“When we tell ourselves such lies, we do the work of our oppressors.” Bayard Rustin (Coleman Domingo)
Who gave MLK the platform for his famous “I have a dream” words? None other than Bayard Rustin, the activist, conceptualizer, and organizer of the largest peaceful march on Washington in history. That August demonstration gave Martin Luther King to history while it is now with the docudrama Rustin that Bayard will long be remembered.
Even with his posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, Rustin was not known as well as he could be. One possible contributor to that neglect was his homosexuality, a notoriously damning attribute in the 1960’s. In fact, he was booted from MLK’w inner circle for just that reason. The docudrama takes pains to show the extent and sincerity of his romantic commitments, almost to the extent of being less intense about his organizational skills.
If I could carp about the drama’s limitation, it would be the excessive time given to his love life rather than to the complex web of dependencies needed to attract and accommodate over 200,000 marchers.
Director George C. Wolfe and the accomplished Coleman Domingo (sure to be nominated) keep Rustin lovingly in the foreground while they allow such secondary characters as enemy Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffery Wright) and Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock) to interfere as they did back then. Wright’s Powell almost upends a meeting, and possibly the entire demonstrations, as he tries to paint Bayard as a danger to the enterprise. The biggest impediment is his being arrested for lewd conduct with men in Pasadena years ago.
In the end, Bayard Rustin organized the biggest peaceful demonstration in the nation’s history, whose underpinnings were the principles of non-violent resistance, a condition lasting through today, not withstanding the horror of the Jan 6th riot at the Capitol.
Thanks to the docudrama, available on Netflix, Bayard Rustin gave the template for peaceful resistance. Thoreau would approve.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
