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Bayard Rustin ( ; March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American political activist and prominent leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. Rustin was the principal organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
Rustin worked in 1941 with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement to press for an end to racial discrimination in the military and defense employment. Rustin later organized Freedom Riders, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership; he taught King about non-violence. Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship, in 1954; and before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group called "In Friendship" to provide material and legal assistance to people threatened with eviction from their tenant farms and homes. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia.
Rustin was a gay man and, due to criticism over his sexuality, usually advised other civil rights leaders from behind the scenes. During the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights.
Later in life, while still devoted to securing workers' rights, Rustin joined other union leaders in aligning with ideological neoconservatism,Vaïsse, Justin, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 71–75. "Table: The Three Ages of Neoconservatism", Neoconservatism: Biography of Movement by Justin Vaisse, official website. . earning posthumous praise from President Ronald Reagan. On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Rustin was a member of the executive committee of the Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel group.
One of the first documented realizations Rustin had of his sexuality was when he mentioned to his grandmother that he preferred to spend time with males rather than females. She responded, "I suppose that's what you need to do".
In 1932, Rustin entered Wilberforce University, a historically black college in Ohio operated by the AME Church. Rustin was active in a number of campus organizations, including the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. He was expelled from Wilberforce in 1936 after organizing a strike, and later attended Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania). Cheyney honored Rustin with a posthumous Doctor of Humane Letters degree at its 2013 commencement.
After completing an activist training program conducted by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Rustin moved to Harlem in 1937 and began studying at City College of New York. There he became involved in efforts to defend and free the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men in Alabama accused of raping two white women. He was part of the Young Communist League from 1936 to 1941, leaving after the Communist Party USA reversed its anti-war policy in response to Nazi Germany's invasion of the USSR. This conflicted with Rustin's anti-war stance. Soon after arriving in New York City, he became a member of Fifteenth Street Meeting of the Quakers (Quakers).
Rustin was an accomplished tenor vocalist, an asset that earned him admission to both Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College with music scholarships.D'Emilio 2003, pp. 21, 24. In 1939, he was in the chorus of short-lived Broadway musical John Henry. Fellow cast member and blues singer Josh White later invited Rustin to join his gospel and vocal harmony group Josh White and the Carolinians, with whom he made several recordings. With this opportunity, Rustin became a regular performer at the Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village.D'Emilio 2003, pp. 31–32. A few albums on Fellowship Records featuring his singing, such as Bayard Rustin Sings a Program of Spirituals, were produced from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Disillusioned, Rustin began working instead with members of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party of America, particularly A. Philip Randolph and pacifist A. J. Muste, leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), who hired Rustin as a race relations secretary in the summer of 1941, considering him to be a man of oratorical ability and intelligence who would sacrifice himself repeatedly for a good cause.
Muste, Randolph, and Rustin proposed a march on Washington, D.C., in 1941 to protest racial segregation in the armed forces and widespread employment discrimination. After meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office, Randolph told President Roosevelt that African Americans would march in the capital unless desegregation occurred. To prove their good faith, the organizers canceled the planned march after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (the Fair Employment Act), which banned discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies.
According to Daniel Levinson, Rustin had an "infinite capacity for compassion." In 1944, while imprisoned in North Carolina, Rustin displayed nonviolent tactics, allowing himself to get beaten repeatedly by a white inmate until he gave up. Rustin defied segregation during that time and practiced his tactic while incarcerated.
Randolph's decision as leader of the organizers to cancel the march was made against Rustin's advice. The armed forces, in which Black troops typically had white commanding officers, BUILDING THE ALASKA HIGHWAY Race and the Army During World War II, WGBH-TV. Retrieved July 26, 2022. remained racially segregated until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman issued an Executive Order.
Randolph felt that FOR had succeeded in their goal and wanted to dissolve the committee. Again, Rustin disagreed with him and voiced his differing opinion in a national press conference, which he later said he regretted.
Rustin traveled to California to help protect the property of the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans (most of whom were U.S.-born citizens) who had been imprisoned in internment camps. In the 6–3 Korematsu decision, the Supreme Court upheld the forcible internment. Impressed with Rustin's organizational skills, A. J. Muste appointed him as FOR's secretary for student and general affairs.
