March on Washington Bayar Rustin

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Bayard Rustin’s Influential March In this paper I will describe the situation African Americans faced in the decades prior to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s culminating in the 1963 March on Washington. I will also incorporate Bayard Rustin and how he has influenced this particular civil rights movement. Although largely behind the scenes, Bayard Rustin greatly impacted the civil rights movement in ways far greater than many people today may know. From playing a key role in the organization of the March on Washington, to influencing great activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin has shown relentless determination in achieving his goal of civil equality. The sources I am going to use to construct my paper will include both primary sources and secondary sources. To demonstrate how Bayard Rustin helped influence the March on Washington I will use D’Emillio’s book the Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, Time on Two Crosses, and Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement, as well as a couple of website sources. Most of these sources are primary such as Time on Two Crosses, which is a book of collected writings from Bayard Rustin. Other sources are mainly secondary. All of these sources touch base on the March on Washington whether it is from Bayard’s Point of view or just explaining the events that took place and how Bayard was involved. For my paper, I am looking at the significance of Bayard and the how he has changed the civil rights movement, with the sources that I have accumulated I think that I will be able to construct a well-argued paper. Due to the 1896 Supreme Court Case Plessey v. Ferguson, which promoted segregation by saying that separate schools were equal, African Americans, particularly in the South lived in a two class, Jim Crow society based on race. Even though
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