Bayard Rustin, my education, and my teaching practice

Earlier this year, I saw this article, shared by Senator Kamala Harris’s Facebook account, about newly-discovered audio of Bayard Rustin discussing his belief that being open about his sexuality “was an absolute necessity.” , 

To Rustin, asserting his identity as an African-American went hand-in-hand with identifying as a gay man. "It occurred to me shortly after that that it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn't I was a part of the prejudice," he said. "I was aiding and abetting the prejudice that was a part of the effort to destroy me."

In addition to reminding me of how Rustin’s achievements are worthy of my astonished admiration, the article got me thinking about the failures of our education system. To wit: I am certified to teach U.S. History in the California public school system, and yet in the course of 20 years of formal education, not once did I encounter a lesson or a reading about Rustin. No, it was through the song “A Good Day” by the 90s post-punk band Smart Went Crazy, that I discovered in the first decade of the new century, that I first heard Rustin’s name. I looked him up, and immediately became an admirer.

In a similar vein, I never knew about Luis Valdez and the Teatro campesino until a former student, Brenda Rivera, taught a workshop on the topic at a Latinas Guiding Latinas meeting at my school in 2013. Now, I don't object to learning from students; to the contrary, I don't think that educators can be effective without learning from students. That said, it is absurd that a California teacher, raised and educated and trained in California, should have gone through over a decade as a classroom teacher without encountering these stories from California history!

I am also complicit in this failure. In my own classroom, I've struggled to implement both the mandates of the FAIR Act as well as incorporate the local history that I have access to. I am excited, though about making some changes to improve.

The FAIR Act is a California law that mandates the inclusion of LGBTQ+ history in social studies curricula. I believe I have done a good job of teaching the truth about much of our country's history, including the genocide of Native Americans, the atrocities of slavery, the subjection of women to second-class status, the long-running demonization of immigrants, and the ongoing inequalities that pervade our systems and prevent all people from sharing in the unkept promises made by our founding documents. I have not done a good job, however, of teaching about the LGBQT+ community.

The morning I read the NPR article, I shared it on Facebook; later, when I saw my colleague Chris Lewis, he shared a lesson on Rustin from a set of lessons on LGBTQ+ history that he and a team of educators developed recently. Chris was my predecessor as the AP US History teacher at my school; he is now a Teacher On Special Assignment (TOSA), and he has already forgotten more about teaching history than I will ever learn. I plan to include the lesson on Rustin when we reach the Civil Rights era.