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Homophobia and Social Justice

Author John D'Emilio examines the complex career of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.

As an activist, Bayard Rustin was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, the strategist who led the planning of the 1963 march on Washington where Martin Luther King, whom Rustin had mentored, delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.  As an "out" gay man, Rustin found himself marginalized by the very movement he helped found and direct.  His complex life constitutes the subject of Elmhurst College's inaugural GLBT Lecture.

John D'Emilio is a professor of history, and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago who has been recognized as a Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow. D'Emilio twice won the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award, first in 1984 for his history, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, considered a definitive history of the homophile movement in the United States from the 1940s through the 1970s. His biography of Rustin, Lost Prophet, won the award in 2004. It was also a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award for nonfiction.

The inaugural GLBT Lecture is scheduled for Tuesday, April 15, at 7 p.m., in the Frick Center Founders Lounge. 

For more information, call (630) 617-3033.