Wow, this should be inter­est­ing! The pod­cast series intro is all we have so far but this NPR piece is dish­ing some of the details of what we’ll hear when this episode airs:

Despite the risks, Rustin felt it was his respon­si­bil­i­ty to be open about his sex­u­al­i­ty. He traces that duty back to an expe­ri­ence he had as a black man in the 1940s Jim Crow South, when he took his place at the back of a seg­re­gat­ed bus.

“As I was going by the sec­ond seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring neck­tie I was wear­ing and pulled it,” he recalled in the new­ly released audio. “Where­upon its moth­er said, ‘Don’t touch a n*****.’ ”

As Rustin tells it, here’s what ran through his mind in that moment after the white woman called him the slur: “If I go and sit qui­et­ly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so inno­cent of race rela­tions that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down qui­et­ly that it’s going to end up say­ing, ‘They like it back there, I’ve nev­er seen any­body protest against it.’ ” 

Rustin was fired from his work with orga­ni­za­tions like the Fel­low­ship of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and he often had to work semi-anonymously behind the scenes. The famous March on Wash­ing­ton that we remem­ber for Mar­tin Luther King Jr.‘s speech was Rustin’s idea.

One of his catch-phrases in speech­es was that we should “speak truth to pow­er.” When he worked with the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee to write the famous 1955 pam­phlet of that name, not only was­n’t he not list­ed as one of the authors, but the oth­ers con­coct­ed some ridicu­lous sto­ry about the phrase being some ancient Quak­er say­ing. Shame­ful. I real­ly want to lis­ten to his sto­ry and can’t wait for the podcast!

https://​www​.npr​.org/​2​0​1​9​/​0​1​/​0​6​/​6​8​2​5​9​8​6​4​9​/​i​n​-​n​e​w​l​y​-​f​o​u​n​d​-​a​u​d​i​o​-​a​-​f​o​r​g​o​t​t​e​n​-​c​i​v​i​l​-​r​i​g​h​t​s​-​l​e​a​d​e​r​-​s​a​y​s​-​c​o​m​i​n​g​-​o​u​t​-​w​a​s​-​a​n​-​a​b​s​o​?​f​b​c​l​i​d​=​I​w​A​R​3​e​U​S​v​E​9​R​s​H​V​j​g​Q​U​3​z​C​m​D​s​6​z​4​9​b​I​u​K​3​i​j​T​t​1​J​B​z​n​V​7​B​V​z​p​e​k​H​7​G​2​k​w​C​m2c