This Black History Month, join us as we highlight Black organizers from the past and the present.
BAYARD RUSTIN served the trade union and civil rights movements as a brilliant theorist, tactician and organizer. In the face of his accomplishments Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten and fired from leadership positions because he was an openly gay man in a severely homophobic era. He conceived the coalition of liberal, labor and religious leaders who supported passage of the civil rights and anti-poverty legislation of the 1960s. As the first executive director of the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, he worked closely with the labor movement to ensure African American workers’ rightful place in the House of Labor. Rustin was posthumously awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom for his brilliance in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was the largest demonstration the country had ever seen.