A brief take on the movie “Rustin”

March 9, 2024 • 12:00 pm

I’ve just finished watching the movie “Rustin“, which came out last year.  Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was most famous for organizing the March on Washington in 1963, the event at which Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Over 250,000 people showed up, and the force of their presence, and of MLK’s speech, was arguably the pivotal event leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And he influenced Martin Luther King’s approach to civil rights activism, particularly by emphasizing nonviolence. But despite Rustin’s influence, how many people remember him?

They will if they see this wonderful movie, which recounts not Rustin’s whole life, but the short period of a few months over which he organized the March. Played by Colman Domingo in a bravura performance, Rustin was marginalized by the movement largely because he was a former Communist and had been arrested and served time for homosexuality—”sex perversion,” as it was called in those days. His homosexuality figures largely in this movie, threatening at times to derail the March, but King, with whom he had a fraught relationship, defended Rustin publicly and got the event back on the rails.

Domingo’s performance has earned him an Oscar nomination this year for Best Actor (awards yet to come), and the film nabbed a critics’ rating of 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a viewers’ rating of 85%.  Although it starts a bit slowly, it quickly gains momentum and culminates with King’s famous speech given as Rustin stands by with smiles and tears. By that point I was in tears, too. At the end, Rustin, taught to see anybody who helped their people as a worthy person, appropriates a garbageman’s sack and starts cleaning up the grounds around the Lincoln Memorial

Wikipedia notes that “Rustin” was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, and it’s a worthy effort. It’s definitely a film worth seeing, and also carries lessons today about how a combination of peaceful behavior, a righteous cause, and civil disobedience can move mountains. I remember those times, but they seem to have vanished.

Here’s the trailer for the movie:

If you watch the film, you’ll surely want to learn more about Rustin, and, fortunately, you can do that by reading  Coleman Hughes’s new article in The Free Press by clicking below:

An excerpt:

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia University during the turbulent years of the Trump administration, there was a racial controversy on campus almost weekly, with some students claiming they experienced white supremacy “every day.” Yet as a black student myself, I detected almost no racism at all. In my search to explain this gulf between rhetoric and reality, I looked back at texts from the civil rights era and found, in the essays and letters of Bayard Rustin—texts I had never encountered on any syllabus—a prescient analysis of everything going on around me.

Rustin, who was born in 1912 and died in 1987, was a key ally of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

. . . . Rustin himself was a discovery; a courageous activist, organizer, writer, and descendant of slaves who had been arrested and beaten for refusing to sit at the back of a Jim Crow bus in 1942, when he was 30 years old—a full 13 years before Rosa Parks made history by doing the same. A Quaker and conscientious objector, it was Rustin who introduced Martin Luther King to Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance and persuaded King, his close friend and confidant, to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, though Rustin omitted the word Christian in his original plan.

Six years later, Rustin organized the landmark March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin had put it together in a matter of months and created “the blueprint for the modern American mass political rally.”

How was it possible for a figure so central to the civil rights movement—who had not only envisioned but helped bring about a world in which black Americans demanded and achieved full citizenship—to wind up, in the words of his biographer John D’Emilio, “a man without a home in history”? By any objective measure, Rustin belongs in the pantheon of great Americans every schoolchild should know. And yet, as D’Emilio put it in his biography, Lost Prophet, “Rustin hardly appears at all in the voluminous literature produced about the 1960s.”

The short answer is that Rustin lived as an openly gay man at a time when every state in the U.S. outlawed homosexuality. His civil rights colleagues could imagine the end of legalized white supremacy but could not envision a world in which Rustin could live as a gay man without fear of arrest. The long answer has something to do with those prophetic essays.

You can read about his “prophetic essays” and ideas in the rest of the article—views that are especially salient during today’s “racial reckoning.” Read the article (Hughes is, of course, a “heterodox” black man) and see the movie.

17 thoughts on “A brief take on the movie “Rustin””

    1. Hadn’t heard – or didn’t notice – either.

      I read lots of Wikipedia, and sometimes there’s so many names in a topic it is overwhelming.

  2. I just saw Colman Domingo last night at South by Southwest in the movie Sing Sing. It is about an arts rehabilitation program within Sing Sing prison and “stars” current and past prisoners. It is incredibly inspiring and brought me to tears. Colman is amazing.

  3. I don’t remember much from when I was 6 or 7 years old, but the story of Rustin being arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus brought back this memory from the late 1940’s:
    We Californians are visiting grandma in San Antonio. We take the bus from Terrell Hills downtown. Mom and brother find seats, I am standing in the isle when I see there are plenty of seats in the back, so I run back there and take a seat next to an elderly man. He smiles at me, I smile back. Nobody says anything until we get off the bus and my mom matter of factly informs me that white people don’t sit in the back of the bus here. Needless to say, I was not arrested.

  4. I saw “Rustin” a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it! The actors were terrific and I was surprised to find out what I didn’t know about the fight for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. So well done.

  5. Rustin saw in advance that the civil rights movement would eventually fall prey to militants abetted by whites seeking “to purge themselves of guilt and racism.” The politics of identity would overtake those of solidarity, and the “economic dimensions” of the civil rights strugle would be neglected. It’s not surprising that he became a neglected figure in comparison to people like Malcolm X, though he was far more sensible than Malcolm or the Black Panthers.

    1. Fascinating, and so prescient. I have bought the biography. Every day’s a school day!

  7. For more heterodox black thought see “The Journal of Free Black Thought” Their March 6,2024 episode #39 is titled Soviet Influence On Black Movements.
    It’s an interview with Karys Rhea who is a Jewish Leadership Project fellow. The interview is mostly about Soviet anti-Zionist efforts.

  8. When I came out in the late 1980s and read up on the history of gay rights, it was commonly mentioned that the man who organized the March on Washington was gay, but this seemed to be omitted from discussions of the history of civil rights in the US.

  9. When I came out in the late 1980s and read up on the history of gay rights, it was commonly mentioned that the man who organized the March on Washington was gay, but this seemed to be omitted from discussions of the history of civil rights in the US.

  10. Are other readers able to access the full article in the Free Press? I get a few paragraphs down, then it tells me it’s for paying subscribers only. I checked Wayback Machine, then realised it was only written today, so no luck there either, unfortunately.

    It’s a shame as the intro is very promising.

  13. I haven’t seen the movie and so don’t know if this plays a part, but Rustin was also a vocalist, lutenist, and collector of early instruments. He made recordings in the early 1950s of spirituals and early English songs, accompanied by himself on the lute or by Margaret Davison on harpsichord or piano. These are now available on a CD published by Parnassus Records in 2022 (“Bayard Rustin — The Singer”). To find it, enter the following ASIN in the Amazon search box: B09XLQCR49. The CD’s tracks are (at present) available to listen to on YouTube.

    There’s an interesting article about this aspect of Rustin’s life on the website of the organization Early Music America (Loren Ludwig, “Making Art and the Fight for Freedom,” [2022]).

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