Bayard Rustin #1563

Caption from poster__             Bayard Rustin with   Martin Luther King, Jr in 1956 ( Credit; Associated Press)          Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester on 17th March, 1910. For the first ten years of his life he thought that Janifer Rustin and Julia Rustin were his parents. In fact they were his grandparents and his real parents were Archie Hopkins and Florence Rustin, the woman he thought was his sister. Florence was only seventeen and unmarried when she gave birth to Bayard. Rustin was influenced by the religious and political beliefs of his grandmother, Julia Rustin. A pacifist, Julia was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and some of its leaders, such as William Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, sometimes stayed with the family while on their tours of the country. As a young man Rustin campaigned against Jim Crow laws in West Chester. One of his school friends later said: "Some of us were ready to give up the fight a