Annual Bayard Rustin Symposium Returns on Saturday
Local historian Anna Bergman’s annual Bayard Rustin Symposium returns on Saturday to the Vallejo Naval Historical Museum in Downtown Vallejo and will also be streamed live on YouTube.
Bergman always brings some interesting new angle to civil rights’ discussions, and this event is no different. As many know, or should know, Bayard Rustin was an MLK associate who was a pioneer for gay rights as well as civil rights.
On deck will be Teddy R. Dorsette III, representing National Black Deaf Advocates, George Mason University Professor Roxanne Dummett on the history and culture of Black Sign Language (BSL), author and journalist Robin Washington on his film, “You Don’t Have To Ride Jim Crow,” which will be screened at the event, and a performance by vocalist Calvin Ellington D’Ville.
Dorsette will share a bit about the National Black Deaf Advocates organization and its founding history. He said he wants to discuss how important the work of the Black Deaf community is with respect to Rustin Baynard’s work and how it affected dismantling systemic racism and intersectional social injustices.
Like Rustin, Dorsette said that the Black deaf community works so that “everyone’s voice is heard and included in the fight for radical inclusion and equity.”
“I am honored to be able be a part of celebrating Mr. Rustin’s life work and sharing our story with the community,” he said.
Washington, who is Editor at Large at The Forward, will share a fascinating story about our nation’s precursor to the Freedom Rides of the ’60s, an event known as The Journey of Reconciliation, led by Rustin and members of the Methodist Church, among others.
In the 1944, a woman named Irene Morgan refused to give up her interstate bus seat in Virginia to make room for white people. She was arrested and jailed, but that caught the attention of Thurgood Marshall, then chief legal counsel for the NAACP. Marshall took Morgan’s case all the way to the Supreme Court, where attorneys argued that her treatment violated the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution because, get this, it “put an undue burden” on commerce. Sad that it had to come down to that and not the greater moral harm that had been done to her, but it was a brilliant strategy because it won.
That didn’t mean that the South was going to heed the law. Enter Rustin, who organized the nonviolent direct action Journey of Reconciliation in 1947, which placed 16 civil rights advocates— 8 white and 8 Black— on a bus from D.C. to North Carolina, challenging the segregation and of course getting themselves arrested for it in Durham. Rustin and others were charged and placed on chain gangs as a result.
When Rosa Parks refused her seat eleven years later, setting off the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rustin and George Houser co-sponsored the Freedom Rides through the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equity. Robin Washington’s mother was a member of the Congress of Racial Equity, which he said held many meetings in his family’s living room.
“I was taken to protests and sit-ins when I was 3, 4, 5 and 6 years old,” he said, though for him they are fond memories of family outings.
To learn more about this and to get a rare glimpse into Black Deaf history and culture, watch it streaming on YouTube during or after the event, or go the actual event at the museum.
The Bayard Rustin Symposium takes place on Saturday, January 29, at 1 p.m. at the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum, 734. Marin St. The event is free and everyone is welcome. To view via YouTube, follow this link.
