The project of “reclamation and celebration” proceeds from a common impulse to rediscover/invent black Greats who by force of their own will make “change” or “contributions.” In Ava Duvernay’s Selma Martin Luther King Jr. shows up and exudes a beatific glow that makes things happen.5 These films and filmmakers have no clue how movements are reproduced as mass projects, from the bottom up and top down, in a trajectory plotted by continuously improvised response to and anticipation of layers of internal and external pressures. But that’s not their point. Rustin isn’t interested in illuminating the intricacies of the civil rights movement; it wants us to recognize its subject’s place in a pantheon of black and American Greats. Toward that end, it keeps telling us—over and over—how close Rustin was personally to King and his family, as though propinquity to Universally Recognized Greatness cements his place in the pantheon. An irony is that the March on Washington became King’s event, as historian William P. Jones points out, only after the fact. I know at least two people who attended the March but left before King spoke: it was late August in Washington, D.C.; people were dressed up, and he was, after all, another southern Baptist preacher.
Bayard Rustin was a brilliant organizer and strategist, not least because he was motivated by a practical utopian vision of the society he wanted to realize. That vision and his clarity regarding a path toward it helped him to parse in a distinctively clear way tensions and contradictions within the movement, particularly as it faced the major crossroad in the mid-1960s. Disconnecting him from that vision has enabled characterizing him as an advocate of “coalition politics,” as though that were itself a political principle. That characterization comes with a timestamp; it grew out of the debate over Black Power in the late 1960s for which an animating question was “Can blacks attain freedom or racial justice on their own?” The question was always wrongheaded, not least because it begged several others—e.g., which voices count as those of “blacks”? What does “freedom” mean concretely in policy and programmatic terms?—that Rustin stood out among his contemporaries in posing because he had a clear vision of the world that should be.