MLK Statue Lags in Montgomery While NYC Considers a Bayard Rustin Statue

 A years-long effort to erect a statue of Rev. Martin Luther King in front of the church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, where he came to international prominence as a Civil Rights figure, has faced delay after delay.

Bayard Rustin, 1912 – 1987

Now, The N.Y. Times reports, a statue of the man who was a close aide to him, and who stood by King's side during his "I have  Dream" speech, is under consideration in New York City. He's on a list of gay rights figures proposed for statuary honors in the Times story.

"Bayard Rustin, best known for organizing the 1963 March on Washington, was also an important mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., bringing Gandhi’s nonviolent methods of protest to the American civil rights movement. When Rustin arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in the mid-1950s to work on bus boycotts, King had not yet embraced these methods; he had armed guards at the door of his house and guns inside. Rustin showed leaders a different way, having gone to India to study pacifism in 1948.

Rustin, who lived in Chelsea, has been called the “lost prophet’’ of the civil rights movement in large part because his sexuality forced him to the periphery. In 1953, he was arrested in California on “lewd conduct’’ charges, supposedly for engaging in sex with two white men in a car. This meant that the file the F.B.I. maintained on him — Rustin had been a young Communist — was expanding. Rustin said he knew then that sex for him had to be sublimated. He was regularly the target of homophobic attacks, and other black leaders, afraid of the tensions that would erupt around him, kept him from occupying central roles. Finally, in the 1970s, he could vocally advocate for gay rights." (From the NY Times story that also profiles ten others.)

The gay community center in Montgomery, Alabama, is named in Bayard Rustin's honor.