- This is the Day
- Posts
- August 24
August 24
Bayard Rustin, Clara Maas, and (belatedly) Black Elk
David Barnhart
August 24, 2025
Inscription at the National Archives, 2019. Own photo.
Today marks the death, in 1987, of Bayard Rustin, civil rights leader, organizer, and intellectual. Though he was the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, his leadership was overshadowed because he was gay. His organizing efforts stretched from integrating the army during World War 2, to protesting Japanese Internment Camps, to the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s, to the gay rights movement in the 80’s.
Today also marks the death, in 1901, of Clara Maas, an army nurse who, in addition to years of working to heal sick soldiers all over the world, volunteered to be a test subject for yellow fever. She died after several rounds of exposure to being bitten by infected mosquitoes. She, along with nurse Florence Nightingale, are honored with a feast day in the Lutheran Church on August 13.
I somehow missed that August 19 marked the death of Black Elk, a leader of the Oglala Lakota people, who died in 1950. He was present at both the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Wounded Knee Massacre, and was a proponent of the Ghost Dance movement. His words of prophetic truth-telling held a mirror up to settler-colonial white man’s culture. (I will be updating the website so that his name appears on the correct day).
Reflection:
Bayard Rustin wrote:
“We are indeed a house divided. But the division between race and race, class and class, will not be dissolved by massive infusions of brotherly sentiment. The division is not the result of bad sentiment, and therefore will not be healed by rhetoric. Rather the division and the bad sentiments are both reflections of vast and growing inequalities in our socioeconomic system--inequalities of wealth, of status, of education, of access to political power. Talk of brotherhood and "tolerance" (are we merely to "tolerate" one another?) might once have had a cooling effect, but increasingly it grates on the nerves. It evokes contempt not because the values of brotherhood are wrong--they are more important than ever--but because it just does not correspond to the reality we see around us. And such talk does nothing to eliminate the inequalities that breed resentment and deep discontent.”
Black Elk said:
“I could see that the Wasichus [white man] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. This could not be better than the old ways of my people.”
and
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”
Prayer: God of Justice and Love, we often try to heal deep wounds, both physical and political, with rhetoric. Help us to do the deep healing that involves changes not just of attitudes or sentiments, but of policies and cash. Amen.