Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
More video today! This one, of course, was suggested to me by YouTube, since I watch a lot of food videos as well as history videos. And it’s exactly the kind of video that I would have to click on, as it lists the favorite foods of every American President.
Here are the Presidents who, in my view, had the best taste (you’ll have to watch to see their favorites):
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Tyler
James K. Polk
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
Teddy Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Lyndon Johnson***
Jimmy Carter
LBJ gets the kudos for liking the best dish, and, looking over the list, I see that it’s weighted with Presidents who liked Southern food. No surprise, as it’s America’s best regional cuisine. They do mention a McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish as Trump’s favorite, but I thought he liked Big Macs better. Either way, he doesn’t make the list.
If you have some good wildlife photos, please send them in. Thanks!
Today we have a text-and-photo tale by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior on his favorite topic: pollination, but also on sex and gender in plants. You should be impressed at the cleverness of plants in having evolved to facilitate reproduction through pollinators. Athayde’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Nifty gender bias
Once upon a time in Ancient Greece, a young man was sauntering in the woods, enjoying the fine weather, unaware he was approaching a pond inhabited by the naiad Salmacis. Like all naiads, the minor deities that oversaw springs, wells and lakes, Salmacis had a weak spot for youthful, virile men. Awestruck by the lad’s beauty, Salmacis tried to seduce him. Her lascivious prattle only managed to alarm the visitor, so she pretended to give up and walked away. The young man, possibly flustered by the naiad’s unladylike harassment, decided to go for a dip in the pond. Beautiful he might have been, but not very smart: freshwater bodies were naiads’ territory. From behind a tree, Salmacis saw her chance. She leapt into the water to have another go at the shy looker, and the poet Ovid tells us what happened next: She poured herself all over the young man, and finally coiled herself right round him as he struggled against her and tried to slip out of her grasp. She was like a snake whom an eagle, the king of birds, snatches and holds up on high. (Metamorphoses, Book 4). Salmacis, who today would be on the Sex Offender Register, realised that her less than refined tactics were not working. In desperation, she begged the gods to let the two of them stay together forever. The gods complied, but interpreted the feisty naiad’s wishes literally. They merged Salmacis and her quarry in one body, creating a deity half man and half woman, with male and female parts. Perhaps an ironic destiny for a man whose name was also the product of a blend. A son of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, the youth was called Hermaphroditus.
To 18th century naturalists, who were well versed in the Classics, Hermaphroditus was an ideal trope for a biological phenomenon known from ancient times: the existence of plants and animals with male and female reproductive organs. As biology progressed, the term ‘hermaphrodite’ began to be applied to sexually reproducing organisms that produce male and female gametes. Roughly 5% of all animals, mostly invertebrates, fulfill the condition. Among vertebrates, hermaphrodism is found only in some fishes and frogs: the great majority of species are gonochoric, that is, either male or female; the rare instances of hermaphroditism are considered pathologies.
Hermaphroditism may be unusual among animals, but it’s the way of life for most flowering plants. About 90% of them are functionally hermaphrodites, either by having male and female reproductive parts in the same flower or having male and female flowers in the same plant (these are known as monoecious). Hermaphroditism opens the door for self-fertilization, a handy strategy when mates or pollinators are rare or absent. But this type of shortcut in the dating game has severe disadvantages: it reduces genetic diversity, leading to lower capacity to survive and reproduce, and to adapt to changing environments. So it is not surprising that many hermaphroditic plants have developed physical and genetic barriers to avoid or reduce the possibility of self-fertilisation. Some species inhibit the germination of their own pollen grains; for others, their sex bits are morphologically different, such as long stamens and short styles or vice-versa (herkogamy); some resort to temporal separation of male and female stages (dichogamy).
If self-fertilisation was to be the norm among hermaphroditic plants, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory would be seriously dented because outcrossing (the interbreeding of unrelated individuals) sets the stage for adaptation by natural selection. Understandably, Darwin paid much attention to pollination mechanisms in his book about orchids (Darwin, 1862) that followed On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. His research and observations paid off: he closed his orchid book by stating it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Nature tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation.
