Leader and activist Bayard Rustin played a pivotal role in organizing the March on Washington in 1963. Many consider him a right-hand man and confidant to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet mainstream history has erased his very existence.
NPR contributor Rund Abdelfatah argues, “Those who knew Rustin remember his charisma, his kindness, his slight British accent, and his tendency to break out in song. And they remember him as a master strategist. For decades before the march, Rustin had been organizing protests, marches, and sit-ins, spreading the gospel of nonviolent resistance long before Dr. King came on the national stage. In fact, Rustin’s surviving partner, Walter Naegle, describes him as a “mentor” to Dr. King.”
Rustin was a proud Black gay man, at a time when extreme racism and homophobia were not always mutually exclusive. He is positioned amongst the other Black gay activists of his time who themselves were at the crossroads of race and sexual orientation: James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Lorraine Hansberry, and more.
At a time when two movements were both at the epicenter of fighting for equality, they seem to present something of a conflict of interest for those who considered themselves citizens of both movements. Both the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Liberation movement hit a fever pitch during the 1960’s and 1970’s and as a result, intersected causes and acts of change begin to emerge.
There is a particular story about how in 1970 the Black Panther Party invited French gay writer and activist Jean Genet to the United States. Genet’s work aligned him as a huge proponent for black liberation. No stranger to homophobia, members of the Black Panther Party, David Hilliard and Huey Newton changed their views upon recognizing their hate rhetoric towards members of the LGBTQIA community was just as detrimental as racial profanity was to them.
Homophobia and racism are still prevalent today and affects members of both communities. It posits another way to view Frances Beale’s concept of “double jeopardy”, through which race and sexual orientation are the lenses through which one sees the process of othering take place. Othering that also takes shape in the form of banishing contributions of Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin to the margins of history and culture. Othering that also takes shape in the form of denouncing the contributions members of the LGBTQIA community have made, and continue to make, for the fight for Black lives.
Pride is no stranger to the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, and the Gay Liberation Movement. It should not be treated as such.
