Bayard Rustin, the March on Washington's Organizer Kept Offstage

Before dawn on August 28, 1963, a tall man with a clipboard and a precise, slightly old-fashioned way of speaking was walking the grounds near the Washington Monument, checking on the arrangements for what would become the largest demonstration the capital had ever seen. He had planned for portable toilets, water fountains, first aid stations and cheese sandwiches. He had arranged the buses and trains that would bring people from across the country, set the schedule so that everyone would be out of the city by nightfall, and recruited off-duty Black police officers from New York to help keep order. His name was Bayard Rustin. When the day ended, with about a quarter of a million people having marched peacefully to the Lincoln Memorial and Martin Luther King Jr. having delivered the speech the world would remember, Rustin stepped to the microphone briefly to read the march's demands. Most of the people watching on television had no idea who he was. That was, in part, by design.

In short: Bayard Rustin was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. He was also openly gay at a time when that was dangerous, and civil rights leaders who valued his skills kept him in the background, fearing his sexuality and past would be used against the movement. His life shows how much the movement depended on him, and what it cost to keep him hidden.

A Quaker upbringing and a life of protest

Rustin was born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and raised largely by his grandparents. His grandmother was a Quaker, and the Quaker commitment to nonviolence and to the equal worth of every person shaped him for life. He was a gifted singer, a good athlete and a sharp student. He also understood from an early age that he was attracted to men, at a time when saying so could cost a person nearly everything.

In the 1930s and 1940s he was everywhere in the radical politics of the time. He was briefly involved with the Young Communist League before breaking with it. He worked with A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the great Black labor union, on Randolph's 1941 plan for a march on Washington to protest discrimination in the defence industries. That march was called off when President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order banning such discrimination, a lesson in leverage Rustin never forgot. He joined the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, and he was jailed during the Second World War as a conscientious objector.

In 1947 he helped organize the Journey of Reconciliation, in which Black and white activists rode buses together through the upper South to test a Supreme Court ruling against segregation on interstate travel. It was a forerunner of the Freedom Rides of 1961. Rustin was arrested in North Carolina and served time on a chain gang, an experience he later described in a widely read newspaper series.

The arrest that followed him

In 1953, in Pasadena, California, Rustin was arrested on a morals charge after police found him with two men in a parked car. He served about two months in jail. The arrest forced him out of his job with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and it followed him for the rest of his career. Anyone who wanted to discredit him, or the people he worked with, had a ready weapon.

It is important to be clear about what this was. In the 1950s, consensual sex between men was a crime in every state, and police in many cities made a practice of arresting gay men. Rustin was prosecuted under laws that the Supreme Court would eventually find unconstitutional, half a century later, in Lawrence v. Texas. His conviction was a product of the persecution of gay people, not a sign of any danger to anyone.

King's adviser

In 1956 Rustin went to Montgomery, Alabama, where the bus boycott had begun after Rosa Parks's arrest. He met the young minister leading it, Martin Luther King Jr., and became one of his closest advisers. Rustin had studied Gandhi's methods and had spent years practicing nonviolent resistance, and he helped King think through nonviolence not just as a tactic but as a philosophy and a way of life. He helped persuade King, who had applied for a gun permit after his home was bombed, to give up armed self-defence. He helped draft the plan for what became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

But his presence was always a liability in the eyes of some. In 1960, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, angry over a planned protest at the Democratic convention, threatened to tell the press a false story that King and Rustin were having an affair. King, under pressure, distanced himself from Rustin, and Rustin resigned from his role. It was a painful episode, and it shows how vulnerable a gay man was even among allies. The threat worked because everyone knew it would work.

Building the march

By 1962 and 1963, A. Philip Randolph had revived his old idea of a march on Washington, this time for jobs and freedom. Randolph wanted Rustin to organize it. Some of the other leaders, including Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, objected, worried about Rustin's arrest record, his past political associations and his sexuality. The compromise was that Randolph would serve as director and Rustin as his deputy, with Randolph making clear that Rustin would do the actual work.

And he did. In about eight weeks, from a headquarters in Harlem, Rustin and a small staff organized a demonstration on a scale the country had never seen. He wrote an organizing manual that went out to local groups. He planned the transportation, the marshals, the sound system, the order of speakers and the timing down to the minute. He thought hard about safety, both to protect marchers and to deny opponents any images of disorder. The careful planning was political: a peaceful, orderly, enormous crowd was the message.

In August, just weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina attacked Rustin on the Senate floor, reading into the record his arrest and his past ties to the Young Communist League, in an effort to discredit the march. Randolph defended Rustin publicly, and the other leaders held together. The attack failed. On August 28, the march took place as planned. A few weeks later, Life magazine put a photograph of Randolph and Rustin on its cover. It was a rare moment of public credit.

Why he stayed offstage

It is worth asking honestly why the civil rights leaders kept Rustin in the background, and whether they were wrong to.

