With only three months to go before the March on Washington scheduled for August 28, 1963, organizer Bayard Rustin attended to all of the details, from arranging the buses needed to get 250,000 people to the nation’s capital, arranging for the loudspeaker system, confirming the number and location of porta-potties, specifying the slogans on picket signs, and establishing the list and order of speakers.
At one meeting, his small staff of young activists proudly told Rustin that they planned to provide the marchers with cheese sandwiches. But, as depicted in the new film Rustin, Rustin objected. Cheese could spoil in the eighty-degree heat, he said. Make it peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead.
The genius of Rustin, like that of its protagonist, is that it shows how movements have made history and changed America for the better, driven by a combination of utopian visions, moral uplift, stepping-stone reforms, and practical political savvy, which includes forging coalitions between people who disagree with or even dislike each other. This makes for a compelling film.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, Rustin marshaled his considerable talents as an organizer, strategist, speaker, and writer to challenge the economic and racial status quo. Always an outsider, he helped catalyze the civil rights movement with courageous acts of resistance. Rustin was a brilliant thinker and strategist, but given his political liabilities—he was a gay, Black, pacifist, and a socialist—he also relied on his incredible charm to win converts to the causes of peace and civil rights.
The new film Rustin is directed by George C. Wolfe and executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. It stars Colman Domingo (as Rustin), Chris Rock (Roy Wilkins), Aml Ameen (Martin Luther King), Jeffrey Wright (Adam Clayton Powell), CCH Pounder (Anna Hedgeman), Glynn Turman (A. Philip Randolph), and Audra McDonald (Ella Baker). It is intended to introduce Rustin to a wider audience and to restore his reputation as a trailblazing civil rights activist.
The film, released in theaters in mid-November, is now also available for streaming on Netflix. It spans Rustin’s entire life, from his birth in 1912 to his death in 1987, but focuses on his role as the March’s primary organizer, a job for which he seemed to have prepared all his life. It was, at the time, the largest protest march in American history and helped catalyze the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the movement’s seminal victories.
Born in 1912, the youngest of eight children, Rustin was raised by his grandparents in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Although they attended his grandfather’s African Methodist Episcopal church, Rustin was strongly influenced by the Quaker faith of his grandmother, who was an early member of the NAACP. Some NAACP leaders, including W. E. B. DuBois, stayed with the Rustins when they were on speaking tours.
Rustin was a gifted student, an outstanding athlete, a skilled orator and poet, and an exceptional tenor. Early in his life he revealed a strong social conscience. In high school he was arrested for refusing to sit in the West Chester movie theater’s segregated balcony, nicknamed “Nigger Heaven.” He attended two Black colleges (Wilberforce University and Cheyney State) before moving to New York City in 1937. There, he enrolled briefly at City College of New York and got involved with the campus branch of the Young Communist League. He was attracted by its antiracist efforts, including the fight against segregation in the military.
Like many others, Rustin broke from the Communist Party when it gave uncritical support to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin; but unlike many former Communists who later flipped to rightwing politics, Rustin remained a committed socialist for the rest of his life.
Rustin sang in nightclubs with blues singer Josh White, recorded albums of both gospel and Elizabethan songs, and appeared with Paul Robeson in the Broadway musical “John Henry.” He could have made a living as an entertainer, but he found other ways to channel his prodigious energy, his outrage over racism, and his growing talent as an organizer.
Rustin viewed nonviolent resistance as a “way of life,” not just a policy.
He had two mentors who shaped his philosophy and employed him as an organizer. One was A. Philip Randolph, a socialist who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor union. Randolph was the nation’s most militant civil rights leader of his time. The other mentor, A. J. Muste, was a radical minister and former union organizer, who led the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a Christian pacifist group. Muste, whom Time magazine called the “No. 1 U.S. pacifist,” introduced Rustin to the teachings of Gandhi. Rustin’s commitment to Gandhi’s principles, along with his Quaker beliefs (he officially joined the church in 1936), shaped his activism for the rest of his life.
