In the mag­a­zine, Itha­ca College’s Car­los Figueroa looks back at an impor­tant talk Bayard Rustin gave to the young Friends asso­ci­a­tion in Philadel­phia in 1948. It was a piv­otal moment in a life that con­tained so many: Rustin had spent the ear­ly 1940s orga­niz­ing with the Fel­low­ship of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and was recent­ly released from a prison term for vio­lat­ing the Selec­tive Ser­vice Act. This was his oppor­tu­ni­ty to lay out a paci­fist pol­i­tics for the Cold War era:

Rustin explic­it­ly sought to per­suade oth­ers into con­sid­er­ing civ­il dis­obe­di­ence as a social demo­c­ra­t­ic strat­e­gy for pur­su­ing struc­tur­al and pol­i­cy change. Rustin advo­cat­ed for a human­i­tar­i­an, com­mu­nal, and moral­is­tic approach to change, thus dis­re­gard­ing an individual’s polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion, geo­graph­ic loca­tion, or gov­ern­ment system.

Over on YouTube, the newest episode of Quak­er­S­peak inter­views Rustin’s part­ner Wal­ter Nae­gle:

Bayard believed in the one­ness of the human fam­i­ly, in the broth­er­hood and sis­ter­hood of all peo­ple,” Wal­ter says. “He believed in the pow­er of non­vi­o­lence which comes out of that belief in the one­ness of all peo­ple.… He saw every­body as equal in the eyes of the divine.

Rustin’s walk with Friends was rather com­pli­cat­ed and he’s often not been giv­en the recog­ni­tion he deserves.