Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (Video)

PBS
Jan 15, 2003

Bayard Rustin -- disciple of Gandhi, mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., and architect of the momentous 1963 March on Washington -- is the subject of a new 90-minute documentary premiering on PBS on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Monday, January 20) at 10 p.m. An official selection in the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, BROTHER OUTSIDER: THE LIFE OF BAYARD RUSTIN also documents the extraordinarily steep price that Rustin paid for daring to live as an openly gay man during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

To purchase the video for your school or library, visit the GLSEN BookLink or contact California Newsreel at 1.877.811.7495 or visit www.newsreel.org.

For teaching materials, historical background, and extensive material on Rustin's life and work, visit www.pbs.org/pov/brotheroutsider.

BROTHER OUTSIDER was produced and directed by Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer; Sam Pollard, executive producer. A P.O.V. premiere on PBS; co-presented by the Independent Television Service and National Black Programming Consortium.

"Poignant ... Rustin came to see his struggle as a homosexual as inextricable from his struggle as a black man in America. But neither mainstream society nor even the civil rights leadership could cope with his honesty." --TIME

"Powerful and startling." --The Advocate

"Vividly brings back to life a man who deeply and brilliantly influenced the course of the civil rights and peace movements ... a thoroughly honest portrait of Bayard and his tumultuous times." --Nat Hentoff, The Village Voice (full review at www.villagevoice.com/issues/0303/hentoff.php

"Evokes with poignancy the many trials of Rustin -- a beautiful man, a gifted singer, a dynamic speaker, and a successful civil rights leader -- who never attained the stature of King, Ralph Abernathy, or Jesse Jackson, primarily because he was gay at a time when homosexuality was fodder for blackmail." --The Boston Globe