The Evil of Indifference

Fifty years ago this summer, Bayard Rustin—a brilliant organizer, orator, nonviolent strategist, and also a gay man—was forced to resign his position at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference because of his sexual orientation. Today, one sin of civil rights storytelling is that many who invoke Martin Luther King Jr. ignore Rustin. And yet the emergence of King as a nonviolent prophet is unintelligible without brother Rustin, who went on to do key (and partly uncredited) work organizing the 1963 March on Washington.