In 1945, at the height of Rustin’s pacifist struggles with conscription, Jean Toomer, who became a guiding spirit of the Friends movement among African Americans, listed a five-step path against impediments to the inner spiritual life which echoes Rustin’s path toward political progress: “1. See them, one by one; 2. face them; 3. honestly evaluate them; 4. deny, that is, oppose them; 5. struggle with them.” The inner life and the outer life are parts of the same process of incremental improvement.

Toomer urged Quakers toward “not introspection but inspection”—not a Buddhist-like contemplation of the inner self but an inventory of flaws identified and possibilities awakened. Active verbs fill the language of the African American Quakers, above all “watching” and “seeking.” Just as the evangelical Black Baptist church of the South was the ideal incubator for a charismatic and inspiring orator, so the Black Friends were the ideal incubator for an organizer to support that orator.

As a sometime student at City College of New York in the nineteen-thirties, Rustin briefly belonged to the youth wing of the Communist Party U.S.A., an affiliation for which he would later pay a price, in several respects. The complexities of the Party’s engagement with the civil-rights movement were manifold. The Party, tightly under the control of the Soviet Union, was at first strongly for a Zionist-style ideal of a Black nation situated somewhere in the American South—an idea that Rustin later ridiculed in debates with Malcolm X. Then, after Hitler’s invasion of Russia, the Party turned right around and promoted American national interests as primary and the civil-rights struggle as secondary.

Novels are better indexes of the temper of their time than any scholarly history, and the best way to understand the emotional appeal of the C.P.U.S.A. to young Black intellectuals like Rustin is to reread Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” It dramatizes how the Party, in the book named the Brotherhood, maintained an intoxicating air of equality at a time when the two mainstream political parties were at best equivocal about even Black suffrage in the South. The novel dramatizes, too, the Party’s transparently phony rhetoric, and its betrayal of individuals in the pursuit of its own agenda. There’s nothing surprising about the Party’s appeal to Rustin, although he came to see, as Ellison’s narrator eventually does, that it had an instrumental interest in the Black cause, caring only for its own, as defined, mutably, by Moscow.

Leaving the Party, Rustin went to work with A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a far more potent organization than its name now suggests. Early in 1941, the two men started organizing a march on Washington, to take place that July. Roosevelt responded to news of their plans with an executive order banning discrimination in the U.S. defense industry, and the march was cancelled. Making yourself an inconvenience, or promising to, could produce results, Rustin saw. When his pacifism got him sent to prison in 1944—first in Kentucky and then in Pennsylvania—he took the occasion to protest against segregation in the penitentiaries.

Rustin’s relation to Randolph was as powerful and filial, in its way, as Malcolm’s to Elijah Muhammad, although the instruction was in the pragmatics of politics, not the mythology of race. (Both protégés, significantly, had been fatherless boys.) As Jervis Anderson demonstrates in his remarkable 1973 biography of Randolph, much of which was first published in these pages, Randolph’s group supplied the third leg in the tripod of Rustin’s allegiances: Quakerism, socialism, and the union movement. The civic authority that union leaders enjoyed then was immense; they were vital to the growth of the Democratic Party. (Walter Reuther, who built the U.A.W. and helped establish the A.F.L.-C.I.O., is today a distant memory, but he ought to be on the twenty-dollar bill.) Randolph trained Rustin in the intricacies of organizing, and in its sheer essential tedium. Rustin spent formative years in the places where change gestated—the dusty downtown offices of the War Resisters League, and the Harlem branch of the fledgling Congress of Racial Equality. He learned that the only glamorous part of resistance was the songs. The rest was a lot of phone calls to donors and letters to potential ones. Rustin, for all his elegance, was very much a child of the now lost world of the Old Left—deep into the television era, he was still urging memorandums and long-winded position statements on his followers.

Rustin’s first encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.—one of the most consequential meetings in American history—occurred in February of 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. Rustin was forty-four; King was only twenty-seven. Rustin, who was officially “on loan” from the In Friendship group, soon persuaded King to form what became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. More than anyone else, Rustin introduced King to the full range of advocates of the combination of nonviolence and committed action, from Gandhi to Niebuhr. (Rustin had spent a couple of months in India in 1948, learning from the Gandhi movement.) He recognized King’s greatness as a speaker and a leader, and helped give him an ideology to make sense of his instincts. “I had a feeling that no force on earth can stop this movement,” he said of King in Montgomery. “It has all the elements to touch the hearts of men.”

