Bayard Rustin is having a moment. A brilliant organizer and strategist, Rustin was one of the most important figures of the twentieth-century US left. His influence, while enormous, was largely felt behind the scenes during his lifetime, to the point that his biographer, John D’Emilio, saw fit to title his book Lost Prophet. Today, the prophet is no longer lost. Rustin, a feature biopic produced by the Obamas’ production company, just debuted on Netflix. The film has spurred an outpouring of reflections on Rustin’s life and legacy, which have tended to focus more on his sexuality than his socialism.

The quality of the film and much of the discourse surrounding it is, unfortunately if unsurprisingly, not particularly high. This makes it all the more important to treat Rustin’s career with the seriousness it deserves. It offers a wealth of both positive examples and cautionary tales for a new left grappling with many of the same strategic questions Rustin and his contemporaries dealt with — above all, the question of how best to relate to the Democratic Party and the labor movement.

In the mid-1960s, Rustin advanced a controversial argument for taking the civil rights movement “from protest to politics,” or, put somewhat differently, from disruption to organization. It inspired vehement disagreement from some of Rustin’s closest comrades, including the legendary Quaker pacifist, socialist, and labor activist Staughton Lynd, who attacked Rustin’s argument for Democratic Party coalition politics as an argument for “coalition with the Marines.” Though less well known than Lynd’s passionate riposte, Julius Jacobson’s polemic in the socialist magazine New Politics arguably provides a more useful foil for reconsidering these debates in the present.