THE ORGANIZER

How Bayard Rustin managed the civil-rights movement.

- ADAM GOPNII

Bayard Rustin has emerged of late as a hero almost perfectly tuned to our time. A Black civil-rights leader who was an architect of the 1963 March on Washington, he was also, in an aptly intersectional way, a gay man who suffered for his gayness—suffered in the homophobic America of the nineteen-forties and fifties, of course, but also within the homo-suspicious civil-rights movement of the sixties. A peerless manager and mentor, Rustin had still done more, and harder, prison time than almost any of the other great leaders of the movement. He spent two years behind bars in the forties, as a conscientious objector, and once, after a freedom ride, he actually ended up on a chain gang in North Carolina.