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‘Rustin’: Colman Domingo on Finally Giving Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin His Due

Originally posted on TV Insider | Last updated 11/14/23

The 1963 March on Washington, best remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.’s rousing “I Have a Dream” speech, drew 250,000 people to the capital to rally for racial equality. But director George C.Wolfe hopes to right a different wrong in Rustin, this superbly cast movie about Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), the veteran civil rights activist who co-conceived the massive peaceful protest and miraculously brought it together in eight weeks.

The film follows Rustin as he works to enlist mainstream activist leaders such as NAACP chief Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), who spurned the idea of Rustin, a self-declared gay man, as the project’s public face. Respected union leader A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman), who devised the march with Rustin, is anointed official director instead. But Rustin keeps on, recruiting religious groups, educators and unions to back the project, and an army of volunteers to coordinate buses, trains and planes to transport marchers to D.C., even arranging with turnpike toll takers to distribute info about the march.

(L-R) Michael Potts, Aml Ameen, Chris Rock, Glynn Turman, Kevin Mambo in Rustin (Courtesy of Netflix)

“He is a role model for what it means to be an American,” said Wolfe of the subject of his passion project. “One thing I admire about Bayard is that he was an astonishing teacher. People who knew him talk about how inspiring he was and how demanding he was.”

That comes across in this film about the oft-overlooked advocate, whose accomplishments helped propel the passage of landmark 1964 and ’65 civil rights legislation, and who helped turn King (played here by Aml Ameen) toward nonviolence.

“He believed in the principles that were laid out, and he just wanted the country to put them into practice,” said Domingo (before the actors’ strike), whose commanding performance centers the movie. “This man was so significant to everyone’s struggle…. How is it possible we don’t know his name?”

Rustin, Original Movie Premiere, Friday, November 17, Netflix

This article first appeared on TV Insider and was syndicated with permission.

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