Instead of giving up on those who cause harm, we need to realize that they are seeking happiness but don’t know how to find it.
—Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, “Putting Down the Arrow”
—Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, “Putting Down the Arrow”
A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
March 17
Born
1912 -
BAYARD RUSTIN
American civil rights activist, born (d: 1987) Largely behind the
scenes in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and earlier, and one of
the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it
was Bayard Rustin who counseled Martin Luther King Jr. on the
techniques of nonviolent resistance.
For much of his
career, Rustin lived in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, in the
union-funded Penn South complex, from 1978 with his partner Walter
Naegle. He became an advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian
causes in the latter part of his career; however, his sexuality was the
reason for attacks from within the civil rights movement as well as
from many governmental and other interest groups.
A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said: "Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in
regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves Gay,
homosexual, or Lesbian."
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