Eight years later, Rustin played an important, though largely hidden, role in another challenge to Jim Crow transportation--the Montgomery bus boycott, triggered by Rosa Parks's refusal to obey a bus driver who demanded that she give up her seat to a white man. When police arrested Parks for refusing to move, black Montgomery boycotted the buses under the leadership of a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin quickly appreciated the boycott's significance and King's potential. He traveled to Montgomery to meet King, and soon became one of his key speechwriters and advisers, urging King to capitalize on the boycott's momentum by creating a new organization dedicated to advancing the cause of human rights in the South through mass activism. Rustin drafted the founding documents of what became the SCLC, and would have liked to administer the SCLC or otherwise serve King on an ongoing, open basis. But that possibility was precluded by Rustin's homosexuality, or, more precisely, objections to his homosexuality and fears of scandal related to the Pasadena arrest.

Anxious to avoid troublesome publicity, Rustin hid his own influence. But for some of his sponsors, Rustin's self-abnegation was insufficient; they insisted that he distance himself from King out of fear that sensationalist reporting on Rustin's Communist past and homosexual proclivities might harm the fledgling Southern movement. Some of the movement's ostensible friends, moreover, were not above raising Rustin's past to settle old scores, or simply to protect their turf. In 1960 Rustin assisted King and Randolph in organizing a "March on the Convention Movement for Freedom Now," a protest at the Republican and Democratic parties' presidential nominating conventions whose aim was to pressure both parties into giving more priority to racial-justice initiatives. Insulted by what he perceived as their failure to consult him first, Adam Clayton Powell--the chief minister of Harlem's most influential church (the Abyssinian Baptist) and one of only four blacks in the House of Representatives--accused King of being in thrall to socialist interests by virtue of his association with Rustin. When that failed to provoke a reaction, Powell upped the ante, threatening to charge that King and Rustin were having a homosexual affair. In the face of that threat, and King's unwillingness to confront Powell, Rustin publicly severed all his ties with SCLC--one of several developments that undercut the proposed demonstrations and rendered them largely ineffectual.

Powell's sexual blackmail devastated Rustin and drove him to the outer edges of the civil rights movement for several years. In 1963, however, he re-emerged, phoenix-like, at the center of the single most famous demonstration of the era. His old mentor, A. Philip Randolph, proposed a march that would focus not only on civil rights wrongly denied to blacks but also on the distressing condition of neglected black workers and those subjected to joblessness. Randolph announced the plan for an "Emancipation March on Washington for Jobs," whereupon Rustin began to translate the vision into reality. He lined up the support of the major civil rights organizations, many unions, an ecumenical roster of prominent religious leaders and scores of celebrities (including Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Joan Baez, Sammy Davis Jr., Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier and, yes, Charlton Heston). Rustin methodically addressed nitty-gritty details involving transportation, policing, toilets, housing, food, medical care, trash disposal, entertainment, etc. He calmed the jittery nerves of supporters who feared failure, overcame the objections of President Kennedy, who feared disorder, and mollified egotistical civil rights leaders who suspected that rivals would reap greater benefits than themselves. Bringing to bear skills he had honed for decades, Rustin set the stage for a massive display of support for the civil rights movement as some 250,000 people converged on Washington on a workday--Wednesday, August 28, 1963.

That Rustin would retain his position as the march's organizer-in-chief was by no means assured. First, his old nemesis, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, tried to oust him from his own demonstration. "This march is of such importance," Wilkins argued, "that we must not put a person [with] his liabilities as the head." Randolph and the other top leaders acceded formally to Wilkins's demand, but then rejected it in substance. Randolph assumed the role of director but immediately named Rustin as his deputy--an arrangement little different from the one about which Wilkins had initially complained. Then, a few weeks before the march, Strom Thurmond, the archsegregationist senator from South Carolina, attempted to discredit the civil rights movement by attacking Rustin. Armed with information obtained with the assistance of the infamous FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Thurmond inserted into the Congressional Record accounts of Rustin's Pasadena arrest, including a police booking slip detailing the incident. According to D'Emilio, Thurmond "named Rustin a sexual pervert...and newspapers across the country gave the story play. Not of his own choosing, Rustin [became] perhaps the most visible homosexual in America at a time when few gay men or lesbians aspired to any public attention."

Thurmond's smear, however, had little discernible negative effect; indeed, it strengthened the solidarity and resolve of the march's leaders. Despite his previous objections, Wilkins rallied to Rustin's defense, as did Randolph. "I speak for the combined Negro leadership," Randolph declared, "in voicing my complete confidence in Bayard Rustin's character."

Spirits were high on August 28. Crowds were orderly, glitches inconsequential. The weather was beautiful. And to top it all off, King delivered his unforgettable "I Have a Dream" speech. Rustin did not exaggerate when he described the day of the march as "one of the great days in American history." It was also his finest hour, a moment in which the potentialities of his subtle skills were on full display. For once, Rustin received public recognition for his behind-the-scenes influence. Life magazine featured him on its cover, alongside Randolph.

The March on Washington constituted the apogee of Rustin's career. It marked not only the high point of the classical phase of black civil rights protest; it also marked the return of political economy to the array of central concerns voiced by mainstream black leaders. In Rustin's blueprint for the march, he noted that the century since the Emancipation Proclamation had "witnessed no fundamental government action to terminate the economic subordination of the American Negro." Rustin highlighted this concern with long-neglected economic matters by naming the protest the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom."

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