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/2019/01/06/682598649/in-newly-found-audio-a-forgotten-civil-rights-leader-says-coming-out-was-an-abso?fbclid=IwAR3eUSvE9RsHVjgQU3zCmDs6z49bIuK3ijTt1JBznV7BVzpekH7G2kwCm2c

Better then to listen to the Democratic response, given by Senator James Web. The transcript is over on the NYTimes and the video is over on YouTube. Here’s a taste.

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues ­ those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death ­ we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm’s way. We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us ­ sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

Worth a look: Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo.com had the neat idea to set up a YouTube group for people to give their own video responses to the State of the Union.