Amazon.com Review
The famous "I Have a Dream" speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington is deservedly remembered as the most potent moment of the civil rights struggle, but Bayard Rustin was the behind-the-scenes architect of that historic event. Rustin "had made significant contributions to a number of movements for African freedom and to the global struggle for human rights," Jervis Anderson notes, but "achieved no significant power in his career. Part of the reason was the breadth and variety of his political involvements." Rustin was a conscientious objector to World War II, worked with the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, participated in A. Phillip Randolph's 1941 Washington protest march, and was a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality. But another reason for his comparative obscurity is that many of his colleagues feared that public knowledge of his homosexuality would undermine the broader civil rights movement.

Anderson skillfully uncovers Rustin's complicated history, from his West Chester, Pennsylvania, birth in 1912 and black Quaker upbringing to his ideological move from communism to social democracy, and restores to public memory a vital career in the history of nonviolent social activism. Rustin summarized his philosophy for change by noting that "the major aspect of the struggle comes from without. If one gets out and begins to defend one's rights and the rights of others, spiritual growth takes place. One becomes in the process of doing, in the purifying process of action." --Eugene Holley Jr.