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In her 2004 Presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall described history, the stories about the past that we remember, as "always a form of forgetting." Scrutinizing what she called the "dominant narrative" of the civil rights movement-a triumphal story that begins with the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s and ends with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts a decade later-Hall argued that it "distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals" (1).
If one had to choose a single event to illustrate both the standard interpretation of the civil rights movement and Hall's caution aboutit, it would be the March on Washington. More than four decades later, the March has come down to us as a moment of hope, unity, inspiration, and vision. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial before a peaceful crowd of 250,000 Americans, black and white, young and old, male and female, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an oration that high school students now memorize for speech contests. Its central recurring line-"I have a dream"-has become as well recognized and as thoroughly American as "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
Standing in the background as King intoned these words was Bayard Rustin, another civil rights activist. Barely known today beyond circles of professional historians, Rustin was the man who, more than anyone, made the March on Washington happen. When the Washington Post profiled Rustin two weeks before the demonstration, it dosed its article with the comment "He's Mr. March himself." After the event, Life magazine featured Rustin on its cover (2). How could he have figured so prominently at the time and yet be so peripheral to historical memory today? Why have we forgotten Bayard Rustin? And what do we suppress when we forget him?
Of Rustin's importance to the African American freedom struggle there can be no doubt. He was one of the moving forces behind the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a key organization in the civil rights movement. Founded in 1942, CORE pioneered in the use of Gandhian nonviolence to challenge racial injustice. Throughout the 1940's, Rustin trained and led groups of nonviolent protesters in actions against segregated restaurants, movie theaters, barber shops, amusement...