While investigating the ways orchids avoid self-fertilisation, Darwin discovered a particularly clever instance involving the autumn lady’s-tresses orchid (Spiranthes spiralis, then known as S. autumnalis), and bumble bees (Bombus spp.), its main pollinators. This orchid produces an erect, unbranched flowering stalk, 7-20 cm tall. Flowers bloom from the bottom of the stalk to the top and are protandrous, a form of dichogamy where male reproductive organs mature before the female ones (studying botany is a sure way to improve your Scrabble scores). These traits are important for what Darwin observed in relation to the behaviour of visiting ‘humble bees’. In his own words: The bees always alighted at the bottom of the spike, and, crawling spirally up it, sucked one flower after the other. I believe humble-bees generally act thus when visiting a dense spike of flowers, as it is most convenient for them; in the same manner as a woodpecker always climbs up a tree in search of insects. This seems a most insignificant observation; but see the result. The result is thus: a bee alighting on the lowest flowers and making her way up may pick up some pollinia (sticky blobs of pollen grains typical of orchids) that may get transferred to apical flowers. However, this pollen will be wasted because upper flowers are functionally male; their pollen is ready to be taken away but their female parts are not yet mature. Bees that gather pollen from apical flowers fly away to the bottom of another stalk, where flowers are older and therefore receptive (functionally female). Thus, cross-fertilisation is assured. This setting has been labelled Darwin’s inflorescence configuration, a fitting tribute to his skills in observation, experimentation and deduction.
Like the autumn lady’s-tresses, the rosebay willowherb (Chamaenerion angustifolium) is hermaphroditic, protandrous, has an inflorescence that blooms from bottom to top, and is pollinated by bees, mostly Western honey bees (Apis mellifera) and bumble bees. Rosebay willowherb too takes advantage of bees’ stereotypical foraging behaviour of moving up along erect inflorescences, but it goes one step further to encourage visitors to follow the script: flowers at the bottom of the inflorescence produce about 1.4 times more nectar than apical flowers (Antoń et al., 2017). Many bees and other pollinators visit flowers sequentially from the highest to the lowest quality, and stop inspecting those below a threshold (Carlson & Harms, 2006). This foraging strategy works to a T for the rosebay willowherb: a bee starts at the bottom where nectar is best, makes her way to less rewarding but pollen-bearing apical flowers, then flies away, hopefully taking some pollinia along.
Functionally female or male flowers secreting more nectar than their counterparts is known as gender-biased nectar production. This phenomenon is relatively uncommon (although data are limited) but has been reported for a range of unrelated species, which suggests it evolved independently several times. Most known examples consist of biases towards functionally female flowers, just like the rosebay willowherb, and in most cases Darwin’s inflorescence configuration and bee pollination are involved (Strelin et al., 2025). We don’t know for sure whether gender-biased nectar production increases the probability of pollen transfer and promotes outcrossing, but it’s a reasonable assumption.
Charles Darwin considered himself a mediocre botanist, even though eight of the ten books he published after On the Origin were about various aspects of plant biology, particularly reproduction (Barrett, 2010). The great naturalist was fascinated by flowers’ ‘beautiful contrivances’ that assured outcrossing and avoided the traps of inbreeding. When we look at the pas de deux performed by the autumn lady’s-tresses and rosebay willowherb with their pollinating bees to keep their hermaphrodite flowers on the straight and narrow towards cross-fertilisation, we can’t help but share Darwin’s fascination.
