What ‘Rustin’ can teach us about fixing broken friendships

About halfway through a Netflix biopic about Bayard Rustin, architect and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, a friend tells him, “Go get your friend back.” I’ll explain what that means in a moment, but first, a word about the titular character. The movie — simply called “Rustin” — casts light on a figure history has all but erased.

Rustin was a gay Black man at the center of a civil rights movement that was, the film makes clear, headed up by leaders who routinely marginalized the contributions of women, gay people and young Americans who often wanted to move faster and deploy messages that were deemed too radical.

The film leans into these conflicts in ways that help us see the flawed excuses and inherent biases among people seen as icons of America’s racial awakening. It was disappointing to watch a table full of Black civil rights leaders shun Rustin, a man of obvious talent and commitment, because his homosexuality endangered the movement’s goals and inflamed their own biases. It is sad but perhaps not shocking to see the moment the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. turned his back on Rustin to protect the movement.

Rustin outmaneuvered those who threw obstacles in his path through uncompromising vision and brainy efficiency. But there is another reason he was successful, and it is evident in a fleeting scene from the film that’s now stuck in my head. [Disclosure: Higher Ground, the production company that produced “Rustin,” also produces my podcast.]

That moment comes at a dinner table. Two bottles of red wine stand amid the clutter from a good meal. Rustin and Ella Baker (another activist who deserves her own biopic) are talking fast and freely, commiserating about a movement that subordinated both of their contributions. (Let’s not forget that the women who helped organize the March on Washington were asked to arrive at the Lincoln Memorial via a different route so photos would feature a phalanx of men in suits fighting to end segregation. Oh, the irony!)

As Rustin and Baker are talking, it becomes clear that Rustin is still wounded that King tossed him from his role in planning the March on Washington. Baker reminds Rustin that MLK had his own detractors who threw shade on his name when he wasn’t in the room. It’s a lovely little set piece about the healing power of friendship; a brilliant woman relegated to the fringe of a movement she helped create providing comfort to someone who’s been deported from the circle altogether.

Then, Baker (portrayed by Audra McDonald, who always brings thunder, even to minor roles), leans in and tells Rustin, “Go get your friend back.”

The whole arc of Rustin’s eventual triumph hinges on that little dollop of boozy advice. “Go get your friend back” was a way of saying “don’t let them steal your destiny.” But also “don’t let one person’s inner war with his morality snatch his destiny either.” As the film makes clear, if Rustin had not returned to the circle of men who tossed him to the curb, the March on Washington might never have happened. He gave his detractors a chance to find their better angels. And he gave himself a chance to learn how to compromise because without give on both sides, the march could not move forward.

And that’s the other reason “go get your friend back” sticks with me. It speaks so powerfully to the here and now. We have all have lost friends, co-workers, fellow congregants and family members because of our current fault lines and divisions. We’ve said the wrong thing or have remained silent in the face of another’s pain. We have disdained someone’s politics, lifestyle or just-keeping-it-real retorts. We have — as my father would say — “stomped on someone’s corns,” and the distance created by those acts and anthems seems unbridgeable. And maybe it is. But does it have to be?

“Go get your friend back” is about second chances. A broken relationship might not be elastic enough to snap back to its original contours, but that person you used to trust or adore or work alongside might be amenable to a tether that could still allow for something meaningful to take root.

Yes, I know: Reunions are the stuff of Hollywood stardust. But the dividends that accrue to people who try to mend broken friendships outweigh that discomfort.

If reading these words makes you think of someone who has been lost to you, the fact that this person still occupies space deep in your brain and heart means that they could still occupy space in your life too.

What are you waiting for? Go get your friend back.