One of the all time favorite parlor games is known as “What If ...?”   Take some well known historical event and then change a minor detail.   What if Columbus’ boat had sprung a leak?  What if Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun had misfired?   Alter the past by some chance throw of the dice and you realize that history might have taken a very different direction.

So what if Martin Luther King Jr.’s microphone had failed to function that August day in 1963 when he delivered his famous speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?   What if  the transportation hadn’t materialized and the expected crowds hadn’t shown up, or what if a riot had erupted, or even if there hadn’t been enough porta-potties on hand?   The press probably would have reported that the March on Washington was a fiasco, like the Poor People’s Campaign that King organized five years later, another encampment in the nation’s capitol which under a heavy downpour of rain melted down into a miasma of mud and foul tempers.  The 1963 March more than any other single event catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. out of his role as a Southern civil rights activist and into the spotlight of national leadership.  And the fact that there were no “what if’s, uh-ohs, or boo-boos” that day was almost entirely due to the man who planned the March and orchestrated the logistics, who at the time was one of King’s closest advisors and confidantes, Bayard Rustin.

Rustin was the man who originally converted Dr. King to the philosophy of non-violence.   The two first met in 1956, just a few weeks after the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott.   A recent graduate of Boston University’s School of Theology, King was only twenty-six years old at the time and although he was the titular leader of the boycott he was in deeply over his head.  Of course he was a Christian and had read Gandhi in seminary, but he wasn’t a pacifist and knew little about organizing a movement of non-violent resistance.  When his house was bombed shortly after the boycott began, King applied for a license to carry a handgun in his car, and the first time Rustin visited the King’s home, he was surprised to see a rifle resting on a chair.  As the two sat and talked in the kitchen, Rustin began to tutor King in the rudiments of waging peace.  “If in the heat and flow of battle a leader’s house is bombed and he shoots back,” Rustin remembered saying to his host, “then that is an encouragement to his followers to pick up guns.  If, on the other hand, he has no guns around him, and his followers know it, then they will rise to the nonviolent occasion.”     Before Rustin arrived on the scene, none of the black leaders in Montgomery were completely committed to turning the other cheek.    What if King had adopted a tactic of retaliation rather than of what he later called redemptive suffering?  What if hotheads rather than cooler heads had prevailed in America’s journey toward civil rights?

 Bayard Rustin was almost ideally suited to counsel King as he sought the moral high ground.   Although his memorial was held in a Unitarian church, he was born to a Quaker family in Southeastern Pennsylvania, and Bayard recalled the lessons of his religious upbringing.  “We were told that we should never discuss an issue when we were wrought up, but only when we were calm.  We were taught that it was too tiresome to hate, and that we should never go to sleep without first reconciling differences that had occurred during the day.  We should never raise the question as to who had caused a dispute, for nothing constructive was to be gained by arguing over who started what.”   Along with opposition to all forms of war, the Friends left him with an aversion to any form of prejudice.  When his grandmother Julia learned that her grandson had taunted the owner of a local Chinese laundry, he had to spend every day after school for the next two weeks washing and ironing alongside the proprietor.

Rustin grew up with a conscience that was exceptionally strong and wide-ranging.  He was of course tireless in the quest for racial equality.   In 1944, long before the world had heard of Rosa Parks, a young black woman named Irene Morgan had boarded a Greyhound bus in Gloucestor County, Virginia.   Weak from recent surgery, she had taken the first open seat available, which happened to be in the “whites only” section, and refused to move when the driver ordered her to the rear.  Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the NAACP, convinced a majority of the justices that the Virginia code enforcing segregation on interstate transport was a violation of the U.S. Constitution.  But bus companies in Virginia and other states simply ignored the high court’s order.  So Bayard Rustin, along with others like the Unitarian minister Homer Jack, organized a “Journey of Reconcilitation” into the South to put their bodies on the buses and on the line.

