As the new ‘Rustin’ biopic shows, the great organizer of the 1963 March on Washington was always working to join more people together in the struggle for greater justice and peace.

After going to see the new biopic “Rustin,” now out on Netflix, I left the theater finding the film to be as dramatic as I remembered the man himself. Drama was Bayard’s personal style, but it was also inherent in the focus of the film: Bayard’s brilliance in being lead organizer for the 1963 mass March on Washington.

In “Rustin,” we get to see him (played by Colman Domingo) again and again challenging expectations, using his keen “organizer’s nose” to sense what was possible even though most people around him couldn’t or didn’t want to see it.

As a teenager in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Bayard was already challenging expectations: He was both gay and the star of his high school’s football team. When, in 2006, West Chester named its new high school after Bayard, the act stirred the town’s homophobes to object loudly. I felt connected to the town’s controversy partly because I started college in West Chester, not long before meeting Bayard.

While in the town recently, I noted a plaque in front of the old movie theater that acknowledges another of Bayard’s feats in his high school days: He defied the theater’s practice of racial segregation, on his own, by leaving the balcony in the middle of a movie and moving his Black self to a seat in the whites-only first floor. Police removed him from the theater but decided not to arrest; after all, how would his high school team manage without Rustin at its next game?

Remembering the genius of Bayard Rustin

I seemed to follow Bayard around. I graduated from Cheyney State, a college very near West Chester, where Bayard had earlier been a student. Cheyney is America’s oldest historically Black university. While there, Bayard continued his practice of challenging convention. He was open about his gayness until Cheyney’s beloved president Leslie Pinckney Hill took him aside, stressed to Bayard his potential as a Black leader, and explained he was damaging his future role by his openness.

As I later got to know him, I came to recognize something basic in Bayard’s process: testing limits through action, being willing to go out ahead, and retaining the goal of liberation even while temporarily accommodating the rude reality in order to accomplish something else.
Winning requires a team

On his high school football team Bayard knew he couldn’t win by himself. In the ‘60s, when I was with him in activist organizations making decisions, I noticed an interesting pattern of his in meetings. He’d start with his flamboyant self, stating his views with eloquence and passion. Multiple points of view were expressed by others. By the time the chair announced the decision, even if it was different from his initial position, Bayard was usually on board. And if his organizing skills were required to do what we’d decided, we knew he’d do a brilliant job.

He accepted that a powerful mass movement cannot consist of individualists going their own way. If being an activist is only about one’s personal integrity, it limits us. If we deeply want to make a difference — to win more justice or peace — we need to combine with others. Bayard was a passionate person, but for him winning wasn’t a lifestyle choice, it was about gaining victories for oppressed people, for people hurt by today’s institutions.

I remember an informal moment when we were shooting the breeze, and I asked him about the organizing meeting we’d just concluded. “Why were you so low-key about your own views this time, focusing on making sure we moved toward consensus?” I asked.

“Because A.J. wasn’t here,” Bayard replied.

A.J. Muste, a key mentor for Bayard, was an older radical pacifist organizer who had extraordinary consensus-building skills. I got it: Bayard knew that the rest of us, relying on Muste to forge our unity, might need Bayard to play that role in Muste’s absence.

Bayard was a performer (a professional-level singer) who knew more than one tune. To win, social movements also needed to know more than one tune — and along with drama, harmony is sometimes essential.