Their case was not simply prejudice, though prejudice was part of it. They were running a movement under constant attack. The FBI was surveilling them. Segregationist politicians were looking for any reason to paint them as communists or criminals. Every leader had to calculate what might be used against the cause. In that environment, a gay organizer with an arrest record and a radical past was a target, and some leaders believed that protecting the movement required keeping him out of sight.

The case against that judgment is also strong. The movement depended on Rustin's skills; he was not an expendable volunteer. Keeping him hidden did not stop opponents from attacking him, as Thurmond showed. And by treating his sexuality as a shameful liability, the leaders accepted the premise of the people persecuting gay Americans. Rustin himself largely went along with it for many years, putting the cause he served ahead of his own recognition.

My view is that the leaders made a defensible tactical call in an indefensible situation, and that the costs fell entirely on Rustin. That is a pattern movements should recognize. When a coalition asks one of its members to hide in order to protect the rest, it should at least be honest that it is asking for a sacrifice, and it should look for ways to stop asking.

From protest to politics

After the march, Rustin's thinking turned in a direction that still provokes argument. In a 1965 essay in Commentary titled "From Protest to Politics," he argued that the civil rights movement had largely won its battle against legal segregation, and that the next stage had to be about economic power: jobs, housing, education and a coalition of Black voters, labor unions, liberals and religious groups that could win elections and pass laws. He ran the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which worked to build ties between Black communities and organized labor.

Some younger activists saw this as too moderate, too close to the Democratic Party and too willing to compromise. Rustin, for his part, was critical of the Black Power movement's turn away from coalition politics, and his support for the Vietnam War's critics was more muted than many expected from a lifelong pacifist. Those disagreements were real, and fair readers can land in different places. But his core insight, that rights without economic security are fragile, and that lasting change requires governing majorities, not just protest, is as relevant as ever.

Coming into the light

In his later years, Rustin spoke more openly about being gay and about gay rights, calling them a central human rights struggle of the time. He testified for a New York City gay rights bill in the 1980s. He met Walter Naegle in 1977, and they were partners for the last decade of his life. Because they could not marry, Rustin legally adopted Naegle in 1982 so that they would have some legal protection as a family, a step some same-sex couples took in those years.

Rustin died on August 24, 1987. In 2013, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, and Naegle accepted it. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom of California granted Rustin a posthumous pardon for his 1953 conviction, and California created a program to pardon others convicted under similar laws.

Who else was kept off the stage

Rustin was not the only person whose work made the march possible and whose voice was muted on the day. The other group is larger, and its exclusion was noticed at the time.

No woman gave one of the march's major speeches. The program included a brief tribute to women of the movement, during which several women were introduced, and Daisy Bates, who had guided the nine Black students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957, spoke only briefly. Dorothy Height, who led the National Council of Negro Women and was one of the most important organizers in the country, sat on the platform but was not given a speaking slot. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the march's organizing committee, protested the omission in writing before the march. Women had done a great deal of the organizing, in Washington and in the local committees that filled the buses.

The parallel with Rustin is instructive. In both cases, leaders made a judgment about what the public would accept and who would make the strongest impression, and in both cases the judgment reflected prejudices that the movement was, in principle, fighting. In both cases the people sidelined kept working anyway, because the cause mattered more to them than the credit.

In the years that followed, women in the civil rights movement organized more openly around their own concerns. Rustin's experience of being hidden became part of what he spoke about in his later years, when he argued that the struggle for gay rights was a central test of whether the country meant its commitments to equality.

There is a practical lesson in this for anyone organizing now. The question of who speaks is never just a question of image. It shapes who feels the movement belongs to them, who stays involved after the big day, and whose concerns make it onto the list of demands. A movement that wants to win over the long haul does well to ask, before every event, who did the work and whether they are being heard. The answer will not always be comfortable. Asking it is still part of the job, and it is cheaper to ask before the event than to apologize decades later.

The march's ten demands, which Rustin read aloud as the program closed, included a federal jobs program and a higher minimum wage. Those economic demands are often forgotten in the retelling. Rustin did not forget them. They were the bridge to everything he did next.

What you can do

Rustin's genius was logistics in the service of justice. He would want you to do the unglamorous work.

• Register voters. Rustin believed protest had to turn into political power. The voting page has registration deadlines, voter ID rules and mail and early voting options for every state, linked to each state's election office.
• Build the coalition he described. The organizations directory lists civil rights, labor, LGBTQ+ and voting groups in every state. Find one whose work crosses more than one cause.
• Connect labor and civil rights. The labor page shows the latest union elections the NLRB has counted and union membership over time, a reminder that economic power was always part of the plan.
• Read across the movements. The racial justice topic page and the LGBTQ rights topic page cover the two halves of Rustin's life, which were never really separate.
• Volunteer for the boring job. Every march, campaign and drive needs someone to handle buses, water and schedules. Raise your hand for it.