The Advocate

Posts tagged Black Excellence

Bayard Rustin helped Martin Luther King Jr. achieve his vision of a more equitable society, even after King was assassinated 50 years ago.“As America prepares to observe the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination today, there...

Bayard Rustin helped Martin Luther King Jr. achieve his vision of a more equitable society, even after King was assassinated 50 years ago.

As America prepares to observe the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination today, there is one name you may not hear: Bayard Rustin. A close confidante and mentor of King, Rustin was a key leader of the civil rights movement and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He proved to be a transformative figure in the fight for racial justice, even introducing King to the Gandhian principles of nonviolence that would come to define the struggle. He also happened to be gay.
Rustin understood that we are all connected. His commitment to solidarity and passion for organizing made him a natural fit for the labor movement. He launched the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute to extend the fight for economic justice to people of color. He knew that achieving a just society required securing jobs and freedom for all Americans. That vision for an inclusive, empowered coalition resonates just as powerfully decades later.
“I think the most important thing I have to say is … try to build coalitions of people for the elimination of all injustice,” Rustin said in the final years of his life, reflecting on the continuing fight for social change. “Because if we want to do away with the injustice to gays, it will not be done because we get rid of the injustice to gays. It will be done because we are forwarding the effort for the elimination of injustice to all. And we will win the rights for gays or blacks or Hispanics or women within the context of whether we are fighting for all.”

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My friends and I didn’t hesitate when we found out a party for queer women was being held at a bar in the center of Hollywood last summer. After all, most of us women of color feel the need for a safe place to shed our shields — even if it’s only for one night.
We talked of nothing else in the week leading up to it, but when we got there we quickly discovered it was a space for some of the ostracized, but not all. Almost everybody was white. The music was mind-numbing, and the sense of loss that came to define our lives was still there.
I couldn’t help but wonder: What place is there for a queer woman of color in society? If my questions seem challenging today, imagine the difficulties queer women of color faced in decades past.
That is the world Jewel Thais-Williams came up in. Now 78 years old, Thais-Williams lived through a version of Los Angeles where gay culture wasn’t allowed to exist outside of the closet and black people weren’t allowed in white-operated underground gay spaces.
“Black women are on the bottom of the totem pole for everything,” she says now, making the statement as a fundamental fact that she’s come to reckon with, but which she also refuses to let define her life’s trajectory.
Her response to the absence of black LGBT spaces? Fixing the problem herself. Thais-Williams ended up founding and running the first black gay disco in Los Angeles — the historic and legendary Catch One.

Read more. Photo courtesy of Jewel Thais-Williams.