Biographies: Bayard Rustin - Actor

Biographies

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Bayard Rustin was an African-American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. He worked with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement in 1941 to demand an end to racial discrimination in employment. Thereafter, he organized Freedom Rides and assisted in organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to reinforce the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he taught about nonviolence. Later on, he served as an organizer for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he became the first president of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which advocated the integration of formerly all-white unions as well as the unionization of African Americans. In the 1970s and 1980s, he served on many humanitarian missions, including helping refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. At the time of his death in 1987, Rustin was in Haiti on a humanitarian mission. Rustin was a gay man who was arrested early in his career for sexual activity with men. Because of his sexual orientation, he usually acted as an influential advisor to civil-rights leaders behind the scenes. In the 1980s, he became a public advocate for gay rights. Later in his life, Rustin shifted ideologically toward neoconservatism, and President Ronald Reagan praised him after his death in 1987. President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 20, 2013. He appeared as himself in such works as Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968) and Our World (1987).

• 18 September 2022
• Dalia Saad