Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the March on Washington

The Rustins opened their home to important African American leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Mary McLeod Bethune. When they visited the area, they could not stay in local hotels, reserved for whites only. As an active member of the NAACP, Julia invited them to sleep at the Rustin home, where Bayard often heard them talking about issues affecting their community, such as segregation and discrimination.
Bayard felt safe and valued in his home with Julia and Janifer. He knew bad things happened to black people because of discrimination, but he had not experienced them himself. At least not yet.
Julia fought for equal rights for all, but she fought especially fiercely for Bayard. When his elementary school teachers tried to change her grandson from a left-handed writer to a right-handed one, as was the custom at the time, Julia marched into the principal’s office. She demanded that they allow Bayard a natural leftie-to write with his left hand. Once he was allowed to follow his natural tendencies instead of trying to be what he wasn’t, Bayard was free to focus his time and energies on schoolwork. And he excelled.
One of Bayard’s most influential teachers was Helena Robinson. She taught her sixth grade students about the evils of slavery, about how people who came to America from Europe (and their descendants) took people from Africa to America and forced them to work. She taught her students about racial discrimination and oppression. It was from Robinson that Bayard became aware of the cruelty of lynching. She explained that mobs of white Southerners would attack and publicly murder African Americans to assert their power through intimidation and fear. Bayard had no real experience with this kind of brutality, at least not as a young child. “Nobody in my neighborhood ever got lynched,” he later recalled. “It was about blacks being beaten because they talked to a white woman, but nobody in my neighborhood could not talk to a white woman.”
Robinson also taught her students about the people who worked hard to oppose slavery. White Quakers went to jail for teaching enslaved people to read and write, and worked with free African Americans to run the Underground Railroad, a system of secret routes for those escaping bondage in the South and traveling north to freedom.
Before the Civil War, West Chester, Pennsylvania, was a major stop on the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad. That route led north from slaveholding states to places like Philadelphia, where slavery was illegal. There were many Underground Railroad stations in and around West Chester, partly because it was home to a group of free African Americans dedicated to liberating their friends and relatives from the chains of slavery. These abolitionists worked side by side with local Quakers to ensure that the Eastern Line was a safe route for those escaping slavery.
Robinson took her students on field trips to old Quaker houses that had once served as stations on the Underground Railroad. With Robinson as their guide, Bayard and his fellow students could see and touch the cramped spots where runaways had hidden from their owners and “slave catchers” intent on returning them South.
Historically, West Chester was an important part of the Underground Railroad, but that did not mean the whole town supported the work of the abolitionists. Some local leaders believed black people were inferior to white people. To prevent the races from mixing, they enforced a system of racial segregation. African Americans were not allowed to sit with white people at local theaters, eat in certain restaurants, or use public restrooms in the center of town. Some buildings even had whites only signs on them. Black children, including Bayard, could not attend white public elementary schools.
When reflecting on his teacher later in life, Bayard said: “She not only stimulated in me a great desire to learn but also introduced me to the possibilities that education had for liberating one from the prison of inherited circumstances.”