Colman Domingo playing Bayard Rustin in Rustin (2023)
Bayard Rustin film due this year
Colman Domingo plays the US Quaker and civil rights leader in first narrative feature from Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company
A film about the US Quaker and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin will be released later this year. The actor Colman Domingo (pictured) will star in Netflix’s Rustin biopic, along with Chris Rock, Glynn Turman and Audra McDonald.
According to Hollywood Reporter, Rustin is the first narrative feature from Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company Higher Ground.
Writing on Instagram, Colman Domingo said how excited he was about the project, which is being directed by George C Wolfe. ‘Words cannot express how honoured I am to portray this icon. Bayard Rustin is a personal hero… We are about to get into some good trouble. We have a fantastic cast and crew and I am ready. Let’s go. I’ve got the ancestors with me. Calling on Bayard’s great spirit.’
Bayard Rustin was posthumously pardoned for his 1953 conviction under laws targeting LGBTQ people as part of an overhaul of historic gay convictions in the US in 2020. Barack Obama also awarded the influential civil rights campaigner a Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2013.
A close associate of Martin Luther King Junior, Bayard Rustin helped plan the Montgomery bus boycott and was a chief organiser of the March on Washington in 1963, where King delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech.
Despite his many campaigning achievements, Rustin found himself being distanced by other religious and political activists after a criminal conviction in which he was sentenced to sixty days in Los Angeles County Jail. This included some Quakers, who expunged his name as co-author of a now-famous pamphlet Speak Truth to Power. The campaigner was also forced to register as a sex offender after being discovered having sex in a parked car.
George C Wolfe directed a script written with Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning writer behind Harvey Milk biopic Milk. The director’s last film was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Comments
TIn the early 1960s I was involved with Central London Young Friends and we met at the Frioends Internationbal Cdentre in Tavistock Square. We were invited to volunteer for jobs at the Centre and One evening I found myself behind the reception desk. It was a quiet evening, but after a while Bayard Rustin came in, by himself and quite keen to chat. I booked him in and then found myself face to face with him for half an hour or more, smoking cigarettes (as one did in those days) talking about matters of concern and particularly the situation in the USA. It was of course just before the great 1963 march on Washington. I was in my mid 20s at the time and quite ignorant of lots of things at the time, but I realised it was one of the most memorable encounters of my life and that I was talking with a very special person.
By Metford Robson on 9th February 2023 - 10:52
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