JAZZ KAPITA
Jazz Kapita (they/them) is an Actor and Designer who has previously worked on Scottsdale Community College’s productions of Proof and Boeing Boeing as the Set Designer, and appeared onstage in SCC's production of 12 Angry Jurors as Juror #11. They’re currently honing their craft in order to discover that the real treasure was friendship all along.
BAYARD RUSTIN
Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was an American political activist and a prominent leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. He is perhaps most well-known for being a principal organizer for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 and mentoring Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolent resistance as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin was also gay, and usually advised other civil rights leaders from behind the scenes due to criticisms of his sexuality and worries that public knowledge of his involvement would undermine support for the civil rights movement. When Rustin and King began to plan a civil rights march adjacent to the 1960 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to leak a false rumor of an affair between Rustin and King to the press, resulting in King canceling the march and Rustin leaving his position at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Despite this, when A. Philip Randolph began to plan the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he pushed for Bayard Rustin as "the logical choice to organize it." He was later invited by Reverend Milton Galamison and other Harlem community leaders to coordinate the 1964 New York City school boycott, which was a large-scale boycott and protest against segregation at NYC schools.
Post 1964, Rustin advocated for closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party, acting as an advisor to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and co-writing the influential article From Protest to Politics in Commentary Magazine with Tom Kahn. Rustin began engaging with gay rights activism in the 1980s, advocating for people with HIV/AIDS and testifying in favor of the New York City Gay Rights Bill.
Bayard Rustin died in 1987 from cardiac arrest at the age of 75. In 2003, a documentary titled Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and in 2013, Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2018, the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice was created in collaboration with Rustin's surviving partner, Walter Naegle. The organization hosts programming and events geared toward public health, gender and sexual advocacy, and houses the Queer History Archive, dedicated to preserving Rustin's life and legacy.