Today we have a text-and-photo essay by reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His captions and descriptions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Bubbling sans blubbing
We don’t know much about Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), but it’s safe to assume this Roman polymath was no slacker. Varro wrote about history, theology, philosophy, language, literature, rhetoric, music, medicine, geography, architecture, law and agriculture, including apiculture (the Varroa genus of parasitic mites that plague honey bees was named after him). Near the end of his life, Varro wrote res rusticae (Country Matters), the last of his reported 490 publications. Possibly gripped by a sense of irrevocability about what was soon to come, Varro opens res rusticae with a sentence that says …ut dicitur, si est homo bulla, eo magis senex (…as they say, man is a bubble, all the more so is an old man). Varro’s image of life as ephemeral and fragile as a bubble was picked up by the Dutch humanist and philosopher Erasmus (1466-1536), who popularised the saying homo bulla est (man is a bubble). Erasmus in turn hit a chord with baroque Dutch painters who had started the vanitas (futility) movement, a style focussed on depicting the transience of life, the pointlessness of earthly pursuits, the inevitability of death. Vanitas painters were partial to dark environs, extinguished candles, flowers, clocks, hourglasses, skeletons, skulls, and lots of bubbles.
Hendrick Goltzius (Netherlandish, Mühlbracht 1558–1617 Haarlem) Quis evadet?, 1594 Netherlandish, Engraving; sheet: 8 1/4 x 6 in. (21 x 15.2 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951 (51.501.4929)
The appeal of this less than cheery theme wasn’t to last: not many art patrons wanted to be reminded of their approaching death every time they looked at a painting on the wall. The Dutch artists needed another source of inspiration. They kept the bubbles, but now depicted as aids to children playing games and having fun – bubbles of a joyful variety instead of portents of oblivion (Kareem, 2005).
To this day, blowing soap bubbles thrills and entertains many a child. But to several bee species, blowing bubbles is no laughing matter.
The great majority of the more than 20,000 known bee species depend on nectar from flowers as their main source of energy. Nectar, secreted by specialised glands (nectaries), contains sugars, mostly glucose, fructose and sucrose. Free amino acids, proteins, minerals and lipids add to the mixture’s nutritional content, although we have only a vague understanding of their workings. Besides bees, wasps, hover flies, mosquitoes, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and bats are among the most enthusiastic consumers of this ready-to-use source of carbohydrates and nitrogen.
The sugar content of flowers from different plants varies considerably, and one could expect bees preferring the sugar-rich ones. But they face a mechanical obstacle: the sweetest nectars offer the greatest energetic rewards, but are hard to extract because of their viscosity. And the longer bees work on the sticky stuff, the more they are exposed to predators. Based on the balance sheet of energetic rewards and costs, sugar concentrations in the 35-65% range seem to be optimal. That suits plants fine, because 40% is the median value of sugar concentration for bee-visited flowers in many habitats and geographic regions (Pamminger et al., 2019).
Nectars with 35 to 65% sugars may be ideal for harvesting, but not so for preventing spoilage and fermentation during long-term storage. Some bees sort out the problem by removing excess water, thus concentrating the nectar. This process is best understood for the European honey bee (Apis mellifera). A worker returning to the hive passes the nectar to one of her sisters by trophallaxis, which is the transfer of food from one individual to another.
The receiving bee regurgitates a bubble of nectar between her mandibles, then swallows it again. The nectar bubble is exposed to the warm air inside the hive and loses some water to evaporation. The bee repeats the process several times, making the nectar more and more concentrated. But the work is not done. The nectar is transferred to the honeycomb, which the bees fan with their wings to further reduce it. When water content is lowered to about 18%, the nectar has turned into a supersaturated sugar solution – or honey to us. Watch a clear and accurate 6’32” summary of honey bees’ amazing comings and goings to produce honey.
Incidentally, the bubbling activity has led some people to assert that honey is bee vomit. Is it? Vomiting is to eject the stomach contents through the mouth, usually as a reflex to some physiological anomaly. Bubbling and other forms of animal regurgitation are regular occurrences with some purpose other than self-protection. Moreover, nectar collected to become honey is not digested or mixed with food. Rather, it is temporarily stored in the bee’s crop (or honey stomach), a pouch located before the stomach proper. So, despite what you read in the social media, honey is not bee puke.
Solitary bees, i.e., those that don’t live in colonies, don’t have large stashes of honey to care for, but several species also blow bubbles to concentrate the nectar. We don’t know for sure why they do it, but by repeated regurgitation and re-ingestion, bees make their nectar more viscous and possibly better suited for storage – just like for honey bees – but also to be transported, mixed with pollen to be fed to their larvae, or used in nest construction (Portman et al., 2023). Watch the superbly named pure gold-green sweat bee (Augochlora pura) pausing her busy life to work on a bubble.
