Emmy Award winner Colman Domingo’s Oscar-nominated performance as Civil Rights activist and LGBTQ+ forefather Bayard Rustin highlights Hollywood’s spotty history of recognizing, portraying, and marketing Black life and culture.
Rustin, written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black brought renewed attention to the co-organizer (with A. Philip Randolph) of Martin Luther King, Jr’s 1963 March on Washington. The rally drew approximately a quarter-of-a-million people to the nation’s capital and featured Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The march is recognized as a seminal event in our country’s history and remembered as a milestone in Black America’s quest for freedom and civil rights.
RUSTIN | Official Teaser Trailer | Netflixwww.youtube.com
Despite a lifetime of activism, Rustin was relegated to the historical sidelines. Some of the neglect is understandable – organizing is a thankless task and takes place behind the scenes. Rustin’s negligible public profile also stems from the fact that he was gay. As Seneca Vaught, Ph.D. has posted on the America’s Black Holocaust Museum site: “During the civil rights era, his homosexuality was seen as a political risk, so he was not able to take the public role many other leaders did. Even today, some who see homosexuality as a sin may not wish to acknowledge him as a civil rights hero.”
Those prejudices are being altered – albeit slowly – and the film is a welcome step in the right direction. It drew mixed notices but Domingo’s turn as Rustin has been widely acclaimed. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis began her review with: “Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance…”
“There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice.
(a) One can accept it without protest
(b) One can seek to avoid it
(c) One can resist the injustice non-violently”
– Bayard Dustin
The film is also noteworthy because it has prompted a fervent discussion about how films are rated. MSNBC’s Derrick L. Middleton believes that “the descriptors for the film’s Motion Picture Association rating make no mention of the specific type of violence present in the movie – which is frequently vivid in films about that period in American history.”
Middleton is speaking of racial violence. Not mentioning it or disguising it provides a distorted view of what audiences will see onscreen. “Given what we know about the psychological impact of depictions of racial violence,” Middleton posits, “there is an urgent need for comprehensive change in how we rate and understand media content.”
In a world where Black citizens are routinely the victims of violence, such misrepresentation “reflects the broader societal challenges in confronting and acknowledging racial issues openly and responsibly.”
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.”
– Bayard Dustin
Rustin – Executive Producers: Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions – is directed by DGA Award winner George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) and shines a long overdue spotlight on the extraordinary man who, alongside giants like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Ella Baker, dared to re-envision our entire world, and ignited a movement with a mighty march toward freedom.
