Bayard Rustin's pardon came 67 years too late
He organized the March on Washington, and a 1953 arrest for consensual sex with men nearly erased him from the movement he built.
Bayard Rustin taught Martin Luther King Jr. the discipline of nonviolence. He was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered "I Have a Dream" to a crowd of a quarter million people. Rustin built the machinery that made the civil rights movement move.
He was also a gay man at a time when being one was a crime, and the state of California made sure that fact followed him for the rest of his life.
In January 1953, in Pasadena, police arrested Rustin in a parked car with two other men. The charge was a "morals" offense, the catch-all category police used to criminalize gay men for consensual sex. He pleaded guilty, served 50 days in jail, and was required to register as a sex offender. He was 40 years old. The conviction became a weapon his enemies used against him for decades.
The men who wanted Rustin sidelined did not have to invent anything. The arrest was on the public record. Segregationists and rivals inside the movement pointed to it to argue he was a liability. He was pushed to the margins, kept off podiums, denied the public recognition his work earned.
On February 5, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom granted Rustin a posthumous pardon. Rustin had died in 1987. The pardon arrived 67 years after the arrest and 33 years after his death.
Newsom did not stop at the single pardon. He announced a clemency initiative for others convicted under the same kind of discriminatory laws. Rustin's case was the most famous, but it was one of thousands. For most of the twentieth century, police across the country used morals statutes, lewd-conduct charges, and sodomy laws to arrest gay men by the tens of thousands.
A pardon does not undo any of that. It cannot return the years Rustin spent pushed offstage, or restore the credit withheld from him while he was alive. What it does is acknowledge, officially and decades late, that the conviction should never have existed.
Rustin organized the largest demonstration the nation had seen, then watched the same government that arrested him deny him his place at its center. The pardon corrects the record. It does not correct the history.