Randolph hired Rustin in 1941 to lead an earlier planned March on Washington, designed to push President Franklin Roosevelt to open up defense jobs to Black workers as the United States geared up for World War II. Fearful of Randolph’s threat to bring 100,000 protesters to Washington, FDR agreed to issue an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in defense industries. Randolph called off the protest, but the episode drove home for Rustin the power of protest, or even the threat of it.
Under Muste’s and Randolph’s guidance, Rustin began a series of organizing jobs with FOR, the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker organization), and the War Resisters League. These were small, mostly white organizations that provided Rustin with a home base, a title, a newsletter, and a network of activists around the country.
A charismatic speaker, Rustin kept up a hectic travel schedule, preaching the gospel of nonviolence and civil disobedience on campuses, in churches, and at meetings of fellow pacifists. Rustin viewed nonviolent resistance as a “way of life,” not just a policy. Many a student became committed to the cause after hearing him speak. He recruited the next generation of civil-rights and anti-war activists.
As a Quaker and a conscientious objector, Rustin was legally entitled to do alternative service rather than military service during World War II. But on principle, objecting to war in general and the segregation of the armed forces in particular, he refused to serve even in the Civilian Public Service. “War is wrong,” he wrote to his draft board in 1943. “Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.”
In 1944, Rustin was convicted of violating the Selective Service Act and served two years in federal prison, first in Ashland, Kentucky, and later in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In Kentucky, he protested the pervasive segregation within prisons, facing violence from both prison guards and white prisoners. In Pennsylvania, prison officials kept Rustin away from other inmates so he wouldn’t influence them with his radical ideas. As Rustin wrote after his release in June 1946:
We were there by virtue of a commitment we had made to a moral position; and that gave us a psychological attitude the average prisoner did not have . . . . We had the feeling of being morally important, and that made us respond to prison conditions without fear, with considerable sensitivity to human rights . . . . It was by going to jail that we called the people’s attention to the horrors of war.
After leaving prison, Rustin rejoined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and resumed his career as a peripatetic organizer. In April 1947, he led the group’s interracial Journey of Reconciliation, riding buses in four southern states to challenge the segregation laws, engaging in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. He and others were arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Rustin spent twenty-two days on a chain gang. These demonstrations served as a precursor to the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s.
The Journey of Reconciliation was not without controversy, even among civil rights groups. Thurgood Marshall, who led the NAACP’s legal division (and whom President Lyndon Johnson later appointed as the first Black Supreme Court Justice), warned that the “disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”
In 1948, Rustin went back to work for Randolph, pushing President Harry S. Truman to enforce and expand FDR’s anti-discrimination order. They organized protests in several cities and at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. It worked: Truman desegregated the military and outlawed racial discrimination in the federal civil service later that year.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, while still working for FOR, Rustin visited India, Africa, and Europe, where he made contact with activists in various independence and peace movements. Increasingly, he viewed the struggle for civil rights in the United States as part of a worldwide movement against war and colonialism.
It was during this time—when homosexuals were considered “deviant” and gay sex was a crime in every state—that Rustin’s homosexuality became a public problem for him. In 1953, after giving a talk in Pasadena, California, Rustin was arrested for “public indecency” involving two other men in a parked car. Muste, who kept Rustin on the payroll so long as he kept his homosexuality out of the media, fired him for jeopardizing FOR’s already shaky reputation. But Randolph got him a similar job with the War Resisters League, where Rustin worked for the next twelve years.
One of the film’s few gaffes is in portraying Muste—in the only scene in which he appears—as an intolerant homophobe, which deprives viewers of an understanding of his remarkable life as a courageous and influential labor and peace activist.
Over the next decade, Rustin continued to play a critical behind-the-scenes role as an organizer within the civil rights movement. At Randolph’s behest, he went to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 to help local leaders organize a large-scale bus boycott. There Rustin began advising the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who had no direct organizing experience, on the philosophy and tactics of civil disobedience.
