Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship, in 1954; and before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group called "In Friendship" to provide material and legal assistance to people threatened with eviction from their tenant farms and homes.

[3] Later in life, while still devoted to securing workers' rights, Rustin joined other union leaders in aligning with ideological neoconservatism,[4][5] earning posthumous praise from President Ronald Reagan.

[16] After completing an activist training program conducted by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Rustin moved to Harlem in 1937 and began studying at City College of New York.

[citation needed] Rustin was an accomplished tenor vocalist, an asset that earned him admission to both Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College with music scholarships.

At the direction of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its members, including Rustin at that time, were active in the 1930s in supporting civil rights for African Americans.

[21] In 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Communist International ordered the CPUSA to abandon civil rights work and focus on supporting U.S. entry into World War II.

[citation needed][22] Disillusioned, Rustin began working with members of the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, particularly A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

To prove their good faith, the organizers canceled the planned march after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (the Fair Employment Act), which banned discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies.

[27] He spoke about his decision to be arrested, and how that moment also clarified his witness as a gay person, in an interview with the Washington Blade in the 1980s: As I was going by the second seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring necktie I was wearing and pulled it, whereupon its mother said, "Don't touch a nigger."

Rustin and CORE executive secretary George Houser recruited a team of fourteen men, divided equally by race, to ride in pairs through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

Arrested with Igal Roodenko and Joe Felmet, Rustin served twenty-two days on a chain gang in North Carolina for violating state Jim Crow laws regarding segregated seating on public transportation.

[33][34] On June 17, 2022, Chapel Hill Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour, with full consent of the state, dismissed the 1947 North Carolina charges against the four Freedom Riders, with members of the exonerees' families in attendance.

[37] Rustin served as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee's task force to write "Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence",[39] published in 1955.

[12] Despite shunning from some civil rights leaders, [w]hen the moment came for an unprecedented mass gathering in Washington, Randolph pushed Rustin forward as the logical choice to organize it.

[42]A few weeks before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual", and had his entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record.

[24] At the beginning of 1964, Reverend Milton Galamison and other Harlem community leaders invited Rustin to coordinate a citywide boycott of public schools to protest their de facto segregation.

Historian Daniel Perlstein notes that "newspapers were astounded both by the numbers of black and Puerto Rican parents and children who boycotted and by the complete absence of violence or disorder from the protesters.

With Tom Kahn, Rustin wrote an influential article in 1964 called "From Protest to Politics", published in Commentary magazine; it analyzed the changing economy and its implications for African Americans.

Rustin wrote presciently that the rise of automation would reduce the demand for low-skill high-paying jobs, which would jeopardize the position of the urban African-American working class, particularly in northern states.

"[47] However, Randall Kennedy wrote in a 2003 article that descriptions of Rustin as "a bought man" are "at least partly true", noting that his sponsorship by the AFL–CIO brought him some financial stability but imposed boundaries on his politics.

Rustin was making radical and ambitious demands for a basic redistribution of wealth in American society, including universal healthcare, the abolition of poverty, and full employment.

In December 1972, when the Socialist Party changed its name to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) by a vote of 73–34, Rustin continued to serve as national co-chairman, along with Charles S. Zimmerman of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU).

"[56] Along with Allard Lowenstein and Norman Thomas, Rustin worked with the CIA-sponsored Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, which lent international credibility to a 1966 ballot effectively rigged against the socialist former president, Juan Bosch.

Rustin was concerned about unity between two groups that he argued faced discrimination in America and abroad, and also believed that Israel's democratic ideals were proof that justice and equality would prevail in the Arab territories despite the atrocities of war.

Rustin co-wrote with Carl Gershman (a former director of Social Democrats, USA and future Ronald Reagan appointee) an essay entitled "Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power", in which he decried Russian and Cuban involvement in the Angolan Civil War and defended the military intervention by apartheid South Africa on behalf of the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

Members of the panel included Telford Taylor, the Nuremberg war trial prosecutor and Columbia University professor of law, Dr. John C. Bennett, president of the Union Theological Seminary; Reverend George B. Ford, pastor emeritus of the Corpus Christi Church; Samuel Fishman representing United Automobile Workers; and Norman Thomas, veteran Socialist leader.

An obituary in The New York Times reported, "Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: 'The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.

[6] According to journalist Steve Hendrix, Rustin "faded from the shortlist of well-known civil rights lions", in part because he was active behind the scenes, and also because of public discomfort with his sexual orientation and former communist membership.

[80] French historian Justin Vaïsse classifies him as a "right-wing socialist" and "second age neoconservative", citing his role as vice-chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was involved in the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger.

Canadian writer Steven Elliott Jackson wrote a play that stages an imaginary meeting and one-night-stand between Rustin and Walter Jenkins of the Johnson administration called The Seat Next to the King.