A master strategist and an activist for Civil Rights, Bayard Rustin is mostly remembered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which has been one of the most famous of the non-violent marches in United States history. He had used Gandhi's tactics of nonviolence by introducing it to the American civil rights movement, while at the same time, bringing Martin Luther King, Jr. to the forefront as the focal point for nonviolence and peace. Despite the achievements that Rustin had accomplished during his career as an activist, he was beaten, silenced, imprisoned, and fired from different organizations mainly because of the fact that he was a gay man living at a time when homosexuality was not only frowned upon but was outlawed. In this paper, I will explain all the contributions that Bayard Rustin had made to the Civil Rights movement during the mid to late 20th century and why he is not given credit for the other activities that he was responsible for. .
Writers and historians such as Lawrence Freedman have stated that Bayard Rustin was content with his status as an "intellectual engineer behind the scenes." In their view, Rustin was a powerful man with such a powerful political philosophy that the leadership at the time had begun to constrict him. Other historians have argued that the main reason why Rustin was written out of the history books is because he stayed true to a social agenda that had benefited all groups who were oppressed at the time that the civil rights movement had grown to be politically narrow. Other historians have stated that the fact that Rustin was gay at a time that homosexuality was frowned upon had cost him in the long run to prove to others that he was indeed a leader who should have played a bigger role in the civil rights movement. As a gay man, Rustin was the target of American leaders such as Strom Thurmond, who had his entire arrest file put into the Congressional Record, despite the fact that his attempt to blackmail Rustin had backfired significantly.
