Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: I felt some trepidation when I learned that Netflix would be releasing a biopic of the late civil rights and peace activist Bayard Rustin with a focus on his role in organizing the March on Washington of 1963.Having spent much of my professional life researching the social movements of which he was a part, I suspected that it would tell a familiar and didactic tale about the Black freedom struggle, flattening out a richer and more complex story that it had the opportunity to tell.I was particularly concerned about how it might depict Abraham Johannes (A.J.) Muste, Rustin's mentor and comrade and a leading figure in the labor, socialist, peace, and civil rights movements of the twentieth century.I recalled how the film The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) depicted pacifist Dave Dellinger as a milquetoast suburbanite who lost his temper and punched a cop, rather than as a radical whose faith in the power of nonviolence had been tested many times and over many decades in struggles against U.S. militarism and empire. 1 Of course, I predicted, Muste would be portrayed as an out-of-touch, white, pacifist ally against whom Rustin would struggle for sexual and racial self-determination.Still, when I finally sat down to watch Rustin (2023) a few months later, I told myself to drop my proprietary attitude and to have an open mind.There are, after all, many stories to be told about the civil rights movement, and Rustin is surely a figure worth popularizing to the American public.Filmmakers also have the right to take poetic license when telling a "true" story because sometimes fiction can highlight a deeper truth more effectively than "the facts."The question, it seems to me, has to do with the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate poetic license.Does it help to move a plot along and make it more compelling for the audience?Does it help the audience to understand and empathize with historical subjects, figures, and ideas with which they may be unfamiliar or unsympathetic?If it can do these things without doing violence to the historical record, then I believe that poetic license is legitimate.So did the film conform to my expectations?Rustin has much to offer audiences; it highlights the agency of young people and women in the making of the movement, and it deploys fictional narratives and subplots to dramatize themes that are important to our historical-cultural moment.At the same time, however, the film distorts Rustin's politics and role in the civil rights movement in ways that reify cultural tropes about the movement that it is time to discard.My comments largely focus on the film's treatment of A. J. Muste, who makes only a brief appearance, but who plays a crucial role in forwarding a simplistic and liberal narrative that ultimately misrepresents the socialist and pacifist traditions that both he and Rustin drew upon Thank you to
Source: Modern American History
DOI: 10.1017/mah.2024.38
Author: Leilah Danielson
Institution: Northern Arizona University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,450
OpenAlex ID: W4405852177