Obama Awards Bayard Rustin -- the Man Behind the March -- the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Peter Dreier 

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College

Bayard Rustin reads the demands at the 1963 March on Washington

On Thursday, the White House announced that Bayard Rustin, the trailblazing civil rights activist, will be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

The timing couldn't be better. Rustin was a key advisor to Martin Luther King and the primary organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom -- a job he seemed to have prepared for all his life. Many Americans will be celebrating that event's 50th anniversary on August 28, and insisting that the country complete the march's unfinished business of economic justice, full employment, voting rights, and equal opportunity.


Honoring Rustin with the Medal of Freedom tells us something about how far America has come as a nation in the past 50 years. After all, he had four strikes against him. He was a pacifist, a radical, black and gay. Controversy surrounded him all his life.

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