There is a photograph of Bayard Rustin that touches me, of him talking with Malcolm X after a debate with Malcolm in the early 1960s. Rustin is carefully forwarding a point. Malcolm, too, is clearly forwarding a point, rather than riling up a crowd. They seem equals, in stature and candlepower. Rustin regularly held his own in debate against Malcolm and other radicals.

What gets me about this photograph is that, 60 years on, Malcolm is the rock star while Rustin is, to many, a footnote. No doubt, Malcolm’s controlled, rhetorical fury did much to make Black people proud of themselves as black. But Rustin’s professorial counsel transcended self-love and addressed survival itself. He engaged the very real question of what Black people were to do with the freedom – even if it was a compromised freedom – granted them by the civil-rights victories of the 1960s. Read him in Commentary back then. Or consider that the 1963 March on Washington – something unimaginable until it happened—was his baby, and that the only reason so few knew it was because his homosexuality was considered shameful.

But over time, oppositional charisma rings more loudly than brass-tacks pragmatism. Rustin’s distrust of identity politics may seem, by the current metrics of many, a tad “white-adjacent.” He would not come immediately to mind as the subject of a film. His “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” written with A. Philip Randolph and republished by The Atlantic in 2018, is a dry work of policy.

But Rustin was as important as Malcolm. He was brilliant. He got a lot done. He was for real.