Some flies, which make up another group of bubbling experts, hint at another function of the practice for bees: thermoregulation. The harshly named – despite being an excellent pollinator – oriental latrine fly (Chrysomya megacephala) lowers its body temperature by pushing a gobbet of liquid food in and out of its mouth several times before swallowing it. As the bubble comes out, evaporation lowers its temperature; when sucked in, it cools the fly’s body (Gomes et al., 2018). This form of evaporative cooling is analogous to what panting dogs and ear-flapping elephants do to keep cool.
We don’t know the extent of bubbling among bees, flies and other practitioners such as hawk moths, sawflies and mosquitoes. Whatever its frequency, bubbling is another clever trick that helps insects succeed out there in the wide harsh world.
While staying at my sister and brother-in-law’s house near Dulles Airport, I encountered a few things of interest. The first is an arrival lunch at Willard’s BBQ near Dulles, and it was crowded, understandable in view of how good the BBQ was, especially for this area. Here’s my lunch of “burnt beef ends” (hard to find, a mixture of crunchy and juicy parts from brisket), along with two “vegetables” (mac and cheese and a fantastic potato salad), BBQ sauce (not needed) cornbread and, of course, sweet iced tea. I’d recommend this place if you are in the area.
And I had a look at the Virginia History textbook that my brother-in-law had when he was about 13. He remembered it as having grossly distorted the horrors of slavery, which it did in a big way.
My sister found a copy of the book online, and I was appalled to see how slavery was described: as a great benefit to slaves, who got vocational education and had kindly masters and good working conditions. It was disgusting. Have a look at how, as kids, we were taught about slavery in Virginia.
The book:
An arriving enslaved person with his family, all decked out in fancy clothes and greeting his new “master” with glee. The family, too, is all happy and spiffy. The reality, of course, was far different, with slave families packed into the holds of the ships, with those who survived sold off soon after being kidnapped from Africa to the U.S., and families often being separated.
This new paper in Nature gives a rare picture of human sacrifice among ancient Mayans from the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. Paleoanthropologists had found remains before, mostly children, preserved by being tossed in sacred cenotes (wells), but this group of 64 ancient individuals was not only collected, but their DNA was analyzed from the ear bones, giving surprising results about genetic relatedness.
As with the Aztecs, human sacrifice was a fixture of ancient Mayan society, though the people killed (in this case, children) were probably captives rather than residents of the place where the killers lived. Sacrifice could have occurred via either decapitation, extraction of the heart from living individuals, or killing with arrows.
Click below to read the piece, or find the pdf here.
The figure below shows where the remains were found: in a chultún (an underground cistern) next to an airport runway near the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá (now a World Heritage Site), which flourished between about 600 and 1200 A.D. This map gives the location:
(From the paper) a, Location of the Maya region in the Americas. b, Geographical locations of Chichén Itzá and Tixcacaltuyub in the Yucatan Peninsula. c, Stratigraphy for the chultún and the adjacent cave in which the burial was found (adapted from ref. 4). d, Location of the chultún within the archaeological site of Chichén Itzá and its relation to El Castillo (adapted from ref. 10). Modern roads are marked in light grey; the chultún abuts an airport runway.
They found the bones of 64 individuals, carbon-dated as being from the 7th to the 12 centuries AD. How did they know how many individuals were represented in their sample? Because they recovered 64 left petrous parts, the bit of the skull’s temporal bone that surrounds the inner ear (this bone, sequestered away from the outside of the skull, is often used to extract ancient DNA). 64 left petrous bones means 64 individuals.
First, every one of the individuals was a male between 3 and 6 years old, showing that the Mayans preferred to sacrifice young boys. Why? It’s not clear, but there’s speculation that sacrifices helped local maize crops flourish (the method of sacrifice wasn’t specified in the paper). However, other sacrificed individuals recovered, as in the famous sacred cenote, have been mixtures of males and females, but also overrepresented with children. The authors don’t speculate why, in this location, only boys were killed.
