🏳️🌈TODAY’S PRIDE HERO🏳️🌈
Bayard Rustin (1912 – 1987)
For more than 50 years, Rustin was a strategist and activist in the struggle for civil rights and gay rights.
He is best remembered as being the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
#LGBTVoices
Rustin left the Communist party in 1941 & served as the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s race relations secretary. He was a pacifist & practiced nonviolence, a method he learned while working with Gandhi. He was imprisoned for 3 years for refusing to register for the WWII draft.
In 1947, he helped plan the first “freedom ride” in the South, challenging ongoing Jim Crow practices though ruled illegal in 1946. His efforts landed him on a chain gang. He reported on the experience which spurred an investigation leading to the abolition of chain gangs in NC.
Rustin became a leading strategist of the Civil Rights Movement from 1955–1968. He organized the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in 57, the Nat’l Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in 58 & 59 & was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington with Martin Luther King, jr.
After the passage of the civil rights legislation of 1964–65, Rustin had a long involvement with refugee affairs. As a Vice Chairman of the International Rescue Committee, he traveled the world working to secure food, medical care, education, & resettlement for refugees worldwide
Despite Rustin’s achievements, he was threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned & fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was a gay man. Rustin's sexuality was criticized by some fellow civil-rights leaders because “it detracted from his effectiveness.”
A relatively open gay man his entire life, it was later, in the 80s when Rustin became a public advocate on behalf of gay & lesbian causes. He gave numerous interviews discussing how anti-gay prejudice had affected his life’s work in addition to experiencing racial discrimination
In the 70s, same-sex marriage was an impossibility. Gay people wanted legal protection for their unions. Rustin and Walter Naegle formalized their relationship the only way that was possible then– Rustin adopted Naegle, who was 37 years younger. They were together until his death
President Ronald Reagan issued a statement on Bayard Rustin's death in 1987, praising his work for civil rights.
On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Bayard Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
#LGBTVoices
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