Brother Outsider Assignment

Comparative Film Assignment: Brother Outsider
In Brother Outsider, the audience is shown the AACRM movement way before Martin Luther King Junior’s “I Have A Dream Speech”. The man who got the movement to that point is Bayard Rustin. He was an advocate for nonviolent approach of protest, pronounced pacifist, and a member of the Communist Party. Also, he was an openly gay in a time that was extremely homophobic.
His racial justice journey started in the 1940s, with the freedom ride through the south. Then, it continued into 1956 with the Montgomery bus boycott. Rustin was then seen at the 1960 Democratic Party Convention where he pushed for civil rights. After, in 1963, he organized the March on Washington, which is where the “I Have A Dream

Speech” from MLK took place. After the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, Bayard switched from a protest strategy to a more political approach (Class PowerPoint, McEvoy, February 4th, 2015).
One of the main concepts of this film was to tell the story of Bayard Rustin and all of the acts he did for the AACRM.

It showed not only all of the victories the movement made but it bring to light all of the struggles the group and Bayard Rustin had as well.
A tactic that is used in both Brother Outsider and AACRM is economic boycott. A specific example of an economic boycott in Brother Outsider was the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
This boycott first began after Bayard’s controversial arrest and he did not want to jeopardize the progress the movement has made. He then sacrificed himself of being the face of the movement by handing it off to Martin Luther King Jr. However, MLKJ had very little knowledge of nonviolent protest. In response to that, Bayard played a huge influential role by offering MLKJ “political agitation and organization” (Kates, "Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin").
Since Rosa Parks was arrested, 42,000 African Americans boycotted the buses in Montgomery. This boycott induced the economic crippling of the city bus system. Police brutality emerged from the by harassing, intimidating, and arresting the leadership of the movement (Kates, "Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard

Rustin").
After thirteen months of boycotting segregated buses, The US Supreme Court overturned bus segregation laws (Kates, "Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin"). The economic boycott tactic from Brother Outsider was very much successful. It gave the movement a huge victory and a spark to proceed with its civil rights’ agenda.
The economic boycott tactic in the reading I chose is from Luders. Since the plantations were owned by whites and had African American workers, it formed a dependency for wages. The Citizens Council wanted to keep the dependency between the two races and shamed whoever did not agree with their ways of thinking. For example, on page 33, a full-page advertisement of names of signers of the NAACP connected to a school board (Luders, 2010, p. 33).
Soon after the signers were made public, some lost their jobs and then asked for their name to be removed from the petition. This shows that the Citizen’s Council will go to all lengths to punish people who do not believe in white supremacy.
Not only did African Americans lost their jobs due to the Citizen’s Council but white moderates did as well. On page 36, Luders states that “white moderates including journalists, academics and ministers who strayed from or dared to challenge the Council position, were smeared with charges of communist sympathies, and efforts were made to bring about their ouster. And, as was often the case, individuals lost their jobs, a newspapers lost advertisers, and business lost customers” (Luders, 2010, p. 36). The Citizen’s Council would attack anyone, no matter what skin color, if a person were not as radical as the Council.
I believe that the economic boycott tactic of The Citizen’s Council was successful.

It was a scare tactic that leads to people losing jobs and their creditability. It showed to others to believe in their cause or awful things would happen to you.
The frame in both Brother Outsider and Luders was economic deprivation. Economic deprivation is defined as not having the same amount of resources as those living around him or her.
The group’s focus in Brother Outsider was to gain equal, basic economic opportunities as the white population from the frame of economic deprivation. By boycotting the bus, it gave the city a lot of economic distress since those fares helped pay for other city functions. Instead of African Americans riding buses, they either walked or joined into the system of carpools that was formed.
The people of the movement all tried to play a part and help the boycotters in any way they could. There was also a group of African American taxi drivers that paid an equivalent fare to the one of a bus ride. African American churches across the nation also helped out by donating either new or used shoes. This helped out the boycotter who would rather walk or bike instead of abide by Jim Crow’s laws. The support of many people inside the city of Montgomery and out helped achieved the one of the first victories of the

movement.
The focus of the Citizen’s Council was to retain the white supremacist ideas of only allowing white people great economic opportunities. Followers of the Council attempted to retain that in many of ways. The white elites biggest issue wanted to keep a “cheap, docile, and immobile labor force” for plantations. 26 But on the opposite side of the spectrum, African Americans were also a threat to low class whites because of employment opportunities.
This brings together both elites and lower class since the upper class wants cheap labor and the lower class wants to keep their employment.