Rustin was also a pioneer in the movement to desegregate interstate bus travel. In 1942, he boarded a bus in Louisville, bound for Nashville, and sat in the second row. A number of drivers asked him to move to the back, according to Southern practice of Jim Crow, but Rustin refused. The bus was stopped by police 13 miles north of Nashville and Rustin was arrested. He was beaten and taken to a police station but was released uncharged. reprinted in
He spoke about his decision to be arrested, and how that moment also clarified his witness as a gay person, in an interview with the Washington Blade in the 1980s:
In 1942, Rustin assisted FOR staffers George Houser and James Farmer, as well as activist Bernice Fisher, in forming the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was conceived as a pacifist organization based on the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, who used non-violent resistance against British Raj.
As declared pacifism who refused induction into the military, Rustin, Houser, and other members of FOR and CORE were convicted of violating the Selective Service Act. From 1944 to 1946, Rustin was imprisoned in Ashland Federal Prison in Kentucky, and later the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, in Pennsylvania. At both, he organized protests against racially segregated housing and dining facilities. During his incarceration, he also organized FOR's Free India Committee. After his release from prison, he was frequently arrested for protesting against British colonial rule, in both India and Africa.
Just before a trip to Africa while college secretary of the FOR, Rustin recorded a LP record, Elizabethan Songs and Negro Spirituals, for the Fellowship Records label. He sang spirituals and Elizabethan songs, accompanied on the harpsichord by Margaret Davison.From liner notes, Fellowship Records 102.
In 1948, Rustin traveled to India to learn techniques of civil resistance directly from the leaders of the Gandhian movement. The conference had been organized before Gandhi's assassination earlier that year. Between 1947 and 1952, Rustin also met with leaders of independence movements in Ghana and Nigeria. In 1951, he formed the committee to Support South African Resistance, which later became the American Committee on Africa.
Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California, in January 1953 for sexual activity in a parked car with two men in their 20s.; "Lecturer Sentenced to Jail on Morals Charge", Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1953, 23. Originally charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pleaded guilty to a single, lesser charge of "sex perversion" (as sodomy was officially referred to in California at the time, even if consensual) and served 60 days in jail. The Pasadena arrest was the first time that Rustin's homosexuality had come to public attention. He had been and remained candid in private about his sexuality, although homosexual activity was still criminalized throughout the United States. Rustin resigned from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) because of his convictions. They also greatly affected Rustin's relationship with A. J. Muste, the director of the FOR. Muste had already tried to change Rustin's sexuality earlier in their relationship with no success. Later in Rustin's life, they continued their relationship with more tension than they had previously. Rustin became the executive secretary of the War Resisters League. An American Legion chapter in Montana used Rustin's Pasadena conviction to try to cancel his lectures in the state.
Rustin served as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee's task force to write "", published in 1955. This was one of the most influential and widely commented upon Pacifism essays in the United States. Rustin had wanted to keep his participation quiet, as he believed that his known sexual orientation would be used by critics as an excuse to compromise the 71-page pamphlet when it was published. It analyzed the Cold War and the American response to it, and recommended Nonviolence solutions.
Rustin took leave from the War Resisters League in 1956 to advise minister Martin Luther King Jr. of the Baptist Church on Gandhian tactics. King was organizing the Montgomery bus boycott. According to Rustin, "I think it's fair to say that Dr. King's view of non-violent tactics was almost non-existent when the boycott began. In other words, Dr. King was permitting himself and his children and his home to be protected by guns." Rustin convinced King to abandon the armed protection, including a personal handgun. "Bayard Rustin – Who Is This Man", State of the Reunion radio show, aired February 2011 on NPR, 1:40–2:10. Retrieved March 16, 2011. . In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Rustin also reflected that his integrative ideology began to differ from King's. He believed a social movement "has to be based on the collective needs of people at this time, regardless of color, creed, race."
The following year, Rustin and King began organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Many African-American leaders were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation and past Communist membership would undermine support for the civil rights movement. After the organization of the SCLC, Rustin and King planned a civil rights march adjacent to the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. This did not sit well with U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who threatened to leak to the press rumors of a fake affair between Rustin and King. King canceled the march, and Rustin left his position in the SCLC. King received criticism for this action from Harper's magazine, which wrote about him: "Lost much moral credit ... in the eyes of the young." Although Rustin was open about his sexual orientation and his convictions were a matter of public record, the events had not been discussed widely beyond the civil rights leadership. Rustin did not let this setback change his direction in the movement.
A few weeks before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual", and had his entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record. Thurmond also produced a Federal Bureau of Investigation photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing to imply that there was a same-sex relationship between the two, which both men denied.