Rustin spent 28 days on a chain gang for one arrest.  But then he’d already spent 28 months in a federal penitentiary for refusing the draft in the second World War.  As a Quaker, he would ordinarily have been granted conscientious objector status.   But he felt going to jail would be a stronger statement of his protest.  For him it was a natural decision.  Because in his mind, the “isms” were all connected.  Whether it was racism or militarism or colonialism, he could be found wherever the struggle for  human dignity was being waged, in India with the campaign for independence or in South Africa, in the fight against apartheid, or even in prison, organizing the inmates behind bars.

Bayard Rustin was an imposing individual, six foot three and finely featured, with a beautiful singing voice and cultured British accent, a collector of art and antiques.  He could organize a march of half a million people in the space of a few weeks or play the Renaissance lute.  But he almost always functioned behind the scenes in the Civil Rights movement because he was also a gay man, and what was more unusual for that era, a homosexual who refused to be ashamed of himself or hide his inmost being from others.  Being gay in those days was treated as a crime.  So despite his outstanding intellect, he was twice dismissed from college.  Despite his finely tuned sense of morality, he was convicted on a so-called “morals” charge.   He was pragmatic enough to realize that his presence could be a liability for an outfit like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the collection of clergy who formed King’s popular base (which Rustin mostly organized).  But what if a black gay man like Rustin had been permitted to be out front?

What if he could have exercised his fullest influence on the world?  Would Bayard Rustin have stepped into the spotlight before Martin Luther King Jr. ever took the stage?  Or would he perhaps have been the one to pick up the baton and carry on the legacy when the great leader was slain?  What if those of fifty years ago had realized that the struggle for Civil Rights is a struggle for Human Rights and must include a struggle for Gay Rights as well?   In this week commemorating Dr. King’s life and work, we can only ask, “What If ... “
 

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MOMENTS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Maybe most of you have played house.  And maybe some of you who are children have played with a doll’s house like the one here.

This is a very nice little house.  It has walls and windows and doors, bedrooms for sleeping and a kitchen for eating, with a good sloped roof on the top to keep out the snow and rain.  I’d say that this might be a very good house to live in except for one thing.

Do you know what’s wrong with this house?  Do you know what would make it hard to live here?  This house is much too small for a grown up person like me!  This house isn’t even big enough for a baby to live in.  Do you think that your family could all fit around the dining room table in a house like this one?   You would have to have a very small family. Maybe a family of chipmunks could move in and be comfortable here, but not any human family.

The strange thing is that many people do have families that are too small and try to live in houses that are too small.  They say, “Only the people who look like me are part of my family.”  Or “Only the people who have the same beliefs as me are part of my family.”   They think of their home as beginning and ending at the borders of whatever country they happen to live in.   They’re trying to live in families that are too small and in houses that are too tiny.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a man who asked us all to think big and to dream big.  And he encouraged us to think of the whole world as our home.  In the speech he gave when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, he said that “Some years ago a famous novelist died.  Among his papers was found a list of suggested story plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: ‘A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.’  This is the great new problem of humankind,” King said.  “We have inherited a big house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together--black and white, Easterners and Westerns, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in the one big world” to get along.

 Getting along together as one big family means there have to be rules, and Dr. King tried to teach us what those rules might be.  They’re surprising simple, the same kind of rules you probably have at home.  The first rule is no hitting.  We don’t solve our problems by violence.  The second rule is sharing.  Take turns and if you have more than you need, let other people have some.  And the third rule is that whatever other rules we make up ought to apply equally to everyone.  Not one set of rules for me and my friends and another set of rules for outsiders.   And this is such an important rule that it’s sometimes called the Golden Rule.  Treat other people in exactly the same way that you’d like to be treated.

I don’t want to live in a little bitty house like this one.  This kind of house is for the chipmunks--or I’d say for the birds!   We need to build a home big enough for everyone to live in and for everyone to share.  Martin Luther King Jr. helped to lay the foundations for that great “world house.”  But it’s up to us to finish the work.