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Sharon Lettman-Hicks, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, told USA Today this month that her organization is “advocating the preservation of his legacy by removing the barriers that didn’t allow society to get to know all of Bayard Rustin.
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In a 1986 speech he advocated for a change in civil rights activism: “The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.” Rustin should be remembered not just for his fight for racial equality, which was accompanied by a quest for economic justice, but also his unflinching participation in the fight for gay rights. And he labored there willingly, but he was also pushed there and kept there and confined there by civil rights leaders.” “This is a man who labored for decades behind the scenes. “Rustin is finally emerging out of the shadows,” he says. Long, who edited I Must Resist, tells Mother Jones the accolades are long overdue. The National Black Justice Coalition, a black LGBT civil rights organization, launched a movement to celebrate Rustin on what would have been his 100th birthday in 2012 and created the Bayard Rustin 2013 Commemorative Project, which highlights his contributions to the March on Washington. In March, President Obama awarded Rustin, who died in 1987, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “We are the poorer for it.”Īlthough prejudice kept Rustin behind the scenes-and out of history books-his name is finally making headlines. “We must look back with sadness at the barriers of bigotry built around his sexuality,” NAACP Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond, who knew and worked with Rustin, wrote in the forward for 2012’s I Must Resist, a book of Rustin’s letters. But Rustin was kept in the shadows by the homophobia of both his enemies (segregationist Strom Thurmond used Rustin’s sexuality to denigrate the movement) and his allies. Later, Rustin was the mastermind of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (now simply known as the March on Washington), organizing it in just two months. He’s also credited with honing the King’s nonviolent strategy.
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In the 1950s, he advised, strategized, and raised money behind the scenes for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helping to direct King’s rise to national prominence. He helped organize and participated in the first freedom ride, 1947’s “Journey of Reconciliation” (for which he and several other participants were jailed and put in a chain gang). Rustin, born in Pennsylvania in 1912 and raised by his grandfather and his Quaker grandmother-who, along with Mahatma Gandhi, influenced his philosophy of pacifism-had his hand in several major moments in a fight for equality that would span his entire life. Now Martin Luther King Jr.’s trusted adviser-the black, gay, “badass” pacifist who organized the March on Washington-is finally getting his due 50 years after the landmark demonstration.
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Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.īayard Rustin was for years one of the least known and celebrated major players in the civil rights movement.