Randa Abid Fattah

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from NPR and ThruLine.

I'm Randa Abid Fattah.

Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S.

that began 250 years ago.

August 28, 1963.

The March on Washington lives in many of our minds as a single moment, a single voice, a single dream.

But what you probably don't know is there's a man standing behind Martin Luther King Jr.

as he's making this speech, just a few feet to his right.

He's tall, thin, wearing thick, black-framed glasses.

And this moment would never have happened without him.

His name?

Bayard Rustin.

Today on the show, the story of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, the man behind the March on Washington.

That's coming up after a quick break.

In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement to end segregation and institutionalized racism was heating up.

Sit-ins, boycotts, and marches were consuming cities across the South, a movement that was beginning to spread to northern cities too.

And Bayard Rustin was a busy strategist, organizer, and political leader.

This is John D'Amelio, author of Lost Prophet, The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

Central to Bayard's concept of utopian idealism was his dedication to nonviolence, an idea that had been instilled from an early age by his grandma, Julia Davis Rustin, a devout Quaker who had raised him as her own child.

This is Walter Nagel.