California Activists Ask Governor Gavin Newsom to Posthumously Pardon Black Gay Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin

The LGBTQ and Black caucuses of the state Legislature have asked Governor Gavin Newsom to posthumously pardon gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. Rustin was arrested for an anachronistic law forbidding men from having sex with men says the Washington Post.

The Post reports, ” A decade before Bayard Rustin became a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights activist was booked into a Los Angeles County jail on suspicion of ‘lewd vagrancy.’ On that night in January 1953, hours after Rustin had given a speech in Pasadena, Calif., police officers spotted him in a parked car, having sex with one of the other two men in the car. Rustin was sentenced to 60 days in jail and forced to register as a sex offender for the “morals charge,” which was often used to target gay people in those years.”

The Bay Area Reporter adds, “[The] draft of the January 21 letter sent to Newsom, gay state Senator Scott Wiener and African American Assemblywoman Shirley Weber wrote that Rustin’s 1953 arrest in Pasadena, California on vagrancy charges led to Rustin spending 50 days in Los Angeles County Jail. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender. Rustin, who died in 1987 at age 75, was part of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle during the civil rights movement. He was one of the key organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and he “was integral in various other nonviolent movements, boycotts, and protests to end racial discrimination,” the letter states.