At the same time, he was also a target within the African-American movement with leaders of the time such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. who had felt that being his political power was in peril to the point where Powell had threatened to bring up his 1953 arrest on sexual charges in order to force Dr. King to remove Rustin from his staff. .
Rustin was also the target of J. Edgar Hoover during the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the fact that he was formerly tied to the Communist movement. Hoover had requested Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize electronic surveillance on him, in which Kennedy authorized and in which Hoover had given the wiretaps to Rustin's enemies in order for them to cause Rustin's reputation to take a significant hit4. As Devon Carbado and Donald Wiese argued that "perhaps no other figure contributed so much to the civil rights movement yet been so penalized by it" 5. Although Rustin struggles with the political and spiritual consequences of his homosexuality, his biographer John D'Emilio states that Rustin had remained "unusually open" about it. .
The first contribution that Bayard Rustin had created as an activist is the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947 in which he, as a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation as well as a member of the American Friends Service Committee along with FOR member George Houser and 14 other members from CORE also took part in this non-violent action to allow for interstate transportation in light of the Irene Morgan decision that the US Supreme Court had handed down one year earlier that allowed for desegregation of interstate travel, but the South did not recognize that decision, so the protesters were arrested and sentenced to time on a chain gang all over the South, including Rustin for 30 days in North Carolina.
Another contribution that Rustin had made to the Civil Rights Movement that historians have not heard of or given credit to him during the Civil Rights movement was the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom that was organized by Rustin and A.