Rustin became involved in the March on Washington in 1962 when he was recruited by A. Philip Randolph. The march was planned to be a commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years earlier. Rustin was instrumental in organizing the march. Aided by Eleanor Holmes Norton and Rachelle Horowitz, he drilled off-duty police officers as marshals, bus captains to direct traffic, and scheduled the podium speakers. Despite King's support, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins did not want Rustin to receive any public credit for his role in planning the march. Wilkins said, "This march is of such importance that we must not put a person of his liabilities at the head." Because of this conflict, Randolph served as the director of the march and Rustin as his deputy. During the planning of the march, Rustin feared his previous legal issues would pose a threat to the march. Nevertheless, on September 6, 1963, a photograph of Rustin and Randolph appeared on the cover of Life magazine, identifying them as "the leaders" of the March. Life Magazine, September 6, 1963. . Rustin stated his thoughts on the march and said it "made Americans feel for the first time that we were capable of being truly a nation, that we were capable of moving beyond division and bigotry".
Rustin organized a May March 18 which called for "maximum possible" integration. Perlstein recounts: "The UFT and other white moderates endorsed the May rally, yet only four thousand protesters showed up, and the Board of Education was no more responsive to the conciliatory May demonstration than to the earlier, more confrontational boycott."
When Rustin was invited to speak at the University of Virginia in 1964, school administrators tried to ban him, out of fear that he would organize a school boycott there.
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, which followed Freedom Summer in Mississippi, Rustin became an adviser to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP); they were trying to gain recognition as the legitimate, non–Jim Crow delegation from their state, where blacks had been officially disenfranchised since the turn of the century (as they were generally throughout the South) and excluded from the official political system. DNC leaders Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey offered only two non-voting seats to the MFDP, with the official seating going to the regular segregationist Mississippi delegation. Rustin and the AFL–CIO leaders urged the MFDP to take the offer. MFDP leaders, including Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses, angrily rejected the arrangement; many of their supporters became highly suspicious of Rustin. Rustin's attempt to compromise appealed to the Democratic Party leadership.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Rustin advocated closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party, specifically the party's base among the white working class, many of whom still had strong union affiliations. With Tom Kahn, Rustin wrote an influential article in 1964 called "From Protest to Politics", published in Commentary magazine; it analyzed the changing economy and its implications for African Americans. Rustin wrote presciently that the rise of automation would reduce the demand for low-skill high-paying jobs, which would jeopardize the position of the urban African-American working class, particularly in northern states. He believed that the working class had to collaborate across racial lines for common economic goals. His prophecy has been proven right in the dislocation and loss of jobs for many urban African Americans due to the restructuring of industry in the coming decades. Rustin believed that the African-American community needed to change its political strategy, building and strengthening a political alliance with predominately white unions and other organizations (churches, synagogues, etc.) to pursue a common economic agenda. He wrote that it was time to move from protest to politics. Rustin's analysis of the economic problems of the Black community was widely influential.Staughton Lynd, another civil rights activist, responded with an article entitled "Coalition Politics or Nonviolent Revolution?"
Rustin argued that since black people could now legally sit in the restaurant after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they needed to be able to afford service financially. He believed that a coalition of progressive forces to move the Democratic Party forward was needed to change the economic structure.
He also argued that the African-American community was threatened by the appeal of identity politics, particularly the rise of "Black power". He thought this position was a fantasy of middle-class black people that repeated the political and moral errors of previous black nationalists, while alienating the white allies needed by the African-American community. Nation editor and Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy noted later that, while Rustin had a general "disdain of nationalism", he had a "very different attitude toward Jewish nationalism" and was "unflaggingly supportive of Zionism".Randall Kennedy, "From Protest to Patronage", The Nation, September 11, 2003. .
Commentary editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz had commissioned the article from Rustin, and the two men remained intellectually and personally aligned for the next 20 years. Podhoretz and the magazine promoted the neoconservative movement, which had implications for civil rights initiatives as well as other economic aspects of the society. In 1985, Rustin publicly praised Podhoretz for his refusal to "pander to minority groups" and for opposing affirmative action quotas in hiring as well as black studies programs in colleges.Goodman, Walter, "Podhoretz on 25 Years at Commentary", The New York Times, January 31, 1985. .
Because of these positions, Rustin was criticized as a "sell-out" by many of his former colleagues in the civil rights movement, especially those connected to grassroots organizing. They charged that he was lured by the material comforts that came with a less radical and more professional type of activism. Biographer John D'Emilio rejects these characterizations, and "portrays the final third of Rustin's life as one in which his reputation among his former allies was routinely questioned. After decades of working outside the system, they simply could not accept working within the system." However, Randall Kennedy wrote in a 2003 article that descriptions of Rustin as "a bought man" are "at least partly true", noting that his sponsorship by the AFL–CIO brought him some financial stability but imposed boundaries on his politics.
