Editors' Note: Guest Blogger Tico Almeida is a civil rights
litigator and served as ENDA's lead counsel in the U.S. House
from 2007 to 2010. June is a popular month for celebrating
weddings and an important month for advancing civil rights for
all Americans. Seventy Junes before New York adopted marriage
equality in 2011 and almost three decades before Stonewall in
June 1969, Bayard Rustin - a gay African-American man who lived
in the East Village of New York City - helped organize a 1941
march on Washington so successful that it never even took place.
Exactly 70 years ago today, on June 25, 1941, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order barring military
contractors from discriminating against African-American
workers. The president did not originally want to create these
workplace protections. His signature was conditioned upon a
promise from civil rights leaders that they would cancel the
massive march that Rustin and others had planned for July 1,
1941. According to historian Conrad Bl