Michael G. Long is an associate professor of religious studies and peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College and is the author or editor of several books on civil rights, religion and politics in mid-century America, including Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall and First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta and resides in Highland Park, Pennsylvania.
Long’s books have been featured or reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today, Book Forum, Ebony/Jet and many other newspapers and journals. He has appeared on C-Span and NPR, and his speaking engagements have taken him from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to the Houston Public Library in Texas, to the City Club of San Diego.
Bayard Rustin (March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, pacifism and non-violence, and gay rights.
In the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Rustin practiced nonviolence. He was a leading activist of the early 1947–1955 civil-rights movement, helping to initiate a 1947 Freedom Ride to challenge with civil disobedience racial segregation on interstate busing. He recognized Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s leadership, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen King's leadership; Rustin promoted the philosophy of nonviolence and the practices of nonviolent resistance, which he had observed while working with Gandhi's movement in India. Rustin became a leading strategist of the civil rights movement from 1955–1968. He was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was headed by A. Philip Randolph, the leading African-American labor-union president and socialist. Rustin also influenced young activists, such as Tom Kahn and Stokely Carmichael, in organizations like the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
After the passage of the civil-rights legislation of 1964–1965, Rustin focused attention on the economic problems of working-class and unemployed African Americans, suggesting that the civil rights movement had left its period of "protest" and had entered an era of "politics", in which the Black community had to ally with the labor movement. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. Rustin became an honorary chairperson of the Socialist Party of America in 1972, before it changed its name to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA); Rustin acted as national chairman of SDUSA during the 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Communist Vietnam and Cambodia. He was on a humanitarian mission in Haiti when he died in 1987.
Rustin was a gay man who had been arrested for a homosexual act in 1953. Homosexuality was criminalized in parts of the United States until 2003 and stigmatized through the 1990s. Rustin's sexuality, or at least his embarrassingly public criminal charge, was criticized by some fellow pacifists and civil-rights leaders. Rustin was attacked as a "pervert" or "immoral influence" by political opponents from segregationists to Black power militants, and from the 1950s through the 1970s. In addition, his pre-1941 Communist Party affiliation was controversial. To avoid such attacks, Rustin served only rarely as a public spokesperson. He usually acted as an influential adviser to civil-rights leaders. In the 1970s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes.
In August 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Horace Julian Bond was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, politician, professor and writer. In 1960, while attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, Bond was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, leading student protests against segregation. A founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, he served as its president in the 1970s while sitting in the Georgia House of Representatives. In 1968, Bond led a challenge delegation from Georgia to the Democratic National Congress, where he became the first African American and the youngest person to ever be nominated for Vice President of the United States, though he was ineligible due to his young age. In 1975, after ten years in the Georgia House, he served six terms in the Georgia senate, after which he taught at numerous colleges including Drexel and Harvard. In 1998, Bond was elected Board Chairman of the NAACP and, after his term, remained active as Chairman Emeritus for eleven years. He is the author of A Time To Speak, A Time To Act, a collection of his essays, as well as Black Candidates: Southern Campaign Experiences. His writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. He remained President Emeritus of the Southern Poverty Law Center until his death in 2015.
Michael G. Long is an associate professor of religious studies and peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College, and is the author or editor of numerous books on civil rights, religion, and politics, including We the Resistance: Documenting A History of Nonviolent Protest in the United States (City Books Lights 2019) Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography (Westminster, 2017);Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers (Westminster, 2015); I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters (City Lights 2012). Long's first book on Jackie Robinson, First Class Citizenship (Times Books)—was selected as a best book of the year byPublishers Weekly, and received critical acclaim in the New York Times and other major media outlets. His writing can be found in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago TribuneUSA Today, Huffington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His work has been featured or reviewed in or on NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, USA Today, Salon, CNN, Bookforum, Ebony/Jet,and other newspapers and journals.