Kennedy notes that despite Rustin's conservative turn in the mid-1960s, he remained a lifelong socialist, and D'Emilio argues that in the final phase of his life, Rustin remained on the left: "D'Emilio explains, even as Rustin was taking what appeared to be a more "conservative" turn, he remained committed to social justice. Rustin was making radical and ambitious demands for a basic redistribution of wealth in American society, including universal healthcare, the abolition of poverty, and full employment."
On the political side of the labor movement, Rustin increased his visibility as a leader of the American movement for social democracy. In early 1972, he became a national co-chairman of the Socialist Party of America. In December 1972, when the Socialist Party changed its name to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) by a vote of 73–34, Rustin continued to serve as national co-chairman, along with Charles S. Zimmerman. (limited free access). In his opening speech to the December 1972 Convention, Co-Chairman Rustin called for SDUSA to organize against the "reactionary policies of the Nixon Administration"; Rustin also criticized the "irresponsibility and élitism of the 'New Politics' liberals". In later years, Rustin served as the national chairman of SDUSA.
During the 1960s, Rustin was a member of the League for Industrial Democracy. He would remain a member for years, and became vice president during the 1980s. (1980). 9780878558674, Transaction Publishing / League for Industrial Democracy. . ISBN 9780878558674
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a human rights and election monitor for Freedom House.
In 1970, Rustin called for the U.S. to send military jets to aid Israel against Arab states in the War of Attrition; referring to a New York Times article he wrote, Rustin wrote to Prime Minister Golda Meir "...I hope that the ad will also have an effect on a serious domestic question: namely, the relations between the Jewish and the Negro communities in America." Rustin was concerned about unity between two groups that he argued faced discrimination in America and abroad, and also believed that Israel's democratic ideals were proof that justice and equality would prevail in the Arab territories despite the atrocities of war. His former colleagues in the peace movement considered it to be a profound betrayal of Rustin's nonviolent ideals.Arlyck, Matthew, "Review of I Must Resist: Letters of Bayard Rustin", Fellowship of Reconciliation website. .
Rustin maintained his strongly anti-Soviet and anti-communist views later in his life, especially with regard to Africa. Rustin co-wrote with Carl Gershman (a former director of Social Democrats, USA and future Ronald Reagan appointee) an essay entitled "Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power", in which he decried Russian and Cuban involvement in the Angolan Civil War and defended the military intervention by apartheid South Africa on behalf of the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). "And if a South African force did intervene at the urging of black leaders and on the side of the forces that clearly represent the black majority in Angola, to counter a non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political judgment is this immoral?" Rustin accused the Soviet Union of a classic imperialist agenda in Africa in pursuit of economic resources and vital sea lanes, and called the Carter Administration "hypocritical" for claiming to be committed to the welfare of blacks while doing too little to thwart Russian and Cuban expansion throughout Africa.
In 1976, Rustin joined the anti-communist Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which promoted Team B's controversial intelligence claims about Soviet foreign policy, using them as an argument against arms control agreements such as SALT II.John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 107–114. .
Rustin did not engage in any gay rights activism until the 1980s. He was urged to do so by his partner, Walter Naegle, who said that "I think that if I hadn't been in the office at that time, when these invitations from came in, he probably wouldn't have done them." He was an advocate for people with HIV/AIDS, and because of his public works, he may have “came out” to the public. Rustin no longer hid his sexual orientation from others.
Because same-sex marriage was not officially recognized at the time, Rustin and Naegle undertook to solidify their partnership and protect their union legally through adoption: in 1982 Rustin adopted Naegle, 30 years old at the time. Naegle explained that Bayard:
Rustin testified in favor of the New York City Gay Rights Bill. In 1986, he gave a speech titled "The New Niggers Are Gays", in which he asserted:
Also in 1986, Rustin was invited to contribute to the book In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. He declined, explaining:Yasmin Nair, "Bayard Rustin: A complex legacy", Windy City Times, March 3, 2012. .
I was not involved in the struggle for gay rights as a youth... I did not "come out of the closet" voluntarily—circumstances forced me out. While I have no problem with being publicly identified as homosexual, it would be dishonest of me to present myself as one who was in the forefront of the struggle for gay rights... I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter. As such, it has not been a factor which has greatly influenced my role as an activist.