The ancestry of the sacrificed individuals was compared among each other, as well as to 68 individuals of Mayan descent living the nearby town of Tixcacaltuyub. One surprising finding was that those sacrificed included two pairs of identical (monozygotic) twins (easily seen in DNA, which is identical among two different earbones). The authors note that twins held a special position in Mayan mythology. But, as the plot of “pairwise mismatch rates” shows below), 11 pair of individuals were “close relatives”, represented by the hollow diamonds (the twins, with a mismatch rate of zero, are the two pairs of twins. The authors speculate (see below) that the individuals came from a single big event of mass killing.
The paper doesn’t say how “close” the “close relatives were”, or whether they were contemporaneous, like brothers, but given the age of the individuals, it seems likely that the related pair members came from the same family.
(From paper): e, Genetic pairwise mismatch rate (PMR) for child pairs in the chultún identifies 11 close relative pairs (hollow diamonds), including two pairs of monozygotic twins (highlighted in grey). A low overall PMR for unrelated individuals (black triangles) confirms low genetic diversity in the population; only pairs with PMR < 0.20 are visualized in the plot. See Supplementary Fig. 2 for individual annotations.
The comparison of the DNA of the sacrificed children with that of living people in Tixcacaltuyub, as in the principal-component cluster graph below, showed that the sacrificed individuals )”YCH”, dark purple stars) fell into a cluster of Native Americans, other Mayan individuals, people from Belize, and individuals from the nearby town (“TIX”, light blue stars), and were considerably different from individuals in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, as expected. (This shows diagnostic genetic differences between geographic groups, demonstrating that the idea of “races”—defined as “diagnostically genetically differentiated populations”—is not purely a social construct, but contains biological information.) However, the ancient sacrificed individuals, which also had a dollop of genes from the Caribbean, didn’t particularly cluster with the present day Mayans living nearby, who had their own admixture of genes from Africa and Europe, perhaps reflecting turnover of populations over time. In the sixteenth century there was a big poulation bottleneck, perhaps due to diseases introduced by Europeans. In fact, this bottleneck reduced the population of what is now Mexico by 90%!)
(From paper): (From paper): a, PCA showing ancient Chichén Itzá (YCH) individuals and present-day Tixcacaltuyub (TIX) in a worldwide PCA plot.
One other bit of information. We are able, looking at contemporary DNA sequences of a population, to judge whether natural selection is acting on genes or groups of genes. If variable genes such as the HLA (“human leukocyte antigen”) genes involved in immune response show coordinated variation (that is, variant “A” of one gene tends to co-occur with variant “B” of another gene in individuals), this gives evidence that selection is acting on groups of genes—in this case genes affecting immunity. The authors identified several HLA variants that look like they were subject to selection, and also tested some by making copies of sequences of some HLA variants and seeing how strongly they bound to proteins derived from Salmonella bacteria (strong binding means that the HLA proteins were reacting and presumably neutralizing the bacterial proteins). The authors suggest that the selection acting to promote the rise in frequency of some HLA variants was due to typhoid or paratyphoid-like infections.
The upshot: Although the data from HLA genes does indicate that there was selection for immunity in both ancient and historic times, what I find most interesting is that the sacrifice involved children, all male children, and many were close relatives. This, at least, gives us a pretty strong sociological picture of one aspect of ancient Mayan culture. To quote the authors,
In comparing the subadults in the chultún to other ancient and present-day populations in the Maya region, we find evidence of long-term genetic continuity, which also suggests that the sacrificed children and sibling pairs at Chichén Itzá were obtained from nearby ancient Maya communities. Among present-day individuals at TIX, we detect evidence of European and African admixture since the Contact period.
