Secrets of Black Philadelphia: Chesco & beyond

PERSON

Bayard Rustin

When President Barack Obama hugged John Lewis on the inaugural stage last month, he was giving one old lion of the civil rights movement his due. Lewis is the last surviving speaker from the 1963 March on Washington.

Here's another lion to remember: Bayard Rustin.

Born in West Chester and raised as both a Quaker and a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Rustin not only marched alongside Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. at the epic civil rights protest - he organized the whole event. A key aide and strategist to King, he also taught MLK the finer points of nonviolent conflict. So why doesn't everyone know his name? Rustin, who died in 1987, was a Communist for a while (although he left the party in 1941), he was a conscientious objector to the draft (for which he served a couple of years in the federal pen), and he was gay. A "Communist, draft-dodger and homosexual," in the words of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), he was never accorded the marquee status he otherwise might have earned.

"When people think of the civil rights movement, sadly, they don't think about him," said Jason Neuenschwander, who teaches African-American studies at Temple University. Rustin played football at West Chester High School and first encountered discrimination when a waitress at a restaurant in Media refused to serve him when the team was in town for an away game. "I sat there quite a long time," he recalled later, "and was eventually thrown out bodily. From that point on, I had the conviction that I would not accept segregation."

The new Bayard Rustin High School in West Chester is named in his honor.

PLACE

Underground Railroad hotbed, Kennett Square

Radical Quaker abolitionist Thomas Garrett was fined for helping enslaved people escape to freedom, leaving him nearly bankrupt. But Garrett's response to authorities was unrepentant. "Friend, I haven't a dollar in the world, but if thee knows a fugitive anywhere on the face of the earth who needs a breakfast, send him to me."

Garrett was one of many in the 1800s who passionately helped "freedom seekers" in and around Chester County. Yet many are unaware of what a hotbed of abolition Chester is.

"[Kennett Square] shouldn't be the mushroom capital, it should be the Underground Railroad capital," said Mary Dugan, 74, president of the Kennett Underground Railroad Center and tour conductor in Kennett Square. Within an eight-mile stretch, there are some 30 Underground Railroad sites.

KURC tours depart from the 1855 Longwood Quaker Meeting House, where Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists spoke.

Impending development mildly diminishes the aura of history, but sites like Marlborough Friends Meeting remain authentic. And it still has a congregation.

The meetinghouse maintains its immaculate wooden finish, and boasts historic texts and a gasp-worthy view. "We have to show people the view because eventually it's going to get gobbled up like everything else," said Dugan, a Quaker herself.

KURC works to "keep history in front of us," said Marjorie Kaskey, 78, one of the tour guides.

Sometime this year, KURC plans to turn one of the Underground Railroad houses into a museum.

For detailed tour information, visit http://undergroundrr.kennett.net.

- Jessica Bautista

THING

Bob Marley's autoworker gig

When the world was turning upside down in 1968, Bob Marley was busy driving a forklift around the Chrysler-Newark assembly plant in New Castle County, Del., delivering materials to auto workers on the line.

The reggae superstar, who was 36 years old when he died in 1981, worked briefly at the local plant during the late '60s - typically on the 3:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. shift, according to Marley biographer Christopher John Farley.

Farley's book "Before the Legend" says the Wailers' song "Nightshift" was inspired by Marley's time at the Delaware plant, where he was a card-carrying member of the United Auto Workers union who wore his hair short and otherwise kept a low profile.

Amos McCluney Jr., a plant worker at the time and the first black union chairman at UAW Local 1183, doesn't remember Marley but said he would have been among the first local black workers hired at Chrysler-Newark after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed job discrimination nationally. "Racism was alive and well," McCluney recalled, "but it was on the move toward getting better."

The Newark plant was then cranking out so many Plymouths, Chryslers and Dodges that the 4,000-plus workers there were expected to repeat their appointed tasks on the assembly line 64 to 65 times every hour. Today, the number is zero. Chrysler-Newark, which manufactured 8.2 million cars over 51 years, closed forever last December.