Rustin’s life really started heating up at the onslaught of World War II. Rustin joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an interfaith nonviolent peace organization, as a race relations secretary. FOR director A.J. Muste was uncomfortable with Rustin’s openness about his sexuality, and tirelessly tried to convince Rustin to “change.” Nevertheless, Rustin continued to travel the country as an openly gay man with FOR, speaking out about desegregation. Before the Freedom Rides, Rustin led some of the first attempts to desegregate interstate bus travel. In 1943, he wrote the “Interracial Primer,” warning people that race riots would ensue if integration did not come quickly. In 1944, Rustin was sentenced to three years in prison for failing to appear before the draft board. After angering prison administrators by being openly gay and organizing desegregation protests, he was ultimately transfered to a high security prison and only served 26 months.
Rustin continued to engage in civil disobedience at great personal risk. After his release, he was frequently arrested for protesting colonial rule in Africa and India. In 1947 he continued his freedom rides, this time more formally as the Journey of Reconciliation, an effort meant to test the ruling of Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia, which banned racial discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin was arrested in North Carolina and sentenced to 30 days on a chain gang for violating state Jim Crow laws. In the early 1950s, Rustin made a trip to West Africa where he spoke to Ghanaian and Nigerian independence movement leaders. There, he reaffirmed that the struggle for liberation was not a singularly Black American issue, but a transnational one that affected all of the Black diasporas.
In 1953, Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California for “lewd conduct” for having sex with two men in the back of a car. The entire debacle was publicized, and though Rustin had never denied being gay, this new spotlight changed his career trajectory entirely. Rustin pled guilty to “sex perversion,” was registered as a sex offender, and was asked to resign from the FOR; he’d spend much of his subsequent career as an activist behind the scenes. In 1955, Rustin was part of the task force that wrote “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence,” a hugely influential pacifist essay. However, he remained an anonymous contributor, worried that his sexual orientation would be used by critics to dismiss the veracity of the work.
In 1956, Rustin was guided by A. Philip Randolph to travel to Alabama and advise Dr. King on nonviolent disobedience tactics. Rustin became a crucial contributor to the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, and helped Dr. King organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Despite King’s acceptance, he was attacked by other prominent Black activists of the time. U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to spread a fake rumor that Dr. King and Rustin were lovers if Dr. King did not cancel a planned march outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. King called off the march, and Rustin quietly resigned from the SCLC. James Baldwin criticized King’s lack of solidarity, writing that King “lost much moral credit…in the eyes of the young” in Harper’s magazine.
