Bayard Rustin

A new book features Bayard Rustin's essays and contemporary reflections on what today's Left can learn from his work.

Why does the influential African-American organizer and strategist continue to speak to us, three and a half decades after his death?

The project of “reclamation and celebration” proceeds from an impulse to rediscover black Greats who by force of their own will make “change.”

Bayard Rustin tried to forge a mass coalition to deliver progressive change. His failure to do so in the 1960s tells us much about building one today.

The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he’s back in the spotlight. What can we learn from his strategies of resistance?

A new film finally spotlights Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington.

Rustin’s assessment of the lay of the political land was predicated on a no-nonsense understanding of the radicalism of the moment.

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin knew the fates of the civil rights and labor movements were intertwined. The same is true today.

How would Bayard Rustin be judged today?

Though Bayard Rustin, close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., was gay, his legacy is not well known in the queer community.

Coretta Scott King would become one of the nation’s most visible—and, to some, most dangerous—critics of America’s rapidly expanding war in Vietnam.

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s Freedom Budget is the key to understanding the appeal of the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor.

This new biopic about the socialist organizer Bayard Rustin stops at the March on Washington. What is it leaving out?

A conversation with the longtime director about “Rustin,” growing up in Kentucky, and putting on a show.

We should find inspiration in their goals today.

In 1950s America, the Cold War was raging, but socialists were playing key roles in the early civil rights movement.

Historians say that a major milestone in the history of school integration is often left out of the civil rights story.

How government commissions became alibis for inaction.

America is covered in Confederate statues. We can do better — and here’s how.

When covering the struggle against school segregation in its own backyard, the paper of record came up short.