Calvin Trillin wrote, in 1968, that the most effective way for the segregationists to cripple the civil-rights movement would have been to pass a law banning metaphor; without its metaphors, the movement was mute. King had a perfect pitch for the metaphoric, and Rustin didn’t—he was too practical-minded—but it was Rustin who put meat on the metaphor’s bones. He also seems to have largely drafted the memoir published, in 1958, under King’s name, “Stride Toward Freedom.” The fact that the memoir doesn’t mention Rustin was, he later said, “my decision and a very sound one.” He explained that he didn’t want King to be linked to someone whom Southern reactionaries had designated a “Communist agitator.”

Rustin was being marginally disingenuous. It wasn’t just his flirtation with the Party that could make the association troublesome; it was also his reputation as a homosexual. The reality, easy to lose track of in our happier times, is that for most of the twentieth century homosexuality was not only illegal on paper but actively pursued by the police as a significant crime. In 1953, Rustin had been arrested in Pasadena for “lewd conduct” with another man in a parked car; he served almost two months in jail and was registered as a sex offender. As a result, he was fired from the pacifist organization he then worked for, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Rustin was not “out” by our standards—he was discreet, and it was only in the last decade of his life that he was able to live together openly with a male partner. But he was out by the standards of his time, when simply not pretending counted as a major step. (W. H. Auden’s biographers struggle to trace the delicate lines of in and out of the period, with Auden still marginally in, and his lover Chester Kallman unapologetically out.)

“I think he’s getting close to the part where he tells us what the fish of the day is.”Cartoon by Roland HighCopy link to cartoonShop

Homosexuality was more anathema to the existing Black power structure, with its roots both in the evangelical church and in Northern big-city clubhouse politics, than it was to the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. One has the sense that, for Hoover, it was simply one club among many with which to beat agitators over the head (Red, queer: it was all the same). But enemies of Rustin within the civil-rights movement—among them Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the Harlem congressman and power broker—were motivated by a genuine abhorrence of gay men. In both realms, it was a time when an accusation of homosexuality could end a career. (The plot of the most successful political novel of the fifties, Alan Drury’s “Advise and Consent,” pivoted on this fatal accusation, and Lyndon Johnson’s closest aide, Walter Jenkins, had his career ended that way.) So it is astonishing that Rustin survived. A couple of weeks before the March on Washington, the segregationist Strom Thurmond attacked Rustin on the floor of the Senate as a “sexual pervert” as well as a Communist, and the first charge very nearly got Rustin kicked out by the more conservative civil-rights leaders. But Randolph, a conservative man in manners and morals, knew Rustin’s value and stood by him.

Lives worth remembering tend to have one central episode. The new movie does very well with the central episode of Rustin’s life: his role in organizing the March on Washington. We learn how Rustin, who, with Randolph, had helped conceive the march, was banished from it owing to worries about his “character.” How he was called back to run the show when it became clear that no one else could do the job as effectively. (Rustin had already become known for his role in organizing earlier marches, including the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, agitating for school integration.) How he turned a war room of kids, white and Black, into an organizational force, overcame the resistance of the National Park Service, and led the marchers to the Lincoln Memorial. And then was left out of the after-meeting with the Kennedys at the White House.

One point the movie doesn’t make clear is that the march, designed as a demonstration of outsiders, was very much an insiders’ event, too. It drew on the assets of the Democratic Party then in power. Walter Reuther, the president of the U.A.W., not only spoke at the march but helped finance it with dues from his mostly white members. And though the Kennedys resented the march, inasmuch as it pushed them too hard too soon, they also needed it, inasmuch as they knew that they had to be seen as being pushed if they were to move on civil rights. All this was part of Rustin’s central understanding: pragmatism and principle intertwine to make progress.

A year later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil-rights groups defied Mississippi’s whites-only Democratic Party by creating a parallel party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, open to all. L.B.J., fearing defections by the “regular” delegates, would seat no more than two delegates from the protest group at the Democratic National Convention. Accept the deal or walk out? “When you enter the arena of politics, you’ve entered the arena of compromise,” Rustin, very much in character, urged the Freedom delegates; defeating the Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, was too important to be sidetracked by squabbles. But it was a policy of patience for an increasingly impatient time, and succeeded only in opening a fatal space between him and a new generation of activists.