The film tells the story of Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), an activist and vital figure in the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century who worked alongside the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, and is credited with teaching King a lot about non-violent resistance. Due to him having been openly gay in a time when homosexuality was still criminal in many U.S. states, he mostly worked behind the scenes, organizing protests and rallying supporters into action. Because of this, as well as him having been a vocal socialist, he tends to go overlooked by history in favor of more prominent figures like King.
Rustin covers his part in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, in which somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people marched to the Washington Monument and King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, a day often credited with bringing the civil rights movement to great public attention and helping getting laws that made discrimination illegal signed into U.S. law.
Not to be confused with the 2001 film Rustin, which is about a town called Rustin, Alabama.
Cast
- Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin
- Aml Ameen as Martin Luther King Jr.
- Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins
- Gus Halper as Tom Kahn
- Glynn Turman as A. Philip Randolph
- Jeffrey Wright as Rep. Adam Clayton Powell
- Da'Vine Joy Randolph as Mahalia Jackson
- C.C.H. Pounder as Dr. Anna Hedgeman
- Audra McDonald as Ella Baker
- Michael Potts as Cleve Robinson
- Johnny Ramey as Elias Taylor
Tropes
- Badass Pacifist: Rustin, having been raised a Quaker, is a big supporter of non-violent protests and is shown to have willingly taken a beating from a violent police officer during an earlier protest.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Rustin is portrayed as this as a member of the movement; he is smart about how to plan the march and passionate about its goals, but his past Communist allegiances, flamboyant mannerisms and his homosexuality, which is portrayed as being a more-or-less open secret, are seen as potential liabilities that could be used to discredit the movement as a whole.
- Camp Gay: Having been openly gay, Rustin is portrayed as having been quite flamboyant.
- Cool Old Guy: Though not exactly "old" at a few years shy of 50, Rustin is shown to regularly and comfortably hang out with student activists in their late teens and 20s.
- Dare to Be Badass: In the first scene, Rustin's Establishing Character Moment has him talk King into leading a march of 5,000 people onto the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.King: I'm sorry, I'm not your man.
Rustin: Who told you you are not our man? Were you not our man when you took command of the Montgomery bus boycott, or spoke with such eloquence the night your home was bombed? - Deliberately Monochrome: A flashback to 1942, when Rustin was brutally beaten by a police officer during the Montgomery bus boycotts, is in black and white, but the rest of the film is in color.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: After all the pushback and harassment he has faced throughout the film, Rustin gets publicly defended by his fellow civil rights activists when segregationists try to use his 1953 arrest against him and the film stresses how the march he organized helped end legal segregation. The epilogue also mentions that he managed to find a lasting relationship that lasted almost a decade until his passing.
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: In the beginning, after Rustin has been ousted from the civil rights movement after Powell threatens to spread a lie about him and King having an affair, he is seen holding down a comparatively much duller desk job at the War Resisters' League, a conscientuous objection movement.
- Foil: Elias Taylor is one to Rustin. Both are black, religious, gay men, but Bayard is fairly open about his sexuality while Elias is a preacher in a relationship with a woman and has to keep his a secret.
- Gayngst: Throughout the film, Elias Taylor struggles with his attraction to Rustin, being a Christian preacher who is married to a woman. In the end, he becomes at risk of being outed and breaks it off with Rustin, and his wife, who is all but stated to be aware of their fling, tries to pretend it never happened.
- Honorary Uncle: Rustin is portrayed as having been this to King's children.
- The Load: Rep. Powell is portrayed as this in the film, pushing back against Rustin's involvement and trying to use the March to promote himself when he can, and even uses Rustin's sexuality as leverage to get him excluded.
- Real-Person Epilogue: The movie ends with one for Rustin himself: in 1977, he fell in love with a man named Walter Naegle, who became his partner until Rustin's death in 1987. In 2013, Rustin was given a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom by then-president Obama.
- Refuge in Audacity: Deconstructed; Bayard's initial plan for the March is more ambitious than it ended up being, hoping to keep the march going for two full days, flood the House and Senate with activists to stall their legislative work and even surround the White House. Unfortunately, when he has to get leaders in the civil rights community onboard, they have objections to parts of it, some for more strategic reasons than others, resulting in the march only going on for one day and not occupying as much of Washington D.C. as envisioned at first. That said, the march becomes a huge success with more than twice as many participants as Rustin expected at first.
- Silence Is Golden: The movie opens with scenes of civil rights activists being bullied and harassed by white bystanders and members of law enforcement. No dialogue is heard, only soft piano music.
- Take This Job and Shove It: Bayard quits his job at the War Resisters' League when he doesn't get support from his colleagues about the abuse of African-Americans at protests in Birmingham, Alabama and because of the fact that his boss has some unsavory ideas about his homosexuality, saying he "will never be fully whole" and blaming it on his parents rejecting him.
- Tears of Joy: Bayard's reaction to King and Randolph holding a press conference to defend his involvement in the marches in spite of his 1953 arrest being brought to public attention.
- We ARE Struggling Together: The film shows the civil rights movement having a lot of internal struggles in fighting segregation and racism. In the opening, Rustin and Tom Kahn, both followers of King and his pacifistic approach to protesting, clash with a more bellicose activist. During planning meetings, female members of the movement like Dr. Hedgeman take issue with the lack of female representation at the protest.Tom Kahn: Earlier today, a fight almost broke out. It did not use to be like that, and now it is like that all the time. SNCC
, CORE, the NAACP kids, we're all fighting over agendas, and slogans, and songs, and you know who's winning?
Rustin: Something tells me I'm about to find out.
Tom Kahn: Bull Connor in Birmingham, Strom Thurmond on the Senate floor. While we all snap, and snarl, and eat each other alive.
