A Note from Dean: The Fuller Stories

Dear Friends,

 Last night my husband and I watched Rustin, a new film based on the true story of Bayard Rustin, who helped Martin Luther King Jr. and others organize the 1963 March on Washington.

 It was produced by Higher Ground, an American production company founded in 2018 by former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama.  The goal of their company is to lift up diverse voices in the entertainment industry. Michelle Obama stated, "I have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire us, to make us think differently about the world around us, and to help us open our minds and hearts to others.”

 ​I learned a lot about Rustin as a gay man raised as a Quaker, how he conceived of the idea of the march, the politics that went on among his peers, the FBI, Congress, and the Kennedy administration.

 A review in the New York Times said this:

At once a work of reclamation and celebration, “Rustin” seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law. His was a rich, fascinatingly complex history, filled with big personalities and tremendous stakes, one that here is primarily distilled through the march, which the movie tracks from its rushed conception to its astonishing realization on Aug. 28, 1963, when a quarter million people converged at the Lincoln Memorial. It was the defining public triumph of Rustin’s life.

 Let me commend the film to you. You’ll find it on Netflix, and here is a link to a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuZ-UONInl4 For his role in “Rustin,” Colman Domingo became only the second openly gay man to earn an Oscar nomination for playing a gay character; he is up for Best Actor.

 Jim and I are glad we saw it in these days when it is so important to learn the fuller stories in our country’s history. Let me know what you think.

 Grace and peace,

Dean