Rustin was “the perfect mentor for King at this stage in the young minister’s career.”—John D’Emilio
Rustin was “the perfect mentor for King at this stage in the young minister’s career,” observed John D’Emilio, author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. Over “the ensuing months and years,” D’Emilio wrote, “Rustin left a profound mark on the evolution of King’s role as national leader.” Much of Rustin’s advice was given from a distance, in phone calls, memos, and drafts of articles and book chapters he wrote for King. He had to cut short his first visit to Montgomery because, as a gay man and a former member of the Communist Party, he was a political liability to the burgeoning civil rights movement. Just at the moment when Rustin might have helped lead the mass movement for which he’d been working his entire adult life, he had to retreat to the shadows.
At the end of 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was unlawful. The victory could have remained a local triumph rather than a national bellwether, but Rustin, along with organizer Ella Baker and lawyer Stanley Levinson, (both close advisers to King) had an idea for building what Rustin called a “mass movement across the South.” This was the genesis of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—conceived by Rustin and founded with King as its first president. Rustin became King’s strategist, ghostwriter, and link to northern liberals and unions.
Local civil rights groups had been working on voter registration, desegregation, and other campaigns around the country, but in 1963, Randolph, as the elder statesman of the movement, believed that the time was right for a major rally that could unite the nation’s liberal and progressive factions around a common agenda. He pulled together the leaders of the major civil rights, labor, and liberal religious organizations and laid out his plan for a march in Washington, D.C.
The purpose of the march was to push for federal legislation, particularly for the Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations, including restaurants, parks, buses, and other facilities. President John F. Kennedy had proposed the law, but it had stalled in Congress. The event’s demands included a major public works program to provide jobs for unemployed workers, an increase in the federal minimum wage, and a new law prohibiting racial discrimination in public and private hiring. As United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther noted in his speech, “The job question is crucial, because we will not solve education or housing or public accommodations as long as millions of American Negroes are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs.”
The leaders Randolph gathered endorsed the plan. But NAACP president Roy Wilkins objected to putting Rustin in charge of the march because of his radicalism and his homosexuality. Randolph outmaneuvered Wilkins by announcing that he would be the march’s director and choose his own deputy: Rustin, of course. Nor would Randolph be cowed by Kennedy, who tried to dissuade the civil rights leaders from holding the march, contending that it would undermine support for the Civil Rights Act.
Three weeks before the August 28 march, Senator Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina segregationist, publicly attacked Rustin on the floor of the U.S. Senate by reading aloud reports of his Pasadena arrest for homosexual behavior a decade earlier. This, as biographer John D’Emilio noted, made Rustin “perhaps the most visible homosexual in America.” Rustin, however, kept his attention on organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
One of Rustin’s key aides, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a veteran civil rights leader and feminist, objected to the absence of any women among the list of speakers. The issue appeared to take Rustin by surprise. Ultimately, NAACP national board member Daisy Bates and international celebrity Josephine Baker were invited to speak from the podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial. In addition, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Camilla Williams, and Joan Baez, along with the SNCC Freedom Singers, all entertained the crowd.
Rustin spoke at the event, along with Randolph, Reuther, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, SNCC chair John Lewis, and several others. It was a huge success. More than 250,000 people attended. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. A week after the march, the widely circulated weekly LIFE magazine put Randolph and Rustin on its cover. Ten months later, in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
How did Rustin get so many people to show up in Washington on that hot August day? This was before email and social media, before fax machines and cellphones. Long-distance calls were quite expensive. The National Park Service—which controlled the National Mall—put numerous obstacles in Rustin’s way.
The key to the march’s success was drawing on a wide coalition of already-organized groups to bring people from small towns and big cities to Washington, D.C. Chief among these were Black churches and liberal labor unions, several of which—including the United Auto Workers Union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and District 65 (a union of retail workers)—helped pay for the march’s staff and logistics, including chartering buses, trains, and even airplanes. Other groups—including the NAACP, the National Council of Churches, and the American Jewish Congress—were also key to the large turnout.
