Colman Domingo plays Rustin in the Netflix biopic.
This article appears in the February 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
On August 28, 1963, upwards of 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. By highlighting the reality of discrimination, the march contributed to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the design of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Organizers of later demonstrations demanding equal justice for women, lesbians and gays, and individuals with disabilities have turned to the 1963 march as a model.
The fact that the march actually took place was a logistical miracle. It demanded an organizer who, as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, could “unite feuding civil rights leaders, fend off opposition from Southern segregationists who opposed civil rights, and fend off opposition from Northern liberals who advocated a more cautious approach.”
The miracle-worker was Bayard Rustin, who in only eight weeks took the bravura idea of a mass demonstration and made it a reality. Yet largely because he was gay, Rustin received no credit for his accomplishment and until recently has been little known to a wider public. With the release of a widely praised Netflix film, Rustin, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, and the publication of an insightful collection of essays, Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics, this is his belated moment.
The march marked the triumph of a lifetime devoted to promoting racial and economic justice. In 1941, collaborating with A. Philip Randolph—a lion of the civil rights movement, who introduced him to the tactics of protest—Rustin helped plan a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in war industries and segregation in the military. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, fearful of the optics of 50,000 African American marchers descending on Washington, issued an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry, and the march was called off. To Rustin, the message was clear—threatening disruption could be an effective tactic.
When Rustin was imprisoned for two years as a conscientious objector, he organized his fellow inmates to protest segregation. He was a mentor and later an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., tutoring him in the philosophy and tactics of nonviolence, and a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which gave King a national platform. Over the course of his career, Rustin logged hundreds of thousands of miles, launching freedom rides, speaking on college campuses and at church socials. He was jailed 23 times, including a stint on a North Carolina chain gang after a freedom ride.
Although the D.C. march came off without a hitch, old-line civil rights leaders kept Rustin buried in the shadows. You won’t find his name on the official program for the march, and he was not invited to a post-march White House meeting with President John F. Kennedy. The NAACP’s recounting of the event barely mentions him.
Rustin’s personal baggage was the rationale for treating him as a pariah. “This march is of such importance that we must not put a person of his liabilities at the head,” insisted Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP. Among those liabilities was his membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s, which in the eyes of many cast him as a traitor. Because he refused to serve in World War II, he was tarred as a draft dodger on the floor of Congress.
Context is essential in understanding how Rustin navigated between his being gay and his activism.
Rustin’s biggest liability was his homosexuality—more precisely, his refusal to lie about his sexuality and “pass” as straight. While he was not “out” until the 1980s, the fact that he was a gay man was an open secret. In the Netflix biopic, the actor Colman Domingo, playing Rustin in an Oscar-worthy performance, provides an explanation that seems true to the man: “I can’t surrender my differences. The world won’t let me. And even if I could, I don’t want to … Am I yet again forced to justify my existence? … When we tell ourselves lies, we do the work of oppressors by oppressing ourselves … On the day I was born black, I was born homosexual. [Civil rights leaders] either believe in freedom and justice for all, or they do not.”
Homophobia ran deep within the civil rights community, most of whose leaders were Baptist ministers. Those leaders also feared—not without cause—that “sex deviate” hunters like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and segregationists like South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond would feast on his homosexuality as a way to discredit the movement.
Rustin’s promiscuous sex life nearly torpedoed his involvement in the march. On the floor of the Senate, Thurmond revealed that in 1953 Rustin had been arrested with two other men and sentenced to prison for having sex in a car. “This so-called man, he is a pervert,” Thurmond thundered, but at this pivotal moment the civil rights leadership rallied around Rustin. In retrospect, it is remarkable, as Michael Long, editor of Bayard Rustin, points out, that those leaders chose a pacifist, ex-convict, former communist, gay Black man to organize the most noteworthy event in the history of American protests.
The March on Washington was not the first time that Rustin’s sexual orientation was used against him. In 1960, he and King planned a demonstration outside the Democratic Convention to demand anti-discrimination legislation. Wilkins and other establishment civil rights leaders opposed the plan, concerned that it would derail their behind-the-scenes congressional politicking.
To Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a charismatic and corrupt New York City pastor, homosexuality was sinful. He fulminated about an “alarming growth of sex degeneracy … The boys with the swish and the girls with the swagger.” Powell threatened King that if he did not disavow Rustin, he would tell the press that King and Rustin were lovers. There was not a scintilla of truth to Powell’s accusation, but King, in one of his least admirable moments, backed down. He canceled the Democratic Convention march and pushed Rustin out of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), sidelining him amid the freedom rides and sit-ins, nonviolent strategies to which he brought experience and expertise. In 1964, after Rustin had organized a successful boycott of the New York City public schools to protest segregation, the SCLC considered inviting him back, but vetoed him because of the old worries about his sexual and political history.
