Today In Black LGBTQ+ History: BAYARD RUSTIN

TODAY IN BLACK LGBTQ+ HISTORY, we celebrate Bayard Rustin, who was an LGBTQ and civil rights activist best known for being a key adviser to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He organized the 1963 March on Washington and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2013 for his activism. In 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom pardoned Rustin for his arrest in 1953 when he was found having sex with two men in a parked car in Pasadena. Rustin served 50 days in Los Angeles County jail and had to register as a sex offender. In pardoning Rustin, Newsom noted how LGBTQ people were unjustly punished for their sexuality by U.S. law enforcement at the time of Rustin's arrest.