Civil rights includes gays 50 years after march

WASHINGTON (AP) — Months before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” declaration galvanized a quarter-million people at the 1963 March on Washington, Bayard Rustin was planning all the essential details to keep the crowd orderly and engaged.

Rustin, who died in 1987, is sometimes forgotten in civil rights history. As a Quaker and pacifist, he was often an outcast. Perhaps most notably, he was gay in an era when same-sex relations were widely reviled in American society. He served as chief strategist for King’s march, over the objections of some leaders — but he was kept mostly in the background, with some organizers considering him a liability.