The second person I'm covering for LGBT history month, like Ethel Smyth, was a significant figure in the fight for rights and human equality - Bayard Rustin.

Bayard Rustin (1912-1987)
Bayard was born in Pennsylvania, USA where he was raised by his mother's parents. The values he held dear of pacifism and racial equality were probably those passed down by his surrogate parents. As a young man Rustin joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and argued against discriminatory laws.

In 1932 Bayard attended Wilberforce University founded by African Americans, in the town of Wilberforce, Ohio, named after the abolitionist, William Wilberforce. During the next thirty years or so he had several run-ins with the law, including, in 1953, a charge relating to his sexuality, for which he received a short term of imprisonment.

Bayard helped organise a peaceful protest - the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which took place in 1963. By that time he had persuaded his friend Martin Luther King Jr, that a peaceful struggle in the mould of Mahatma Gandhi was the best way forward to achieve civil rights in America.

The year before his death Bayard Rustin declared that the "barometer" of human rights had become the lesbian and gay community which, he said, was the community "most easily mistreated."

More about Bayard Rustin