Gavin Newsom pardons gay civil rights leader, announces plan to pardon more LGBT people
Gov. Gavin Newsom posthumously pardoned gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin on Wednesday, saying Rustin was convicted unjustly because of his sexuality.
Rustin, who died in 1987, was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. But a decade before he helped assemble the historic demonstration, he was convicted of vagrancy for having consensual sex with two men in a car in Pasadena under a since-repealed California law. He spent 50 days in jail and had to register as a sex offender.
Newsom announced the pardon alongside a new clemency initiative designed to clear the records of people like Rustin, who Newsom and other California leaders argue was unfairly targeted because of his sexuality.
The governor’s office points to vagrancy, loitering and sodomy as crimes that historically were used to target people for being gay or transgender. Newsom’s new clemency initiative aims to pardon LGBT people convicted of those crimes.
“In California and across the country, many laws have been used as legal tools of oppression, and to stigmatize and punish LGBTQ people and communities and warn others what harm could await them for living authentically,” Newsom said in a statement. “I thank those who advocated for Bayard Rustin’s pardon, and I want to encourage others in similar situations to seek a pardon to right this egregious wrong.”
Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, who lead the California Legislature’s LGBTQ and Black Caucuses, asked Newsom to pardon Rustin last month.
“Bayard Rustin did not harm anyone. He simply had sex,” Wiener said during a news conference announcing the pardon request.. “This state should be ashamed of itself for how it treated Bayard Rustin.”
Rustin was also targeted because he was black and active in the Civil Rights movement, Weber said.
In a letter to Newsom, Wiener and Weber noted that Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, whose office prosecuted Rustin, supported their pardon request.