If you don’t know who Bayard Rustin was, you’re not alone.
But you likely know about one of his greatest feats.
Rustin was the chief architect of a seminal event in the fight for racial justice: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
Rustin, an outspoken activist, skilled strategist and charismatic leader in his own right, was pushed out of the historical spotlight because he was openly gay.
"Bayard Rustin has been termed the lost prophet of the civil rights movement. I prefer American hero," said actor and playwright Michael Benjamin Washington, whose play “Blueprints to Freedom: An Ode to Bayard Rustin" is getting a world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse this month. The play was developed at the La Jolla Playhouse through the DNA New Work Series. The first staged reading took place on Aug. 28, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.
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Michael Benjamin Washington is taking on the role of Rustin.
"Bayard’s mind was 50 years ahead of its time. Many thought he was going to be the western world’s Ghandi," Washington said.
Rustin was a rising star in the civil rights movement throughout the 1940s and '50s. He was sent to Alabama to counsel another, faster rising star and teach him the tenets of non-violent civil disobedience.
"He passed it on to Martin Luther King, Jr., who then took it on for the Montgomery bus boycott," said Washington, referring to the 1955 protests against racial segregation of buses in Montgomery, Ala., sparked by Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger.
Rustin was jailed a dozen years earlier for refusing to give up his seat on a bus.
Rustin soon became a mentor to King. He served as his executive aide and ghostwrote many of his early essays.
But for King, Rustin was not an ally who could share center stage.
"They had a very contentious relationship, in the sense that Bayard was openly gay and was a former communist," Washington said. "Those two factors kept him marginalized for the duration of his career."
Bayard Rustin never hid his homosexuality and he paid a price for it.
After a 1953 arrest in Pasadena for "sexual peversion," a charge leveled against anyone caught having homosexual sex in those days, Rustin was vulnerable to attack and considered, at times, a liability to the civil rights movement.
In 1960, Rustin and King organized a protest to take place outside the Democratic National Convention. Prominent black politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. worried such a protest would compromise his position, so he threatened to spread a rumor that Rustin was having a sexual relationship with King unless they called the protest off.
The protest was canceled and Rustin resigned from his post with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
This is the context for one of the most powerful scenes in the play, where Rustin and King meet after a two-year rift in Rustin's office, just months before the March on Washington. Rustin confronts King about not standing up for him in the face of rumors. He yells, "You never thought for a second to spare me, Martin."
King, played by actor Ro Boddie, responds: "When Adam threatened to expose you and me as homosexual lovers, I had one choice. Now he did concoct a lie, I did turn against you. We have been derailed. But that was two years ago."
"I think what’s fascinating about that scene is we get to see two men, one of whom we know really well and the other we don’t know that well, behind closed doors in the intimacy of this office," said Lucie Tiberghien, the director of "Blueprints to Freedom."
"And I think it’s interesting to tease out the places where they’re more vulnerable then we expected them to be."
As we know, King eventually agreed to speak at the march, which overall was a great success. It was Rustin who organized the whole event. And he did it before email, cell phones, or fax machines.
"It’s quite remarkable. I can’t think of quite so unique a skill set as he possessed," said Gabriel Greene, the Playhouse's director of new play development and dramaturg for the production.
"There are these thousands and thousands of individual documents that show how much detail went into the planning and the execution of the march," Greene said.
When the day of the march arrived, Bayard Rustin was still relegated to the sidelines.
Which is why he’s not on the program and his name doesn’t exist on the literature but there was a moment he got to hear his own voice echoing through the Mall on Washington.
Rustin’s story is especially relevant to 2015, with groups like Black Lives Matter on the rise. He died in 1987. In 2013, President Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Washington hopes his play inspires audiences to activism.
"That’s what Bayard Rustin wanted," Washington said.
"Don’t just shake your head and say 'That's good or bad, or not my fight.' What are you going to do?"
"Blueprints to Freedom: An Ode to Bayard Rustin" runs through Oct. 4 at the La Jolla Playhouse.
