Bay Windows - Local News, April 21, 1999
Loren King Bay Windows staff

Both will stay active with the breakfast committee, Robinson said, but will turn over the organizing reigns to Al Whittaker, Jr. Robinson will serve on the board of directors for the AIDS Action Committee, the sponsor of the breakfast.

Robinson said there is much significance in reaching first decade of combating AIDS/HIV in minority communities. That is why the breakfast committee this year has added a long but encompassing and affirming subtitle to the event: A spiritual resurgence of hope; to celebrate and to heal a community recovering from, responding to, uniting against, attacking, confronting, accepting. acknowledging, combating HIV/AIDS."

Even with protease inhibitors, we are still healing from 16 years of AIDS and we know there are challenges still in front of us," Robinson said. This breakfast makes a profound statement about where we as a community need to be, and where we need to go."

The annual event, which drew 425 people last year, is named in honor of Bayard Rustin, openly gay advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King during the 1950s and 1960s, and a controversial social activist until his death in 1987 at age 77. The community breakfast for gay and lesbian people of color takes place on April 24 at 10:30 a.m. at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum at Columbia Point, Dorchester. Admission is free.

Keynote speaker for this year's breakfast is Rev. Rainey Cheeks of Washington, DC, founder of the Inner Light Unity Fellowship Church and Us Helping Us: People Into Living, an advocacy agency. Rev. Cheeks is HIV-positive and was featured in the January issue of POZ magazine.

This year's community speaker is Shirley Royster, local activist. Entertainment will be provided by Lady Soul, three women from New England who recently recorded a CD; and poets Tom Grimes, Letta Neely and Makeda Ama.

The breakfast will honor two community activists who in a courageous way put in the energy, like Bayard Rustin did," said Robinson. Recognized this year will be Pamela Scott, HIV educator, and the late Mark Randolph Williams, who died in Nov. 1998. Mark volunteered for Positive Directions and the Freedom to Marry Coalition. That's the spirit of what this breakfast is all about," said Robinson. Also remembered at the event will be Michael Richmond, past executive director of MOCAA (Men of Color Against AIDS). Michael is still part of us and we celebrate his crusade against HIV and AIDS in communities of color," said Robinson. We are still healing from this loss, but MOCAA thrives and he will be remembered... that is in essence what this breakfast tries to do; this is the kind of courage we honor."

Robinson said it all comes back to the man the breakfast is named for. He dealt with invisibility, and he was a team worker," Robinson said. Openly gay at a time when whites or blacks publicly acknowledged their homosexuality, Rustin worked directly as a special aide to Dr. King from 1955 to 1960. He helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott, drafted the original plan for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and masterminded civil rights demonstrations in 1960 at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

Jailed for being a conscientious objector during World War II, Rustin after the war organized the first Freedom Rides in North Carolina to protest segregation on buses. This was in 1947, long before the more famous Freedom Rides of 1961. He was arrested and spent several weeks on a prison chain gang.

Rustin was arrested or jailed more than 20 times during his lifetime for civil rights and antiwar activities. But the arrest that had the biggest impact on his life and career took place in 1953. While in Pasadena, Calif., organizing demonstrations against discrimination in restaurants and hotels, Rustin was entrapped, arrested on a sex perversion" charge and sentenced to 60 days.

Rustin's greatest accomplishment, certainly his most visible, was planning the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which brought 250,000 people to the nation's capital in a landmark civil rights demonstration. Rustin was tapped for the job by the most prominent civil rights leaders of the day: Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, John Lewis, James Farmer and Whitney Young.

Because he was raised a Quaker and a pacifist, Rustin was a knowledgeable student of the teachings and philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi. Rustin had even met Gandhi during a visit to India during the 1940s. Rustin was able to advise King on the use of nonviolent resistance as a tool for social justice.

From 1964 until his death, Rustin was head of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a New York-based educational, civil rights and labor organization. He was an outspoken advocate for coalition-building among blacks, gays, Jews, liberal-leftists and labor unionists. For the last decade of his life, Rustin was in a relationship with Walter Naegle, an assistant at the Randolph Institute. A school in New York City, where Rustin lived most of his adult life, bears his name, The Bayard Rustin School for the Humanities.

Bayard Rustin would be at the vigils for Matthew Shepard, James Byrd and Amadou Diallo. He'd be lending his support to AIDS. That's the kind of person he was, and we want to get that across at the breakfast," Robinson said. We want people to understand what he was about."

(For more information about the 10th Annual Bayard Rustin Community Breakfast, call 617-450-1644.)
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