We Can Add to the World Justice

Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Pauli Murray developed a black Christian pacifism inspired by Gandhian nonviolence. Their activist projects in the 1940s, including sit-ins, freedom rides, and multicity marches, became mainstays of the later civil rights movement. While working with majority-white organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and interracial organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality, Murray, Rustin, and Farmer nevertheless developed what Farmer called “the race logic of pacifism,” the idea that black Americans had a particular aptitude for nonviolent direct action because of their experiences of white racism. In the midst of a majority-white Christian peace movement, these three black activists devised a religious pacifism that was also distinctly black. Their early activism illuminates, furthermore, questions about the role of gender and sexuality in the black freedom movement.