When I learned that Barack and Michelle Obama had announced a biopic on the socialist organizer Bayard Rustin through their production company Higher Ground, I shuddered a bit. Rustin was committed to a vision of egalitarian social transformation and sought to alter the terms of political debate toward that end; Barack Obama is not and never has been. After the movie’s release, the reports were no more promising. “It’s far worse than even you could imagine,” a friend told me, while another bemoaned its “malicious presentism.” Yet another friend, who was a politically active adult through the period the film covers, said, “The trailer was enough for me, and I couldn’t get through that.” But in the interest of service to my readers, I subjected myself to the whole thing. After it ended, I had to put on The Battle of Algiers as a purgative.
Rustin opens during the high period of activism in the Southern civil rights movement, with a montage of staged reconstructions of what the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis aptly describes as “stoic protesters surrounded by screaming racists.” This historical kitsch goes so far as to include a live-action version of Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges, surrounded by US marshals, walking to school in 1960. What follows, Dargis observes, “seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law.” That’s the film in a nutshell. Rustin’s politics and his role in the crucial debates over ways forward from the legislative victories of 1964 and ’65 don’t come up in this story, which conveniently ends with the 1963 March on Washington.
In its effort to establish Rustin’s importance, the film falsely attributes to him the principal responsibility for proposing and executing the march, which actually originated with A. Philip Randolph and was largely organized by his Negro American Labor Council. It also downplays the role of the labor movement in organizing the march, treating the unions offhandedly as obstructionist and instead attributing their initiative to smart, energetic young people. Yet two months before the march, the United Auto Workers were central in organizing a 125,000-strong Detroit Walk to Freedom, essentially a trial run for the later event. Randolph and Rustin originally conceived the march’s focus as a demand for jobs and then broadened it to accommodate the Southern movement’s concern with Jim Crow. But the economic motive remained at the fore of the planning, Dargis notes, quoting Rustin himself: “The dynamic that has motivated Negroes to withstand with courage and dignity the intimidation and violence they have endured in their own struggle against racism may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind demands for a broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”