Who was Bayard Rustin?
The principal organiser of the 1963 March on Washington — the event at which Martin Luther King delivered the speech everyone knows — and a figure who was deliberately kept in the background because he was openly gay, a former Communist Party member, and had a conviction under laws criminalising homosexuality.
What he actually did:
Organised the March on Washington in roughly eight weeks, coordinating transport, marshals, sanitation, sound, food, funding and the participation of multiple organisations that disagreed with each other. Around 250,000 people attended and it passed without significant disorder, which was itself the political achievement — a violent march would have set the movement back.
Introduced Gandhian nonviolent direct action into the American civil rights movement. He had studied it directly, travelling to India, and he taught its methods to King, who had not previously practised it systematically. This is arguably his largest contribution and the least known.
Organised the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947, an interstate bus protest against segregated seating that preceded the Freedom Rides by more than a decade, for which he was arrested and served time on a chain gang.
Was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the Second World War.
Advised on strategy through the Montgomery bus boycott and afterwards.
Why he was marginalised. Opponents of the movement threatened to use his sexuality and his political history to discredit it, and some allies pressed for his removal from visible roles. He accepted operating behind the scenes, and was repeatedly written out of accounts.
What he said about it was characteristically direct: that the barometer of where one stands on human rights is what one is willing to say about the group treated as least deserving of them.
Later life. He worked on labour and economic issues, international human rights, and — in his final years — spoke publicly on gay rights.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2013, and was posthumously pardoned for the 1953 conviction in 2020.