#PrideMonth2020 — Know Your History (3)
PILLARS OF PRIDE
By — Oliver Schofield-Tydalé
Bayard Rustin was the chief organizer for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the 1963 civil rights March On Washington. Rustin’s expertise in nonviolent direct action assisted King in shaping the African-American Civil Rights movement.
Bayard Rustin was an LGBTQ or civil rights activist best known for being a key adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. He organized the 1963 March on Washington and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 for his activism.
He was a key advisor to Martin Luther King and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington.
Rustin played a critical role in introducing King to Gandhi’s teachings while writing publicity materials and organizing carpools.
In a 1987 interview with the Village Voice, Rustin said, "I think the gay community has a moral obligation... to do whatever is possible to encourage more and more gays to come out of the closet."
In January 1953, Bayard Rustin after delivering a speech in Pasadena Calif was arrested on “lewd conduct” and “vagrancy” charges allegedly for a sexual act involving two white men in an automobile, with the FBI’s file on Rustin expanding for demanded his resignation.
That left Rustin to conclude, “I know now that for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer.”
Rustin’s sexual arrest record terrorized him again in 1963, when segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond read its entire contents into the congressional record, in an attempt to make the march lose its best organizer.
It backfired, civil rights leaders taking an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" approach were not supporters of Thurmond and backed Rustin.
During the 1980s, Rustin also opened up publicly about the sexuality he had “sublimated” since the 1950s.
(This coincided with his falling in love with Walter Naegle, now serving as executor and archivist of Rustin’s estate.)
In a 1987 interview with the Village Voice, Rustin said “I think the gay community has a moral obligation to do whatever is possible to encourage more and more gays to come out of the closet.”
For his part, he worked to bring the AIDS crisis to the attention of the NAACP once predicting “Twenty-five, 30 years ago the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people, 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, trans etc;”
In 2013, Obama awarded Rustin the presidential Medal of Freedom.
