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"The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated."
Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin is perhaps the most under-appreciated heros of the civil rights movement, simply because most people don't know of his existence. Other civil rights leaders forced his openly gay lifestyle In 1948, Rustin traveled to India to learn nonviolence techniques directly from the leaders of the Gandhian movement and helped to implement these tactics with independence groups in Ghana and Nigeria before returning to the United States to advise Martin Luther King Jr. on Gandhian tactics as King organized the public the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The following year, Rustin and King began organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC). Many African-American leaders were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation and Communist and forced Rustin's to resign from the SCLC in 1960.
When Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph organized the March on Washington in 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual" and produced a photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing, to imply that there was a same-sex relationship between the two. Both men denied the allegation of an affair, but despite King's support, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins did not allow Rustin to receive any public recognition for his role in planning the march.
You can read his full biography here.
I think Rustin's unsung biography takes on a new sense of prevalence in a post Prop 8 world, as the queer community and some in the black look for a way forward. The fact that King, a preacher, and the patriarch of the civil rights movement, relied on an openly gay man to organize his movement says a lot. But also the fact that the NAACP did not acknowledge his contributions says something as well.
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