Bayard Rustin, Civil Rights Leader and King Aide, Dies

Bayard Rustin, a leading thinker, planner and pioneer in the civil rights movement who served as an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and organized a march that drew 200,000 demonstrators to Washington in 1963, has died. He was 77.

Rustin, chairman of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, died late Sunday night at Lenox Hill Hospital after surgery for a ruptured appendix, said Norman Hill, president of the institute.

Rustin had surgery Friday at the hospital after complaining of stomach pains upon his return from a trip to Haiti, Hill said.

Rustin was a leading civil rights strategist for more than a quarter of a century.

He was an activist as a youth, with a long record of civil rights arrests, and a Quaker pacifist who joined the War Resisters’ League. He also was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.

But in his later years his reputation was that of a moderate, as he continued to espouse King’s message of nonviolence and to urge political and economic solutions to social problems.

Rustin’s reputation as an organizer was cemented in 1963 when he organized the civil rights march on Washington that brought 200,000 to the Lincoln Memorial to hear King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The following year he organized a boycott of New York City schools by black children that was said to be the largest civil rights demonstration up to that time.

Rustin further antagonized militants in the civil rights movement in 1969 when he called black college students’ demands for black studies programs “stupid.”