Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was raised by his Quaker grandparents in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and had a fine tenor voice; he sang briefly with Josh White and Leadbelly in New York. He joined the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1941 and toured the country teaching nonviolent resistance. In 1944 he went to federal prison for more than two years for refusing to be drafted, and spent much of it fighting segregation inside the prison.

In 1947 he helped organise the first Freedom Ride, testing a Supreme Court ruling against segregation on interstate buses, and served 22 days on a North Carolina chain gang for it. He travelled to India to study Gandhi's methods, and in 1956 went to Montgomery to advise a young Martin Luther King, whose house was then guarded by armed men. Rustin persuaded him to give up the guns, and drafted the plan for what became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

He was openly gay at a time when that was a crime, and in 1953 he was arrested in Pasadena and served 60 days. Opponents used it against him for the rest of his life. In 1960 a congressman threatened to spread lies about him and King, and King let him go. In 1963 A. Philip Randolph insisted that he organise the March on Washington anyway. He did it in eight weeks, and Strom Thurmond attacked him on the Senate floor days before it took place.

He spent his later years on trade unionism and gay rights, and died in 1987.