Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912 and raised by his Quaker grandmother. He was openly gay decades before that was survivable. He was a draft resister during World War II and served 28 months in federal prison rather than register. He was a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and an early member of the Congress of Racial Equality.

In 1955 he traveled to Montgomery, Alabama and met a 26-year-old Baptist pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. who was reading Reinhold Niebuhr but did not yet know Gandhi. Rustin spent six months teaching him. The Montgomery Bus Boycott became a Gandhian campaign because Rustin made it one. Every nonviolent strategist who came after — Lawson, Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Bevel — sat at some point at Rustin's elbow.

In the summer of 1963, A. Philip Randolph called him. The march Randolph had been threatening since 1941 was finally on. Rustin had ten days to organize 250,000 people, 2,000 buses, 21 chartered trains, food and water and bathrooms and a sound system on the Lincoln Memorial steps. He delivered. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom went off without a single arrest.

His sexuality made him a target his entire life. Strom Thurmond stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and read Rustin's morals-charge arrest record into the Congressional Record to try to destroy the march. Randolph refused to fire him. The march went on.

In 1965 he co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which pushed the labor-civil rights alliance from inside the AFL-CIO for the next four decades. He died in 1987 still organizing.

President Obama awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 — fifty years to the month after the march he had organized.