This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and ThruLine.

I'm Randad de Vette.

Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago.

Freedom Now movement, hear me.

We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington to go by plane, by car, bus.

250,000 people, black and white marched on the nation's capital.

It nationalized the southern freedom struggle.

It was really glorious.

August 28, 1963, the March on Washington, lives in many of our minds as a single moment, a single voice, a single dream. I have a dream that one day my poor little children

But what you probably don't know is there's a man standing behind Martin Luther King Jr.

as he's making this speech, just a few feet to his right.

He's tall, thin, wearing thick, black-framed glasses.

And this moment would never have happened without him.

His name, Bayard Rustin.

Bayard, Bayard, Bayard, Bayard, Bired, Bired Rustin.

Today on the show, the story of civil rights activists Bayard Rustin, the man behind the march

on Washington.

That's coming up after a quick break.

Since the beginning of this nation, we have attempted to make a moral and psychological analysis of prejudice, the economic and social degradation to which it has led, and I'm afraid we are still doing so.

In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement to end segregation and institutionalized racism was heating up.

Sit-ins, boycotts, and marches were consuming cities across the south,

a movement that was beginning to spread to northern cities too.

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