‘Rustin’ True Story: What to Know About the Real Bayard Rustin, The Gay Civil Rights Leader Behind the March on Washington

There are plenty of biopics coming out in 2023—Oppenheimer, Maestro, Napoleon, just to name a few. But if you pick just one to watch this year, let it be Rustin, which began streaming on Netflix today.

Colman Domingo stars as Bayard Rustin, a gay civil rights leader whose contribution to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington has been downplayed for years, in part due to his sexuality. But now Tony-nominated Broadway director George C. Wolfe (who also worked with Domingo in the Netflix film adaption of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) is bringing Rustin’s story to Netflix audiences. It’s a story that’s long overdue for a Hollywood adaptation, and it’s told by first-rate actors at the top of their game.

That said, it is a Hollywood version of a “true story.” Read on to learn more about the real Bayard Rustin, and how accurate the Rustin movie is to the true story.

Is Rustin based on a true story?

Yes, Rustin is based on the true story of civil rights activist Baynard Rustin. Though he was the lead organizer of the March on Washington, as well as a friend and an influence on Martin Luther King Jr., Rustin’s involvement in the civil rights movement was often downplayed, due to the fact that he was a gay man. In a statement about the film for the production notes, director George W. Wolfe described Rustin as “one of, if not the most “out” version of an out homosexual to be found walking the streets of New York City from the 1940s.”

In a 2011 interview with The Washington Post, Rachelle Horowitz (played by Lilli Kay in the movie)—a march transportation organizer who worked under Rustin’s leadership—said that Rustin “absolutely didn’t hide” his sexuality. “He’d never heard there was a closet.” Rustin was arrested in 1953, in Pasadena, California when he was caught having sex with two other men in a car. He was charged with “sex perversion,” aka, the so-called crime of homosexuality.

Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennslyvania in 1912, where he was raised Quaker. He was involved in countless progressive causes and, according to The Washington Post, he helped organize protests from everything from “segregation, Japanese internees, draft resisters, workers’ rights, chain-gang prisoners, the anti-nuclear movement, and South African apartheid.”

In the 1950s he was considered a key advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., and journeyed to Alabama in 1953 to help King organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott. According to a profile written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. for The Root, Rustin played ” a critical role in introducing King to Gandhi’s teachings while writing publicity materials and organizing carpools.” Rustin and King started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1956 and were planning a large march outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960. But according to that same profile from The Root, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a black congressman from New York, wanted King and Rustin to call off the march, and threatened to spread the rumor that Rustin and King were lovers if they did not. We see this scene play out in the film, with Powell played by Westworld star Jeffrey Wright. King was convinced to call off the march, and he distanced himself from Rustin, who resigned from his position at the SCLC. According to Gates, James Baldwin wrote for Harper Magazine that King “lost much moral credit … in the eyes of the young,” for his decision to drop Rustin.

But Rustin and King reunited after the police attacked protestors in Birmingham in 1963. Rustin and fellow activist/mentor A. Philip Randolph (played by Glynn Turman in the movie) began planning the 1963 March on Washington, and they knew they needed King to speak at the event. Rustin once again traveled to Alabama to meet with King, and convinced him to join the protest. In other ways: King’s “I Have a Dream” speech may never have existed without Rustin.

Some leaders of the civil rights movement didn’t want Rustin due to his sexuality, most notably  Roy Wilkins of the NAACP (played by Chris Rock in the movie). According to the 2003 biography, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (as reported by Gates for The Root), Wilkins said of Rustin, “This march is of such importance that we must not put a person of his liabilities at the head.” But Randolph insisted on Rustin. And this time around, King backed his former advisor, too.

According to Horowitz, Rustin was the only man for the job. “The details for him had real meaning,” Horowitz told The Washington Post in 2011. “It had to be well organized, nonviolent and peaceful, because nobody believed that black Americans could organize a march of this size. Even liberals said there would be riots.”

Rustin and Randolph made the cover of Life Magazine a few months later, in 1963, but his role in organizing the march is still not well known. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2013. “What people miss about history is it’s very easy to focus on one person,” Rustin director George C. Wolfe said in an interview for the production notes. “Frequently when somebody ascends, historians find it’s much easier to focus just on the one instead of the totality.”

In the ’70s and ’80s, Rustin went on to fight for gay liberation and publicly came out in the ’80s. In a 1987 interview with Village Voice (as reported by Grant), Rustin said, “I think the gay community has a moral obligation … to do whatever is possible to encourage more and more gays to come out of the closet.” He died that same year, on August 24, 1987, at the age of 75.

How accurate is the Rustin movie to the true story of Bayard Rustin?

Like most “based on a true story” Hollywood movies, the movie Rustin has added, condensed, and eliminated certain details of the true story in order to make a compelling, entertaining movie. Obviously, all of the conversations that Rustin had behind closed doors that we see in the film can’t be verified for accuracy. That said, the general tone of these conversations and sense of Rustin’s personality is based on what has been reported and known about the man.

The biggest “inaccuracy” in the Rustin movie is the characters Tom (played by Gus Halper) and Elias (played by Johnny Ramey), two men who are presented in the film as Rustin’s lovers. Both characters are fictional—as in, they were invented for the movie, and are not based on real people—in part in an effort not to out any of the actual organizers who were involved in the movement who were rumored to be involved with Rustin. “Because Bayard was ‘out,’ but he was 1963 out. He was not 2023 out,” Wolfe said.

If you’re looking for a purely factual overview of Rustin’s life, you can check out the 2003 PBS documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. Sadly, the film is not streaming, but the DVD is currently available on Amazon.