In our 100 year history, the WRL national office, surprisingly, has had only a few locations in New York City. Each was unique in its own way.

This is a story from a middle chapter in Bayard Rustin's career, the story of the War Resisters League's decision to hire Bayard. Hiring him was a decision that WRL’s leadership wrestled over and ultimately decided to do. Even a cursory look at it reveals a lot about American social norms (then and now) and, likewise, about how power, oppression, and homophobia function even in professed radical organizations like WRL.

In 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum unveiled a radically scaled back exhibition that glorified the bombings, prominently presenting Enola Gay (the Hiroshima bomber) as if it were a holy relic.

The original draft text of the exhibit had been an even-handed history and evaluation of the August 6 and 9, 1945 bombings. But caving to howls of the American Legion and conservative members of Congress, the Smithsonian deleted all criticisms of the bombings and presented a sanitized version without graphic images of the destruction. Instead, they highlighted how the plane was restored, showed photos of machinery, interviews of the Enola Gay crew, and stressed how “the bombings were necessary” to save American lives.

Consequently, WRL with other peace groups formed the Enola Gay Action Coalition to prepare for protests at the opening, as well as to create our own exhibit “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 50 Years of Nuclear Terror”—as an answer to the Smithsonian’s crude attempt at censorship and historical revisionism....

It was a few minutes before midnight on August 27, 1963, when I arrived by train from my home in Scarsdale, NY, at the 125^th Street train station in New York City and walked half a dozen blocks to the Harlem office of the Congress of Racial Equality, known as “CORE,” with a ticket to board a bus bound for Washington, D.C., and the much anticipated and widely publicized March on Washington