President Ronald Reagan issued a statement upon Rustin's death, praising his work for civil rights and "for human rights throughout the world".
Rustin's personal philosophy is said to have been inspired by combining Quaker pacifism with socialism, and the theory of non-violent protest popularized by Mahatma Gandhi.
Rustin served as chairman of Social Democrats, USA, which, The Washington Post wrote in 2013, "was a breeding ground for many Neoconservatism". Dylan Matthews, "Meet Bayard Rustin" , Washingtonpost.com, August 28, 2013. French historian Justin Vaïsse classifies him as a "right-wing socialist" and "second age neoconservative", citing his role as vice-chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was involved in the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger.Vaïsse (2010), Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, p. 91. . "Coalition for a Democratic Majority", Right Web, Institute for Policy Studies. .
According to Daniel Richman, former clerk for United States Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, Marshall's friendship with Rustin, who was open about his homosexuality, played a significant role in Marshall's dissent from the court's 5–4 decision upholding the constitutionality of state sodomy laws in the later overturned 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick.
Several buildings have been named in honor of Rustin, including the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex located in Chelsea, Manhattan; "H.S. 440 Bayard Rustin Educational Complex" at InsideSchools.org. . Bayard Rustin High School near his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania; Bayard Rustin Library at the Affirmations Gay/Lesbian Community Center in Ferndale, Michigan; the Bayard Rustin Social Justice Center in Conway, Arkansas, and the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice in Princeton, New Jersey; the Bayard Rustin Room at Friends House, London, UK.
Rustin is one of two men who have both participated in the Penn Relays and had a school, West Chester Rustin High School, named in his honor that participates in the relays. In 1968, two months after the King assassination, Montclair State University gave Rustin an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. In 1985, Haverford College awarded Rustin an honorary Legum Doctor.
A 1998 anthology movie, Out of the Past, featured letters and archival footage of Rustin.
The West Chester Area School District voted in 2002 to approve the creation of Bayard Rustin High School, which opened four years later in 2006.
In July 2007, a group of San Francisco Bay Area Black LGBT community leaders officially formed the Bayard Rustin Coalition (BRC), which promoted greater Black participation in the electoral process, advances civil and human rights issues, and promotes the legacy of Rustin.
On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States. The citation in the press release stated,
Bayard Rustin was an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all. An advisor to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he promoted nonviolent resistance, participated in one of the first Freedom Rides, organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.
At the White House ceremony on November 20, 2013, President Obama presented Rustin's award to Walter Naegle, his partner of ten years at the time of Rustin's death.
In 2014, Rustin was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields". In April 2018, the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland voted to name the Bayard Rustin Elementary School after Rustin.
Canadian writer Steven Elliott Jackson wrote a play that stages an imaginary meeting and one-night-stand between Rustin and Walter Jenkins of the Johnson administration called The Seat Next to the King. The play won the award for Best Play at the 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival. A full-length play with music, written by Steve H. Broadnax III, Bayard Rustin Inside Ashland, dramatizing Rustin's World War II prison experience and its central role in his lifetime of activism, had its world premiere on May 22, 2022, at People's Light and Theatre Company in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
In 2018, the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice was established in Princeton, New Jersey, with Naegle acting as Board Member Emeritus, serving as a community activist center and safe space for LGBTQ kids, intersectional families, and marginalized people.
Rustin was one of fifty inaugural American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted in June 2019 to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor, within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM), the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and queer history, in New York City's Stonewall Inn.
In January 2020, California State Senator Scott Wiener, chair of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus, and Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, called for Governor Gavin Newsom to issue a pardon for Rustin's 1953 Pasadena arrest, citing Rustin's legacy as a civil rights icon. Newsom issued the pardon on February 5 while also announcing a new process for fast-tracking pardons for those convicted under historical laws criminalizing homosexuality. On June 5, 2023, the Pasadena City Council adopted a resolution declaring that the "City of Pasadena celebrates and concurs in the Governor's 2020 pardon of Bayard Rustin".
In 2021, Higher Ground Productions, founded by Michelle Obama and Barack Obama, announced production of Rustin, a biographical film directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Colman Domingo in the title role. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on August 31, 2023, and was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2023. It received a limited theatrical release on November 3, 2023, followed by a Netflix release on November 17. Reviews were generally positive, with Domingo's performance garnering numerous accolades including Best Actor nominations for the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award.
A street in Nyack, New York, was renamed "Bayard Rustin Way" in 2022 to honor Rustin's memory.
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