Rustin Organizes the March on Washington
The organization of the March on Washington in 1963 was a pivotal moment in the American civil rights movement, primarily coordinated by Bayard Rustin, a key figure in both civil rights and LGBTQ rights advocacy. A coalition of prominent leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph, came together in July 1963 to plan the march, which aimed to address civil rights and economic issues faced by African Americans. Rustin, who was initially selected to coordinate the event, demonstrated remarkable organizational skills by preparing an extensive manual and successfully fundraising for the march in a short timeframe.
The march, held on August 28, 1963, attracted an estimated 250,000 participants and became a symbol of the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Despite his significant contributions, Rustin faced challenges due to his sexual orientation, which was weaponized by opponents to undermine the civil rights movement. His activism spanned decades and included a commitment to nonviolent resistance, influenced by his travels and philosophical studies.
Rustin's complex identity as a Black man and openly gay individual positioned him at the intersection of multiple social justice movements, often leading to tensions within activist circles. His legacy, recognized posthumously with awards such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, reflects both the triumphs and struggles of those fighting for equality in the mid-20th century.
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Rustin Organizes the March on Washington
Bayard Rustin, a gay African American activist, is credited as the key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington demonstration for civil rights, the event where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The march is considered one of the largest and most influential demonstrations in US history.
Date July 2–August 28, 1963
Also known as: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Locale Washington, DC
Key Figures
Bayard Rustin (1910–87), African American civil rights leader, war-resistance activist, pacifist, and organizer of the 1963 March on WashingtonMartin Luther King Jr. (1929–68), civil rights leader, reverend, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and march speakerA. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), African American labor leader, civil rights activist, and chair of the march
Summary of Event
Meeting in New York City on July 2, 1963, a coalition of key civil rights leaders planned a march on Washington, DC. Coalition members included Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); A. Philip Randolph (founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the AFL-CIO); Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Whitney Young Jr., of the Urban League; John Lewis from the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee); and James Farmer from CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality).
After debate, the group selected Bayard Rustin, the founder of CORE, to coordinate the march. While Randolph, an activist labor leader and civil rights veteran, was the official March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom director, he supported Rustin to work on his behalf as chief march planner, which Bayard successfully did in only two months.
Within the first weeks of planning, Rustin had an organizing manual written and two thousand copies distributed to civil rights leaders in strategic locations throughout the United States. Funds were raised by collecting large and small donations and through sales of buttons and an official memento that consisted of a portfolio of photographs. By mid-August, 175,000 buttons had been purchased by supporters for twenty-five cents each, and 40,000 portfolios had been printed.
Randolph’s and Rustin’s collaboration had actually begun in 1941, when Randolph, with Rustin’s assistance, planned a March on Washington to protest racism in the US armed forces. The 1941 march never materialized, however, because at the last moment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order protecting African American rights. Rustin continued to organize after the 1963 March on Washington, and in 1964, he was involved in the extensive New York City school boycott to protest continued segregation in the city’s schools.
In the mid-1950s, writer and activist Lillian Smith pressed Rustin to assist King in developing Gandhian principles of nonviolent resistance for the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Smith was the internationally acclaimed author of the controversial 1944 novel Strange Fruit—the tale of lynching in a small Southern town. In 1964, Smith published Our Faces, Our Words, a work that extolled the principles of nonviolence that had become a fundamental part of the Civil Rights movement, in large part through the influence of Rustin. Smith had asked Rustin to assist King because of his understanding of nonviolence, which originated in his family’s ties to the pacifist church, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
Rustin’s philosophy of nonviolence had deepened during his periodic travels to India and Africa between 1947 and 1952 to explore the peaceful resistance embedded in independence movements. By the late 1950s, Rustin had become a speechwriter, political adviser, and confidant of King, and he was instrumental in bringing Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement.
Rustin’s life as an African American as well as an openly gay person placed him in many tense and dangerous situations. Being gay during a fiercely homophobic and bigoted time in US history led him to voice concerns about the civil rights denied to people because of their sexual orientation. As a Black man he was engaged in the civil rights struggle for African American freedom—political and economic. White segregationists such as Strom Thurmond, a US senator from South Carolina, used Rustin’s homosexuality to try to discredit the civil rights movement. As a result, Rustin largely operated behind the scenes in his activism.
In July, 1963, Thurmond attacked the March on Washington on the floor of the US Senate, using Rustin’s sexual orientation (namely his arrest on charges of public indecency in Pasadena, California, in 1953), as a main rhetorical weapon. Thurmond also attacked Rustin’s pacifism (he “dodged” the draft) and his former Communist Party affiliation, all to dishonor him and the Civil Rights movement. In a similar way, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina later sought to smear Rustin’s reputation. The term “communist” was also used by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and others in their attempts to block the march and to discredit King.
Significance
The 1963 March on Washington, held on August 28, was the culmination of more than two decades of civil rights struggles by churches, labor organizations, and social-justice advocates. The march focused on civil rights and national economic demands and galvanized the civil rights movement unlike any event up to that time, bringing as many as a quarter of a million people into the streets under Rustin’s organizational leadership.
Rustin continued his civil rights activism and is considered especially important for his place at the intersection of the racial justice and LGBTQ rights movements. At times, however, he was controversial even among fellow activists. Rustin’s sexual orientation appears to have been particularly troublesome for Roy Wilkins, a key figure who played a major role in the preparation of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the case that led to legally mandated desegregation of schools in the United States. Like a number of other civil rights leaders, Rustin refused to take up identity politics and was labeled an “Uncle Tom” by radical militants of the Black Power movement—a charge often used to show disapproval of the tactics of often older, traditional, religious African Americans. He alienated some in the Black community because he was critical of affirmative action programs and the development of Black studies departments in US colleges and universities. He also alienated himself from some liberals because of his support of Israel.
For his efforts to stop segregation in interstate travel, in 1948 the Council Against Intolerance in America gave Rustin the Thomas Jefferson Award for the Advancement of Democracy. Throughout his life he was an outspoken advocate of freedom and democracy, a passion that took him to Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland, and Zimbabwe as a delegate for Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Wilkie, and other Americans concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy around the world. In this capacity, Rustin helped to monitor elections and the status of human rights.
Later in his career Rustin increasingly devoted himself to gay rights activism. Shortly before he died of cardiac arrest on August 24, 1987, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, he compared the Black struggle with the fight for gay and lesbian rights. He did note one major difference: for Black people, he felt strongly that gaining rights under the law had to be joined with economic relief, while for the LGBTQ community, Rustin felt that the struggle was about prejudice under the law only.
In 2013 Rustin was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2020 his 1953 criminal conviction was pardoned. A biopic film based on his life was released in 2023.
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