Pacifism or self-defense? The backstory of a famous debate between two towering civil rights figures
The debaters on the Howard University podium that October 1961 day were taking up a question: Should African Americans be against or for racial separation? On the anti-side was Bayard Rustin, a pacifist Quaker and close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. On the pro-side was Malcolm X, nationalist minister of the Nation of Islam.
That’s when both African American leaders claimed the Bible.
“Given the fact that Moses kept the children of Israel in the desert for 40 years in order to do away with their slave mentality, and build up a new leadership, he also had to know precisely where he was going to take them. … [Today] you have Negroes spread over the country. … What are they going to do then, give [up their homes] and move somewhere else? And what are the psychological implications of this?” Rustin asked his opponent.
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Malcolm X responded, saying Moses was “the best example that you probably could have pointed out.”
He added: “Moses’ people were strangers in a land that wasn’t theirs. The black man in America is a stranger in a land that is not his. If you recall, Moses didn’t advocate integration, Moses advocated separation. At nowhere in the Bible can you show me where Moses went to his people and said, ‘Believe in the same God your slave master believes in,’ or ‘Integrate yourself with Pharaoh.’ ”
Their dynamic captures a phase early in the civil rights era, a stark divide then among African Americans that shifted in the years that followed as the movement changed, the two men changed and the country changed. At the heart of the matter was the question of how African Americans could most effectively attain justice and freedom. That is still being debated perhaps just as fervently today — the reason the 1961 debate was chosen as the focus of a new play being staged jointly by the Museum of American History and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The above exchange is the play’s version of the men’s actual debate.
“Cramton, 1961,” named for the Howard auditorium where the debate took place, was written by Smithsonian scholar Christopher Wilson, whose interactive programs have focused on the civil rights movement. It features the efforts of a handful of activist Howard students who fought to put on the debate, the event itself and other activism in the region — including efforts to desegregate eateries along Route 40, a key roadway between Washington and the New York area.
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The play explores the sharply different ideas of the two men — about racial integration, about the use of violence even in the cause of self-defense, among other things — and the moral and religious arguments they marshaled. It also spotlights the Howard of 1961 — the apathy of many students and the wariness of its administration toward students’ radicalism (of any kind). In a few years the campus would become a hub of black nationalism and various kinds of activism for racial equality.
Although the 1,500-seat Cramton auditorium was full for the debate, Wilson said, just one faculty member reportedly attended: government professor Emmett Dorsey.
The two museums have similar grants to examine the role of religion in U.S. history, and Wilson said they decided to focus on the Howard debate because of the way its religious arguments contributed to the transformation of Howard students into activists. Witnessing Malcolm X and Rustin frame their cases in such personal, moral terms — Rustin as a Quaker, Malcolm X as a member of the Nation of Islam — was significant for some who attended, particularly those who went on to become student movement leaders, Wilson said. Those included Stokely Carmichael and Courtland Cox.
Carmichael later said the debate “was the moment he became a nationalist,” Wilson said, because Malcolm X was such a powerful force on stage.
The play, which was performed last summer at the American History Museum, will be staged Saturday afternoon at the African American Museum.
The play takes place during the era before the civil rights movement was in full swing — a time when King was just starting to embrace direct action and self-defense, when Malcolm X was still considered a fringe figure and part of a controversial offshoot of Islam, and when Rustin’s long history of radical pacifism was getting a broader look by black Americans. The debate, and particularly the campus’s reaction, offers a window on how leaders evolve and how movements don’t usually happen at a single moment but instead are the result of thousands of people “having a moment” when they are willing to take serious risks or make serious commitments for change, Wilson said.
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The 1961 debate marked the first time Malcolm X had been to any historically black college or university, Wilson said. The leader had been on campuses like Oxford and Columbia, but African American administrators were more wary, and students weren’t pushing at the time, he said. In the summer of 1961, at Howard there were just seven of what would grow into hundreds of Freedom Riders — blacks and whites who, in mixed racial groups, rode segregated buses in an effort to force change.
Howard’s then-president James Nabrit Jr. “felt Malcolm X was a segregationist, and they were worried about a bunch of Nation of Islam followers on campus,” Wilson said.
Unlike two subsequent debates between the two men, the Howard one wasn’t taped or recorded. Wilson had to re-create the event through interviews, and he created composite characters. Of the 10 people he interviewed who were there, they all recall it somewhat differently, he said.
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“The students who brought Bayard and Malcolm to Howard realized that in order to create a more humane nation, more young people needed to be ‘woke’ and become what Bayard called for — ‘angelic troublemakers,’ ” the website for the event says.
While Malcolm X and Rustin — as King’s partner in organizing the epic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — became major civil rights figures, in 1961 neither were, said civil rights historian David Garrow. Religiously, they were outliers. “Neither represents the black church,” Garrow said.
Share this articleShareRustin was a gay former communist New Yorker who had served two years in jail in the 1940s for refusing to enlist in the military on pacifist grounds. Malcolm X was a convicted drug dealer who had converted to the Nation of Islam and was going by the name Malcolm Shabazz.
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Until the mid-1960s, Garrow said, the Southern civil rights movement — and Washington sat between North and South — “is fundamentally grounded in the Christian faith of the black church.”
Of the two men, Rustin was the more embraced figure among activists at the time of the 1961 debate, Garrow said. However, he said, that was to change in coming years when many young activists perceived him and King as being too compromising.
The Howard debate was, for some on the elite campus, the start of paying attention to different religious and moral arguments.
In the play, the two men offer opposite views of whether religion permits violence.
“There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion,” Malcolm X says in the play.
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Rustin pushes back on Malcolm X’s framing that African Americans who don’t fight back represent the meekness required to be a minority in a violent America.
“My activism did not spring from my lifestyle, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents, who reared me,” he says in the play. “If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence.”
Malcolm X’s perspective, in particular — the call for self-defense — “was something Howard students hadn’t heard black people so prominently say before,” Wilson said. By the late 1960s, Howard “is a totally different place, [with African-style] dashikis everywhere, a much bigger feeling of radicalism and identity and nationalism.”
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The two men knew that Howard would heat up, said Rachelle Horowitz, who was Rustin’s assistant from 1957 to 1972. Howard’s faculty was esteemed, and the school attracted elite students — including the handful of student government activists who made the debate happen.
“They both wanted to appeal to that” at Howard, she said. Rustin knew that Malcolm X, with his more dramatic words and entourage, “was more attractive to students. He expressed hostility to white people and opposed integration. Bayard was representing a more difficult activist course. He didn’t expect to win the debate.” But he did it because he was so concerned about apathy, she said.
“He hoped a few people would think.”
As the movement grew, Horowitz said, it became less uniformly “religious.” While it launched from the black church, “the more it became a mass movement, and the northern students got involved, [religion] for many got diluted.”
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The play “Cramton, 1961″ will be shown at 2 p.m. Saturday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the 350-seat Oprah Winfrey Theatre. Tickets are free, and as of Thursday were all taken. However, organizers expect there to be some spots for people who already have museum tickets that day. Doors open at 1:30 p.m.
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