Sunday, November 19, 2023

Rustin

 


Award-winning stage director George C. Wolfe's stirring biopic Rustin (a Netflix production that has first been released to big-screen theaters) is more evidence to me that the arts communities will fill the gaps left by the scrubbing of marginalized people from classrooms and history books.
Bayard Rustin, the masterful organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was long forced out of history's frame by established civil rights leaders who were either envious of his abilities or repulsed by his sexuality.
Only after the success of the historic march and Rustin's expansion of his social change agenda to include labor unions and LGBTQ+ equality was his work re-evaluated and elevated. In fact, Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers of this wonderful film.
As played by the always-engaging Colman Domingo, Rustin's character is conflicted about some things but absolutely certain about the rightness of his calling, even after being ousted from NAACP leadership by Roy Wilkins (an impressive turn by Chris Rock) and failing to win, at first, the support of his old friend Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen).
Rustin's relationships with a young, white fellow organizer (Gus Halper) and later a young Black minister affiliated with the NAACP (Johnny Ramey) show that even one steeped in the importance of exactitude in planning social change can be blind to personal matters.
Though he had an outsized personality that galvanized teams of workers and won him great affection and loyalty, Rustin was forced to operate in the background, seeking anonymous and dangerous rendezvous that his political enemies (Sen. Strom Thurmond, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) sought to dishonor him and dismantle the movement.
Ultimately, the coalition Rustin created with the support of his mentor A. Philip Randolph (a terrific Glynn Turman) united behind him, as evidence was clear of what had been accomplished on that day in August 1963.
And that, to my mind, is the beauty and gift of this film -- that it reminds us (or perhaps tells some for the first time) that turning a country around does not happen with thoughts and prayers but with the "grunt work," as Rustin refers to it, to move people to lay comfort on the line and demand that the nation live up to its promise and its promises.
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