American activist Bayard Rustin was BOTD in 1912. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he was raised by his Quaker grandparents, who influenced his later activism. He won a music scholarship to Wilberforce College, but was expelled after organising a strike, then moved to New York where he became a nightclub singer. Devoting himself to activism, he became involved in the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, organised a march in Washington D. C. to protest racial segregation in the armed forces and travelled to California to assist Japanese-American prisoners of war. After two years imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War Two, he organised protests to end segregation on public transport. Arrested and sentenced to a month working on a chain gang in Alabama, he later wrote about his experiences, prompting the abolition of chain gangs as punishment in the state. In the 1940s, he travelled to India to study non-violent civil resistance with Mahatma Gandhi‘s independence movement, and formed connections with Pan-African activists. Discreetly gay, he was arrested in 1953 for homosexual offences, prompting many civil rights organisations to distance themselves from him. He became a central figure in the Black civil rights movement, co-organising and speaking at the 1961 March on Washington, though was sidelined by colleagues over concerns that his homosexuality would alienate public support. A close adviser to Martin Luther King, he convinced King to adopt a fully non-violent and non-armed public stance. A fervent anti-Communist, he opposed Black separatism, putting him at odds with Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. Rustin remained in public life, becoming involved with trade unionism and participating in humanitarian missions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Haiti. He was in a long term relationship with Walter Neagle, a white American 30 years his junior. Like many same-sex couples of the period, Rustin adopted Neagle to provide him with next-of-kin and inheritance rights. In 1986, Bayard spoke publicly for the first time about his homosexuality, identifying gay people as “the new barometer for social change”. He died in 1987, aged 75. Amid many posthumous honours, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by President Obama. He was played by Colman Domingo in the 2023 biopic Rustin, directed by George C. Wolfe.