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What Is Martin Luther King Jr.'s Legacy to the LGBTQ Community?

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

With racial injustice and LGBTQ discrimination making headlines daily, Martin Luther King Jr. Day has taken on increased significance in recent years. But what are the links between these two communities? What lessons of the Civil Rights Movement can LGBTQ people share with the world?

Below, we examine Dr. King's legacy and its impact on the LGBTQ community.

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Demonstration in Washington, which gathered 200,000 blacks and whites, and during which President Kennedy announced a program in favour of, civil rights, August 1963, United States, National archives. Washington, . (Photo by: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

"By the Content of Their Character"

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom espoused the radical idea that all Americans should be judged on their actions, not on immutable factors like race. The LGBTQ community has expanded that belief to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

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2nd February 1964: American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (1912 - 1987), spokesman for the Citywide Committee for Integration, at the organization's headquarters at Silcam Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, New York City. (Photo by Patrick A. Burns/New York Times Co./Getty Images)

Bayard Rustin

The architect of the March on Washington, Rustin also pioneered the earliest Freedom Rides; he refused to give up his seat on a segregated bus more than a decade before Rosa Parks. But as a gay man, Rustin, an early supporter of King, was often sidelined by the very movement he helped found: After a 1953 arrest for solicitation, he wrote "Sex must be sublimated if I am to live in this world longer." In an attempt to stop the March on Washington, Sen. Strom Thurmond read Rustin's arrest report into the congressional record in 1963.

In his later years, Rustin directed his energy into the nascent gay rights movement, declaring, "the new n*ggers are gays." A year before he died, he declared "we cannot fight for the rights of gays unless we are ready to fight for a new mood in the United States. Unless we are ready to fight for a radicalization of this society."

In 2013 President Obama awarded Bayard Rustin a posthumous Medal Of Freedom. Logo honored his legacy in 2015 by announcing the Bayard Rustin Trailblazer Award, honoring unsung heroes of LGBTQ equality.

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March 1965: American civil rights leader Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968) (centre) with his wife Coretta Scott King and colleagues during a civil rights march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery. (Photo by William Lovelace/Express/Getty Images)

Coretta Scott King

While MLK was assassinated before Stonewall, his widow, Coretta Scott King, was a staunch ally to the LGBTQ community—and believed her husband would have been, too. Before her death, Mrs. King spoke eloquently about the connection between racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate, insisting they all "seek to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood.”

Speaking of her husband's legacy, Mrs. King said, "I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"

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The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a Virginia law banning marriage between African Americans and Caucasians was unconstitutional, thus nullifying similar statues in 15 other states. The decision came in a case involving Richard Perry Loving, a white construction worker and his African American wife, Mildred. The couple married in the District of Columbia in 1958 and were arrested upon their return to their native Caroline County, Virginia. They were given one year suspended sentences on condition that they stay out of the state for 25 years. The Lovings decided in 1963 to return home and fight banishment, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Loving v. Virginia

In 1967, long before the LGBTQ community fought for marriage equality, it was Richard and Mildred Loving who ran afoul of Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws. Their case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that marriage was a basic civil right "fundamental to our very existence and survival."

"To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law."

Years later, Mildred Loving spoke in support of same-sex marriage: "Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights," she declared. "I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about."

Throughout the legal struggle for federal marriage equality, Loving v. Virginia was cited as a precedent.

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Segregated drinking fountain in use in the American South. Undated photograph. Sign reads "For colored only."

Separate But (Not) Equal

In the 1960s it was separate water fountains. Today it's bakeries and school bathrooms. The African-American civil rights movement created a cultural understanding that we as Americans cannot pick and choose the people we deal with in the public sphere. And while some corners still bristle at that concept, the majority of Americans agree that religious beliefs don't trump civil liberties.

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US President Barack Obama smiles during the inaugural session of the COP 21 United Nations conference on climate change, on November 30, 2015 at Le Bourget, on the outskirts of the French capital Paris. More than 150 world leaders are meeting under heightened security, for the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), also known as "Paris 2015" from November 30 to December 11. / AFP / ERIC FEFERBERG (Photo credit should read ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP via Getty Images)

Barack Obama

President Obama spoke often about the debt he and the entire nation owed to Dr. King: In 2015 he praised MLK, saying, "In a world full of poverty, he called for empathy; in the face of brutality, he placed his faith in non-violence."

"His teachings remind us we have a duty to fight against poverty, even if we are wealthy; to care about the child in the decrepit school long after our own children have found success; and to show compassion toward the immigrant family, knowing that we were strangers once, too."

Such teachings no doubt informed Obama's evolution on LGBTQ rights, from tentative supporter to staunch ally. In a 2012 Newsweek cover story, Andrew Sullivan even declared Obama America's first "gay president," writing, "I have always sensed that he intuitively understands gays and our predicament—because it so mirrors his own."

"He knows how the love and sacrifice of marriage can heal, integrate, and rebuild a soul," Sullivan continued. "The point of the gay rights movement, after all, is not about helping people be gay. It is about creating the space for people to be themselves."

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