Legendary civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and three other men will have their sentences vacated posthumously.
FILE - Bayard Rustin, deputy director of the planned march on Washington program, points to a map showing the line of march for the demonstration for civil rights during a news conference in New York on Aug. 24, 1963.
“While this judicial action is taking place 75 years after the injustice occurred, never should we falter in examining past wrongs, seeking reparation, and lifting those heavy burdens from our hearts and minds so that future generations may know justice,” Renée Price, chairman of the Orange County Board of Commissioners, said in a statement.
After a trial in Orange County, the four men were convicted and sentenced to serve on a chain gang. Rustin later published writings about being imprisoned and subjected to hard labor for taking part in the first freedom ride, which was also known as the Journey of Reconciliation. “He was deliberately moved out of the spotlight,” Lentz-Smith said. “The very things that make him remarkable and admirable to us ... in 2022 made him profoundly vulnerable” then, she said.