Like Frederick Douglass after the Civil War, working doggedly within the Republican Party, and earning the enmity of the remaining radicals for doing so, Rustin, after the heyday of the civil-rights movement, worked doggedly within the Democratic Party, earning the enmity of his time’s radicals. He was implacably clearheaded about the Soviet Union and its horrors at a time when many Black luminaries, including Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, were delusional about it. (Du Bois’s tribute to Stalin upon the dictator’s death makes unhappy reading for his admirers, of whom Rustin was one.) And his anti-Communism led him to make common cause with figures such as Senator Henry (Scoop)Jackson, the little-remembered leader of the Cold War liberals.
Yet attempts to kidnap Rustin for neoconservatism run up against his equally dogged commitment to a social-democratic program of vast government initiatives and investments. His dream was always of a new New Deal that would go further than the original one had, lifting all boats not by some rising tide of affluence but by giving everyone the same ship and the same sail. He has been praised by Marxist historians for his refusal to reduce inequality to a matter of psychology, of what white people think about Black people, and by neoconservatives for his repudiation of the totalitarian left—though the Marxists dislike his anti-Communism and the neocons dislike his socialism. What to make of him? Is he a man of irresolvable contradictions or one of exactly the right complexities, the kind we still need now?
Rustin was born in 1912 and raised by his grandmother in the Black Quaker belt not far from Philadelphia. His mother was a fluttering, spectral presence in his life—for a long time he believed her to be his sister—and he never knew his father. His grandmother was a devout Quaker, and a critical context in which to place Rustin is that of the African American Friends. Rustin was as much a representative of this creed as King was of the Black Baptist church.
Just as some in the antiwar movement in America were shaped by the now diminishing traditions of liberal Catholicism—think of Eugene McCarthy, Robert Lowell, even Robert Kennedy in his last years—Rustin’s civil-rights work was shaped by the practice of Quaker consensus-seeking. With no set dogma available, members of the Society of Friends have to consult their inner light to navigate, and the many boats are expected to knock against one another as they glide. The necessarily schismatic nature of the civil-rights movement, encompassing godless socialists as well as evangelical Christians, was exactly the right place for someone with a Friends background to flourish. Finding a way from individual crankiness to a working consensus was, as Harold D. Weaver, the leading scholar of Black Quakers, has made plain, a regular Quaker practice.