Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, was crucial to the movement

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, was crucial to the movement
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bayard-rustin-organizer-of-the-march-on-washington-was-crucial-to-the-movement/2011/08/17/gIQA0oZ7UJ_story.html

By Steve Hendrix, E-mail the writer

It was around this point in August 1963, in the sweltering days before the March on Washington, that Eleanor Holmes Norton was waiting for someone to say something really nasty about her boss.

She was a march volunteer. The boss was Bayard Rustin, the march’s chief organizer and the man widely viewed as the only civil rights activist capable of pulling off a protest of such unprecedented scale.

And he was gay. Openly gay. That year again? 1963.
....


“When the anniversary comes around, frankly I think of Bayard as much as I think of King,” says Norton. “King could hardly have given the speech if the march had not been so well attended and so well organized. If there had been any kind of disturbance, that would have been the story.”

Bayard Rustin, March on Washington, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin#March_on_Washington

March on Washington

A few weeks before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual," and had the entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record. Thurmond also produced an FBI photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing, to imply that there was a same-sex relationship between the two. Both men denied the allegation of an affair.
....

Legacy

....
On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.