Two years later, following the march from Selma to Montgomery and other civil disobedience campaigns, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
That year, Rustin also wrote a controversial article, “From Protest to Politics,” in the then-liberal magazine Commentary. In it, he argued that the coalition that had come together for the March on Washington needed to place less emphasis on protest and focus on electing liberal Democrats who could enact a progressive policy agenda centered on employment, housing, and civil rights. Rustin also drafted a “Freedom Budget,” released in January 1967, that advocated the “redistribution of wealth,” an expanded program of social welfare, full employment, and living wages. Rustin’s ideas influenced King, who increasingly began to talk about the importance of jobs, unions, and wealth redistribution.
Many of the young SNCC radicals did not trust the unions or the Democratic Party. By then, the group had become a major advocate of Black Power, an idea Rustin opposed because it undermined his commitment to coalition politics and racial integration. African Americans were only about 10 percent of the nation’s population. To win significant victories at the ballot box and in Congress, Rustin said, they needed white liberal allies.
But the biggest obstacle to Rustin’s (and King’s) Freedom Budget program was the war in Vietnam.
But the biggest obstacle to Rustin’s (and King’s) Freedom Budget program was the war in Vietnam. They both recognized not only that poor and Black people bore the brunt of casualties in Vietnam, but also that the money the United States was spending on the war (and on the military-industrial complex more broadly) was draining funds that could be used to solve problems domestically, particularly in cities.
Rustin was among the first public figures to call for the withdrawal of all American forces from South Vietnam, but as President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war, Rustin muted his criticisms. He wanted to avoid alienating LBJ, key Democrats, and union leaders who supported the war. King’s anti-war speeches would cause a rift between him and Rustin. As a result, Rustin—who had for decades been one of the nation’s most important pacifists and King’s mentor on nonviolence—was absent from the antiwar movement, which cost him credibility among New Left student activists.
During the final twenty years of his life, Rustin continued his organizing work within the civil rights, peace, and labor movements. He traveled overseas to support anti-colonial struggles and served as an election watchdog. He was still in demand as a public speaker, and was still valued for his strategic brilliance. But he never again had the same influence he had when organizing the March on Washington.
Ironically, Rustin’s homosexuality became a centerpiece of his final few years. He had been wary of the burgeoning gay rights movement, which exploded after the Stonewall riot in New York City in 1969. But at the end of his life, when he was involved in a stable relationship, he began speaking publicly about the importance of civil rights for gays and lesbians.
During the past two decades, Rustin’s life and legacy have deservedly gotten more attention. In 2002, the Republican-dominated school board in West Chester—a conservative school district that was 89 percent white—voted to name its new high school after Rustin. At Bayard Rustin High School, where a huge image of him adorns one wall, teachers today incorporate aspects of his life into their classes. A decade ago, Principal Phyllis Simmons told me: “Our students know who Bayard Rustin is.”
Rustin has been the subject of several biographies, and his writings have been collected in several volumes. Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics, a new collection of essays edited by Michael G. Long, was published in September. A 2002 PBS documentary, Brother Outsider, helped make him an icon for gay rights activists. In 2013, President Barack Obama bestowed on Rustin, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to American civilians. In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom posthumously pardoned Rustin for his 1953 arrest and conviction in Pasadena.
The left today needs people like Rustin who see the big picture and can forge coalitions, and who understand that the struggle for democracy and social justice requires not sprinters but long-distance runners.
In 1986, a year before he died of a burst appendix, Rustin was asked by writer and gay rights activist Joseph Beam to contribute an essay to a volume on the experience of gay black men. Rustin declined. But his reply to Beam provides an eloquent summary of the foundation of his life’s work. He wrote:
My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me . . . . The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief in the oneness of the human family. It demanded my involvement in the struggle to achieve interracial democracy.
Today there are many more nonprofit progressive activist and advocacy groups, and many more paid organizers than in Rustin’s day. They are working on environmental justice, women’s rights, labor and workers’ rights, racial justice, LGBTQ+ equality, anti-militarism, tax reform, immigration reform, tenants’ rights, education, criminal justice reform, and more. But the progressive movement must be greater than the sum of its parts. The left today needs people like Rustin who see the big picture and can forge coalitions, and who understand that the struggle for democracy and social justice requires not sprinters but long-distance runners.