Bayard Taylor Rustin was born on March 17, 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He attended Wilberforce University in Ohio and Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, both historically Black schools. He moved to New York City in 1937 to study at City College of New York.
Rustin worked for A. Phillip Randolph during World War II, fighting against racial discrimination in war-related hiring. By the 1950s, he was an expert organizer of human rights protests. During this decade, Rustin met the young civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and began working with him as an organizer and strategist in 1955. Rustin assisted King with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that began in late 1955. Together with other key leaders of the boycott, Rustin created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. Three years later, prejudice about Rustin’s homosexuality led him to leave the SCLC and distance himself from Dr. King in order not to become a burden. Despite this, King and Rustin continued collaborating together, culminating in the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin worked closely with A. Philip Randolph to organize the event. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who contributed to the march’s planning, said, “Bayard was the real general here, and he acted like a general, telling us all what to do and when to do it and how to do it. You needed an organizer, but you needed somebody with charisma to make you want to follow him. That was his gift.” The March on Washington is credited with paving the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Rustin received numerous awards and honorary degrees throughout his career. He continued to speak about the importance of economic equality within the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the need for social rights for people in the LGBTQ community. He died on August 24, 1987, at the age of 75. President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. Rustin is the topic of a biopic, Rustin, which streamed on Netflix and was produced by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s company, Higher Ground. Director George C. Wolfe jumped at the opportunity to tell the story of a crucial but often overlooked figure. He said, “This was a man whose ferocity and sense of justice and correctness seemed to be embedded in every fiber of his being. History…it forgot him. It, in point of fact, erased him.”
