Bayard Rustin

In 1963, as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, Bayard Rustin was given a daunting task: organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

It was no small assignment, as more than 220,000 demonstrators would pour into Washington, D.C., on a hot August morning for a daylong protest rally. And it was up to Rustin to sweat the details.

A longtime civil rights activist as well as ally and adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rustin had to not only arrange for speakers and vet their speeches, he had to rent portable toilets, find parking for hundreds of buses on which participants arrived and work with scores of off-duty police officers to secure the march.

But Rustin’s role as march organizer was more difficult because he was openly gay. Due to his sexual orientation, he faced opposition from both those who were for and against the march. Fellow civil rights leaders, including the influential minister and New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell, feared Rustin’s sexuality would detract from their efforts and urged King to draft a new organizer.

Then-Sen. Strom Thurman, an equally influential segregationist, delivered a scathing speech on the Senate floor in which he labeled Rustin a communist homosexual and convicted “sex pervert.”

The March on Washington

Still, the March on Washington – in which King delivered his eloquent “I Have a Dream” speech – went off without a hitch, largely to Rustin’s diligence and persistence.

Born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Rustin was raised by Quaker grandparents and began his quest for racial equality at an early age. As a high school teenager, he played on the school football team and demanded that black players be housed with white players during away games.

He moved to Harlem in New York City in 1937 and continued his civil rights activism while working as a nightclub singer.

Because of his sexual orientation during an era when homosexual behavior was largely unaccepted, many of Rustin’s civil rights achievements were not widely noted.

Upon his death in 1987, President Ronald Reagan issued a statement praising Rustin’s work for civil rights. In 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.