Bayard Rustin was one of the most influential Quakers of the 20th century. He was one of the most influential African Americans of the 20th century. He is also a person that few people in America, including Quakers, have ever heard of.

Rustin was born near Philadelphia in 1912 and was raised by his grandparents in the African Methodist Episcopal church, but his grandmother was a Quaker. His grandparents were fairly affluent, and they often entertained prominent black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson.

He attended Wilberforce University in Ohio and Cheney University of Pennsylvania, both historically black universities. He was expelled from both schools for organizing student strikes. In the 1930s Rustin moved to New York City where he joined the 15th Street Quaker Meeting and did training in social activism with the American Friends Service Committee. He became involved in early pacifist and civil rights protests and briefly with the Young Communist League. He became an influential organizer in A. J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation.

In 1941, on the eve of WW II, Rustin organized a “March on Washington” with A. Phillip Randolph, the black founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Roosevelt, in order to avoid the impact of such a march, issued an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in defense industry employment. It was a monumental victory for 29 year-old Rustin.

Prior to the war, Rustin traveled to California to work on behalf of interned Japanese Americans. Beginning in 1943 he served two years in a federal prison for refusing the draft.

In 1947 Rustin organized an integrated bus tour through the South that was dubbed a “Journey of Reconciliation.” This was a precursor to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. Rustin was arrested during this journey and served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina. In 1950 he visited India to learn Gandhi’s philosophy and tactics of non-violent resistance.

In 1955 he helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed Rosa Parks’ famous refusal to move to the rear of the bus, and he schooled Martin Luther King in Gandhi’s philosophy and tactics of non-violent resistance. In fact, Rustin had been arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus in Nashville in 1942. Rustin was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1957.

He was the principal organizer of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” at which King delivered his legendary "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

After the passage of the civil rights legislation of 1964–65, Rustin became the head of the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. He was somewhat unique in the civil rights movement in that he always put economic rights on a par with civil rights.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Communist Vietnam and Cambodia. In the 1980s Rustin became an advocate for gay rights. He died in 1987 while on a humanitarian mission in Haiti.

In 2013 President Obama posthumously awarded Rustin “The Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

So why is Bayard Rustin a name that is so little known? In 1953 he was in Pasadena, California to address a Quaker gathering. While in Pasadena he was arrested for having sex with a white man in the back seat of a car. He pled guilty to “lewd conduct.” He served 60 days in jail and was registered in California as a sex offender.

For his entire life Rustin had been very open about his sexuality but this arrest and his flirtation with Communism in the 1930s so tarnished his public image that while his allies continued to depend on his monumental organizing skills, his name needed to be kept in the background. He was not credited as the principal organizer of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” and he did not sit on the stage as King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

On February 5, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom granted a posthumous pardon to Rustin for his Pasadena conviction. The law had already been overturned by the California Supreme Court in 1979

Trivia: Rustin was a brilliant tenor. He occasionally sang professionally. A recording, Bayard Rustin Sings Twelve Spirituals on The Life of Christ with Readings from the Bible by James Farmer, is available on YouTube.

There is feature length DVD Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. An informative trailer for this DVD is available on YouTube.