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You would know who Bayard Rustin was if it weren't for one little aside.
Strom Thurmond (ACK!) told Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in so many words: Lose your association with Rustin OR I'm going to start a rumor that you're sleeping with him.
To be thought a 'womanizer' was one thing, but clearly to be 'gay' was more than Civil Rights Movements could handle--non-violent or otherwise.
DC's Union Station houses a statue of Asa Philip Randolph--the architect--of the March on Washington (1963), but what you may not know is how next to impossible the March would have been without the drive and groundwork of Rustin. King was in violation of his own philosophy of passive resistance until Rustin's advising.
It is by no means a small effort to disappear Bayard Rustin from the history of the Movement we now remember through television. His face was on the cover of Time. He made national headlines often. He graced the same microphones as Malcolm X and King. And he hob-nobbed with Gandhi.
Look for interviews from DC's long standing First Lady (President of the 51st State)--Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes-Norton.
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