EDDIE ADAMS/AP PHOTO
You won’t find Rustin’s name on the official program of the March on Washington, despite his primary role in organizing it.
Historical context is essential in understanding how Rustin navigated between his being gay and his activism. For gays and lesbians, the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were a nightmare. Homosexual sex was illegal in every state, and police routinely entrapped gay men. The FBI generated 330,000 pages documenting “sex deviates.” President Dwight Eisenhower issued an executive order banning “sex perverts” from federal jobs. Many houses of worship shut their doors to gays. Families disowned their gay and lesbian children. The American Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as an illness. As historian Martin Duberman recounts in Cures, his heartbreaking memoir, some gay men, plagued by self-hatred, sought out psychiatrists in the vain hope that they could become “normal.”
Being “out” was exceedingly rare during that era, and Rustin’s refusal to lie about his sexuality was an act of personal courage. “I never had any sense that Bayard felt any shame or guilt about his homosexuality,” recounted Davis Platt, his lover during the 1940s.
In the 1960s, Rustin shifted his focus, moving away from the streets to the corridors of power. He argued that the most effective strategy was to make use of the political system, building coalitions to secure racial and economic justice—the theme of the March on Washington. By then, however, this melioristic approach had fallen out of favor. As “Black Power” became the rallying cry, Rustin’s ideas, summarized in a 1965 Commentary essay, “From Protest to Politics,” went unheard. Ignored at home, he focused on international human rights.
The public and private lives of Bayard Rustin were inextricably intertwined. Until he met Walter Naegle, who in 1977 would become his life partner, he evinced no interest in the gay rights movement. That relationship doubtlessly played a part in his subsequent involvement.
Naegle was precisely Rustin’s type—boyishly handsome, a social activist and a talented photographer. He had refused to sign up for the Vietnam War draft, just as Rustin had refused to serve in World War II. In 1982, the two men decided to legalize their relationship in the only possible way—Rustin adopted Naegle. “He was concerned about protecting my rights, because gay people had no protection,” Naegle told an NPR interviewer. “We actually had to go through a process as if Bayard was adopting a small child. They had to send a social worker to our home, to make sure that this was a fit home.”
While Rustin started speaking out about gay rights during the 1980s, he was ambivalent about his role in that movement. “While I have no problem with being publicly identified as homosexual, it would be dishonest of me to present myself as one who was in the forefront of the struggle for gay rights,” he wrote in 1986. “I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter. As such, it has not been a factor which has greatly influenced my role as an activist.” Yet that same year, Rustin wrote to Ed Koch, then mayor of New York City, urging the passage of a gay rights bill: “No group is ultimately safe from prejudice, bigotry and harassment so long as any group is subject to special negative treatment.”
Rustin’s feelings about the gay rights movement continued to evolve. “Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people,” he told a reporter in 1987, shortly before his death. “That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.”
Finally, Rustin is getting the attention he deserves. “Being black, being homosexual, being a political radical, that’s a combination that’s pretty volatile and it comes along like Halley’s Comet,” Walter Naegle told a Huffington Post reporter. The essays in Bayard Rustin limn the many facets of his life, among them his organizational genius; his commitment to nonviolence, which infused the civil rights movement; his turbulent relationship with King; and his pivot from the streets to the political arena. In a chapter titled “Troubles I’ve Seen,” John D’Emilio draws on his masterful biography of Rustin, Lost Prophet, to create an intricate portrait of the man in all his complexity. Rustin, the newly released film, does a remarkable job of portraying its subject, neither underplaying nor sensationalizing the interplay between his public and private lives.
It is natural to want our heroes to be unblemished—Sir Lancelot or Joan of Arc—but rarely, if ever, is that the case. As George Orwell wrote, in an against-the-grain critique, “Reflections on Gandhi”:
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
What’s needed in American politics, but in short supply, is an acceptance of complexity, not a one-dimensional narrative of outsized heroes and villains. The moral compass of those whom we regard as heroes emerges over time, through trial and error. No one would dream of canonizing Rustin. But Barack Obama was surely right to honor him, not just with the Presidential Medal of Freedom that he awarded posthumously but also with the movie that he and his wife have now produced. Rustin the man and Rustin the movie are welcome reminders of the linked struggles for justice and dignity in our enduring past.
