: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/03/revisiting-rustin-on-his-centennial/

Profile on KNOWhomo with a brief excerpt from ‘The New N****** Are Gays’: http://knowhomo.tumblr.com/post/11565611172

Washington Post article on Rustin: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bayard-rustin-organizer-of-the-march-on-washington-was-crucial-to-the-movement/2011/08/17/gIQA0oZ7UJ_story.html

Website for Brother Outsider, a film biography of Rustin: http://rustin.org/?page_id=2

Article on Rustin’s speech ‘The New N****** are Gays’: http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/damnation/gays-are-the-new-niggers/

Wikipedia biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin

(via p0kemina)

goodstuffhappenedtoday:

Oh, this? Just some teenage girls from Nigeria who invented a urine-powered generator.

How’s this for an innovative startup: four Nigerian girls — the eldest of whom is just fifteen years old — have worked together to invent a generator that’s powered by urine. The group presented their creation at this year’s Maker Faire Africa, and it’s so freaking brilliant it makes me want travel back in time and punch 15-year-old me right in the solar plexus.

The Next Web lays out how it works:

• Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which cracks the urea into nitrogen, water, and hydrogen.
• The hydrogen goes into a water filter for purification, which then gets pushed into the gas cylinder.
• The gas cylinder pushes hydrogen into a cylinder of liquid borax, which is used to remove the moisture from the hydrogen gas.
• This purified hydrogen gas is pushed into the generator.
• 
  1 Liter of urine gives you 6 hours of electricity.

Here’s hoping these girls can get the funding they need to take this idea to new heights. Even if they don’t, we’ve got a feeling they’re going places.

Read more over at The Next Web.

(via mia-the-wonder-slut)

fuckyeahfeminists:

ilovecharts:

Perspective.

Comparing the months spent on wars

(via petitedeath)

eddyizm:

serutuf:

Gay Pride Events in Uganda

“The importance of this Pride event cannot be understated. The fact that these brave activists could pull this off in this milieu of persecution is a great victory for the community. Visibility like this notes the ongoing legacy of late activist David Kato, it defies the export of American Evangelical hate, and it helps ensure defeat of the Bahati Bill. It shows leadership for all of Africa, and above all it shows that the LGBT people of Uganda simply refuse to give up their right to exist and to live their natural born sexual orientation.”

you can read the full article here

Their bravery is inspirational. 

R. E. S. P. E. C. T.

(via feministdisney)

alloftheextremes:

“Our house was small, and when you grow up with domestic violence in a confined space you learn to gauge, very precisely, the temperature of situations. I knew exactly when the shouting was done and a hand was about to be raised – I also knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn. Curiously, I never felt fear for myself and he never struck me, an odd moral imposition that would not allow him to strike a child. The situation was barely tolerable: I witnessed terrible things, which I knew were wrong, but there was nowhere to go for help. Worse, there were those who condoned the abuse. I heard police or ambulance men, standing in our house, say, “She must have provoked him,” or, “Mrs Stewart, it takes two to make a fight.” They had no idea. The truth is my mother did nothing to deserve the violence she endured. She did not provoke my father, and even if she had, violence is an unacceptable way of dealing with conflict. Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.” Patrick Stewart

(via kiori)

girlsgetbusyzine:

pizzagrrrl:

Peggielene Bartels, A.K.A. King Peggy, is currently the King of Otuam, Ghana. She was chosen to be one of only three female kings in Ghana, and when she discovered that male chauvinists wanted her to only be a figurehead, she said: “They were treating me like I am a second-class citizen because I am a woman. I said, ‘Hell no, you’re not going to do this to a woman!’” When she encountered corruption and the threat of embezzlement to the royal funds, she declared “I’m going to squeeze their balls so hard their eyes pop!”

King Peggy has maintained her work in Ghana’s embassy in Washington, D.C. while making education affordable in Otuam, installing borehead wells to produce clean drinking water, enforcing incarceration laws to deal with domestic violence, replenishing the royal coffers by taxing Otuam’s fishing industry to improve life in the village, and appointing three women to her council.

“Nobody should tell you, ‘You’re a woman, you can’t do it,’” she insists. “You can do it. Be ready to accept it when the calling comes.”

Quoted from the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Ms. Magazine.

(via albinwonderland)

(via the420love)

watershedplus:

An innovative initiative is taking place in the Philippines to bring sustainable lighting to homes in impoverished communities. Empty plastic bottles are installed in the roof, filled with water and bleach they refract sunlight. These “solar light bulbs” provide light equivalent to a 55watt light bulb.

See how they’re made here. From Visual News

(via petitedeath)

Coming to Washington D.C., one of my goals was to attend a massive public protest in favor of women’s rights, in response to the recent attacks against a woman’s right to birth control, abortion, and a culture that teaches women to protect themselves against rape instead of teaching boys not to rape.  I will have this opportunity tomorrow, when I attend the Unite Against War on Women DC Rally:

https://www.facebook.com/events/410230738990905/

I am really looking forward to this event.  I will post pictures, thoughts, and comments tomorrow.