Colman Domingo plays civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, in the Netflix film Rustin.
Domingo said he felt a responsibility to introduce Rustin to modern audiences. “It was a great calling honestly,” Domingo said at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event. “History put him in the darkness because he was so full in his experience in the world and that was a challenge to many folks.
So I knew this was an opportunity to pull him out of the shadows.” Domingo said he suspects the reason Rustin is not as well-known historically as Martin Luther King, Jr.
is because Rustin was gay. Domingo himself remembered discovering Rustin at 19 at his school’s African American Student Union. “Then I questioned my whole education because I didn’t know about him,” Domingo said. “It made me realize I need to interrogate my history at all times and look at history clearly.
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