Marking the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou recalls the memory of the gay civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin at Killing the Buddha:
Rustin, an openly gay black man, helped introduce Gandhian nonviolence to the African-American civil rights movement. His pacifism landed him in jail for refusing to participate in World War II. He was part of the first Freedom Rides in 1947, helped to found the Congress for Racial Equality, and was National Field Secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Rustin was among the most famous advocates of Gandhian nonviolence in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Mahatma once summoned him to a conference in India. Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he served as key adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., giving him the chance to train Dr. King in the philosophy of nonviolence as a way of life.
In Rustin’s spirit, Sekou calls on gays to practice a “hermeneutics of suspicion” with sacred texts, both religious and civil, as black Americans have for centuries:
The black freedom struggle understood the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as both the standard of and aspiration to what it means to be fully human on American soil. While their experiences where not the same as those of white Anglo-Saxons who were rejecting over-criminalization, religious intolerance, and British taxation without representation, African Americans shared the desire to be free and full citizens in the new democracy. The “niggers” took the language of democracy as the terms of their liberation.
Continue reading at Killing the Buddha.