Word: rustin
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Before long, millions of people did. It debuted on April 4 in London's Trafalgar Square, the assembly point for the four-day march. Over the next few days, it appeared in countless newspaper photos and TV reports. Bayard Rustin, an American protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who took part in the march, brought the symbol home to a growing civil rights movement dedicated to nonviolence. When the Vietnam War started getting out of hand, protesters discovered they had a ready-made icon to signal their feelings...
...talk to him in private. He had a confidence that Stanley didn't want anything. He had no ulterior motives and agendas, and that's something which is very rare, as you see. You see how much he's different from everybody else, including [March on Washington coordinator] Bayard Rustin and lots of other people who are brilliant, brilliant people, but they all have their own angles, and also Stanley criticized King unvarnished and straight-on as opposed to in great rhetorical sermons, and that sort of thing. He would tell him, you know, Martin, I think you're making...
Reading about and watching the poignant new PBS documentary about his life (co-produced and co-directed by Time Inc.'s Bennett Singer and scheduled for national broadcast on Jan. 20) and reading his prose, one is struck by a central, inspiring fact. Rustin never wavered in his belief in true racial integration. He saw the civil rights movement not as a protest against America or an indictment of it but as a way for America to live up to its own principles. In stark contrast to Malcolm X, with whom he civilly debated, Rustin emphasized not what white Americans...
...invisibility? Rustin, you see, was a proud and exuberant gay man. From adolescence on, he displayed an ease with his sexual orientation that was extremely rare at that time. He seemed to feel neither guilt nor shame. He had two very public relationships in his life (both with white men), and he came to see his struggle as a homosexual as inextricable from his struggle as a black man in America. But neither mainstream society nor even the civil rights leadership could cope with his honesty. In 1953, he was arrested for sexual activity in a car--a "morals charge...
...amazingly, Rustin never showed bitterness. He had every right to be inflamed against the white establishment, which at one point sentenced him to hard labor on a chain gang as punishment for his early civil rights protests. And he had every reason to be embittered by his black allies, for their acquiescence in the gay baiting. Yet somehow he rose above both. In one telling incident, he completed his sentence on the chain gang by writing a conciliatory letter to the sadistic white officer who ran the prison. Somehow, Rustin never succumbed to the anger that was his right...