and
Overall, 25% of the children had a close relative within the assemblage, suggesting that the sacrificed children may have been specifically selected for their close biological kinship. Moreover, this may underestimate the true number of relatives present in chultún as only 64 of the estimated 106 individuals in the chultún had a preserved petrous portion of the left temporal bone available for analysis. The further finding that the closely related children in each set seem to have consumed a similar diet and died at a similar age suggests that they have been sacrificed during the same ritual event as a pair or twin sacrifice.
and, finally,
The discovery of two sets of identical twins, as well as other close relatives, in a ritual mass burial of male children suggests that young boys may have been selected for sacrifice because of their biological kinship and the importance of twins in Maya mythology. We show that, at a genome-wide level, the present-day Maya of Tixcacaltuyub exhibit genetic continuity with the ancient Maya who once inhabited Chichén Itzá and we demonstrate through several lines of evidence the involvement of the HLA region in a pathogen-driven selection event(s) probably caused by infectious diseases brought into the Americas by Europeans during the colonial period.
The interest of the Mayans in identical twins reminds me of Josef Mengele in Auschwitz, who also took a particular interest in twins, but in his case he did gruesome experiments on them before killing them.
I’ve been fighting a bad cold as well as dealing with the fallout from our cancellation debacle at the University of Amsterdam, so I haven’t gotten out much. This is a great pity as the weather had been good, though now it’s turned rainy.
This evening I will give a talk on science vs. religion at Tilburg University, founded as a Catholic school in 1927. Now it’s only technically Catholic, and is described by Wikipedia as “a public research university specializing in the social and behavioral sciences, economics, law, business sciences, theology and humanities. . . ”
We have had no threats of disruption (Tilburg is a few hours south of Amsterdam), so I’m not worried about that. Tomorrow Maarten Boudry and I, plus perhaps a surprise guest or two, will tape the discussion that was deplatformed at the University of Amsterdam.
At any rate, here are a few snapshots from my limited incursions in Amsterdam.
I’m surprised that this is my third visit to Amsterdam, and up to now I’d missed the “Stolpersteine” (literally, “stumbling stones”) which one encounters from time to time in the pavement in front of houses. They’re easy to miss, which is why I haven’t seen them before. Wikipedia describes them like this:
. . . . a ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Literally, it means ‘stumbling stone’ and metaphorically ‘stumbling block’.
The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate persons at the last place that they chose freely to reside, work or study (with exceptions possible on a case-by-case basis) before they fell victim to Nazi terror, forced euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of June 2023, 100,000.Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world’s largest decentralized memorial.
They mostly commemorate Jews, but are also laid for murdered Romani, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others persecuted by the Nazis. Here are three I found within two blocks from where I’m staying (there is a pair representing a man and his wife):
It says, “Here lived Elisa Frederika De Jon van Biema, born 1901, abducted 1944 to Westerbork, killed January 27, 1945, Auschwitz.” Westerbork was the infamous Dutch camp where detainees, including Anne Frank and her family, were kept until they were transferred to the concentration camps (in this case Auschwitz). Elisa was killed at 44.
Below are the stones for a Jewish man and his wife who were deported together; the man died at Westerbork and his wife at Auschwitz. Prisoners were sent to other camps, too, like Sobibór. All told, about 98,000 Jews were deported from Westerbork to the camps, and nearly all of them were immediately gassed upon arrival.
Although some people object because these small stones allow people to walk over memorials for dead Jews, I find them moving because, once you look for them, they are easy to find but distressingly common. The houses of the murdered, of course, are still there, so the memorials are ineffably evocative.
Another Jewish man and wife, arrested on April 8, 1943, and gassed at Sobibór only two weeks later.
On a lighter note, here are two pictures from the local “supermarket”, which is a market but much smaller than American supermarkets. Nevertheless, it has a huge supply of cheese, which of course is a speciality of the Netherlands. Look at all the different kinds of cheese!
If you follow this site, you know I always check out the cat food in markets, to see if there’s any local flavor to what they feed the moggies. Here there was nothing special (France has an array of gourmet-named cat foods), but they did have paté. The label reads, “complete pet food for adult cats.”
And a takeout meal last night from the local Balinese restaurant: rice, beef, chicken, eggplant, beans, and mixed veggies:
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.
