Rustin's Challenge

Paul Prescod is a Labor Notes staff organizer and a Jacobin Magazine contributing editor. Formerly he was a Philadelphia public school teacher and organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union. 

Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Melissa Naschek is a writer and the co-host of Jacobin's Confronting Capitalism podcast 

There was no more trenchant and substantive critic of the Left from the Left in the 1960s and 1970s than Bayard Rustin. Some liberals and leftists today valorize Rustin on the basis of his multiple oppressed identities and civil rights organizing. On the other hand, many others dismiss him for being compromised by his commitment to the Democratic Party or by his deep suspicion of the new forms of left activism that appeared in the mid-1960s.

While Rustin certainly made some strategic mis-steps later in…