LGBT News Now - Whenever senior client Clarence R. Williams visits the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Anita May Rosenstein Campus, he feels a swelling of pride while walking through the Bayard Rustin Courtyard.
“We never have enough same-gender loving Black American gay men featured or celebrated in any significant way,” says Williams, co-founder of the Senior Services social group Ebony Sage Circle. “Bayard Rustin never, ever denied who he was. He was a very brilliant and intelligent man who had a lot to give.”
The openly gay civil rights activist was a top advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. and was the organizing genius behind the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his historic I Have a Dream speech. Rustin also served as an advisor to American labor unionist and civil rights activist A. Phillip Randolph, who was the head of the March on Washington.