Among 2024’s Academy Award nominations for Best Actor is Colman Domingo in Rustin, in which he plays Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), an integral figure in America’s Civil Rights battles of the mid-20th century; although he played a pivotal role in many fronts of American political history, Rustin was not widely known, working primarily behind the scenes, most notably by organizing the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin’s lack of fame during his life was the result of his history of supporting Communism (which he came to reject) and his open homosexuality (like Rustin, Domingo is also gay).
Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 17, 1912. His mother, Florence Rustin, was only 17 years old, so Florence’s parents, Janifer and Julia Rustin, decided to raise Bayard as their son; as a result, Rustin believed his mother was his sister until he was told the truth when he was a teenager.
West Chester was a predominantly Quaker community. Julia instilled in Bayard many of the theses of the Quaker belief system, mixed with her own beliefs through her attendance at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Julia was also a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and many of the luminaries of that organization visited the Rustin home, making a solid impact on Bayard.
Rustin excelled in sports in high school while also singing in choirs as a tenor vocalist; it was this talent that gained him admission to first Wilberforce College, a historically black college in Ohio; he was expelled in 1936 over his organizing of a strike, and then attended Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheyney University) before moving to Harlem in New York in 1937.
Rustin also joined the Young Communist League in 1936 but left the organization in 1941, when the Soviet Union-led organization directed members to agitate for US support of their war effort after the Nazis invaded the USSR earlier that year. Rustin had become a devoted pacifist by this time, deeply ingrained by his Quaker-influenced upbringing and by his admiration of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and soon was hired at the Fellowship for Reconciliation (FOR), whose leader A.J. Muste became a mentor. After the US declaration of war in December 1941, Rustin worked with FOR to assist conscientious objectors. During WWII, conscientious objectors were given a choice of working at camps or serving time in prison. Rustin and his organization discovered that the camps involved menial drudgery in poor conditions. So when Rustin was selected for service and refused to comply, he chose prison and was incarcerated from 1944 to 1946.
The segregation Black Americans experienced in the military galvanized the Civil Rights movement after the war (President Truman ordered the military to be de-segregated in 1948), and in 1947, Rustin and fellow FOR staffer George Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation, in which teams of interracial men traveled on buses in the upper South to test compliance to a recent Supreme Court ruling that prohibited discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin and the other participants were arrested several times by local police, and Rustin served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina.
Rustin was arrested in 1953 in Pasadena, California, after being discovered having sex in a car with two other men; Rustin served 60 days in jail for “sex perversion.” Although Rustin’s sexuality had been common knowledge before this event, it had not been discussed. The arrest and conviction made it public and disrupted his relationship with A.J. Muste and FOR.
Rustin began advising Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956, at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He persuaded King to follow Mahatma Gandhi’s lead by taking a non-violent approach to protests; he even apparently influenced King to reduce his armed protection. The following year, Rustin and King worked together to create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They began to develop a plan to organize a protest at the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. This brought them into conflict with Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first Black person elected to Congress from New York, who wanted to protect his Democratic political connections while retaining his position as a leading figure in the Civil Rights movement.
Powell threatened to spread the rumor that King and Rustin were lovers. King called off the protest (earning one of his few criticisms from supporters), and Rustin resigned from the SCLC.
Nevertheless, when the decision was made to have a march on Washington, King turned to Rustin to organize the event despite the controversy that would likely result from having an openly gay man leading the charge behind the scenes. Indeed, racist Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin in the Senate, calling him a “Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual” and having the details of his Pasadena arrest inserted into the Congressional Record.
Despite this, the 1963 March was a historic success under Rustin’s guidance. This event is still recognized as one of the critical turning points in American history.
As if to counter Thurmond’s exhortations, Rustin had become a committed anti-communist by the mid-1960s and, in fact, was an early developer of neo-conservatism. He even rejected his earlier pacifist advocacy by supporting President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to contain Communism, including giving guarded support to the Vietnam War. He also ardently supported Israel during their conflicts; in 1970, he argued that the US should send fighter jets to Israel.
In 1964, Rustin wrote an article for Commentary in which he correctly predicted how increasing automation in factories would negatively affect Black communities and that closer association with white-dominated labor organizations would be necessary to aid black workers; at the same time, he decried identity politics, warning that ideas such as “Black Power” were divisive and would alienate white citizens.
Rustin’s association with neo-conservative views would bring him much criticism in later years by leftists, with many accusing him of “selling out.”
Even though Rustin was openly gay, he largely kept his distance from the gay rights movement of the 1970s; it wasn’t until the 1980s that he began to speak out on issues directly impacting gay men. This was much the result of his relationship with Walter Neagle, a man 30 years his junior.
Because same-sex marriage was not legal at the time, Rustin formally adopted Neagle in 1982. In 1986, he gave a speech in which he stated that gay men were the new blacks (he used a different term) and that gay people were “the new barometer for social change.”
However, the following year, when asked to contribute to a book on the gay black experience, he declined, feeling that it would be “dishonest” to participate when he had done so little for the gay rights movement.
Bayard Rustin died on August 24, 1984, as a result of a perforated appendix. Rustin’s key role in the Civil Rights movement was widely recognized only after the turn of the century. A high school named after him opened in West Chester in 2006, and he was posthumously presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by President Obama.
The release of the motion picture Rustin has finally brought the story of this visionary gay black man to a wider audience, bringing him the public acclaim that was denied him in his life.
Joseph Jones
Mr. Jones is a contributing writer for the Gay Male Journal, focusing on Homosexual Male history. He has a History degree from the University of South Florida and resides in Tennessee.
