I'd suggest you all view "Brother Outsider," an award-winning documentary on the life of Bayard Rustin.

From Rustin.org:

A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement, and helped mold Martin Luther King, Jr. into an international symbol of peace and nonviolence.

Despite these achievements, Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. Five years in the making and the winner of numerous awards, BROTHER OUTSIDER presents a feature-length documentary portrait, focusing on Rustin’s activism for peace, racial equality, economic justice and human rights.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was particularly vicious in his orchestrated attacks against Rustin. Powell was seeking to consolidate his own power base and deflect complaints about his alleged political corrpution. Recall, Powell was unseated from Congress and then re-elected. With regard to the intolerance Rustin suffered because he was gay -- which was the most potent attack someone intent on bringing Rustin down could use given Rustin's stellar civil rights credentials -- do recognize that most gay men lived their lives in the closet, regardless of how many people knew their "secret." (For example, it was only because J. Edgar Hoover had the resources of the FBI behind him that his longstanding gay relationship went largely unreported.)

Tolerance was a scarce commodity.

Walter Naegle (Rustin's life partner during the last 10 or so years of his life and archivist of Rustin's estate) writes:

At home, he helped organize the Committee to Support South African Resistance in 1951, which later became the American Committee on Africa. As a gay man, relatively open for his time, Bayard Rustin experienced anti-gay prejudice in addition to racial discrimination. Because of his sexual orientation as well as his controversial political positions, he was often relegated to a behind-the-scenes role in various campaigns. Arrested in 1953 on a “morals charge,” he lost his job at the FOR, but found work with another anti-war group, the War Resisters League. In 1956, at Mr. Randolph’s request, he was granted temporary leave from his position to assist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

But let us present Rustin in his own words (taken from From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement, "Commentary" magazine February 1965):

To what extent can the kind of self-help campaign recently prescribed by Eric Hoffer in the New York Times Magazine cope with such a situation? I would advise those who think that self-help is the answer to familiarize themselves with the long history of such efforts in the Negro community, and to consider why so many foundered on the shoals of ghetto life. It goes without saying that any effort to combat demoralization and apathy is desirable, but we must understand that demoralization in the Negro community is largely a common-sense response to an objective reality. Negro youths have no need of statistics to perceive, fairly accurately, what their odds are in American society. Indeed, from the point of view of motivation, some of the healthiest Negro youngsters I know are juvenile delinquents. Vigorously pursuing the American dream of material acquisition and status, yet finding the conventional means of attaining it blocked off, they do not yield to defeatism but resort to illegal (and often ingenious) methods. They are not alien to American culture. They are, in Gunnar Myrdal's phrase, "exaggerated Americans." To want a Cadillac is not un-American; to push a cart in the garment center is. If Negroes are to be persuaded that the conventional path (school, work, etc.) is superior, we had better provide evidence which is now sorely lacking. It is a double cruelty to harangue Negro youth about education and training when we do not know what jobs will be available for them. When a Negro youth can reasonably foresee a future free of slums, when the prospect of gainful employment is realistic, we will see motivation and self-help in abundant enough qualities.

[...snip...]

Let me sum up what I have thus far been trying to say. The civil rights movement is evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement -an evolution calling its very name into question. It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality. From sit-ins and Freedom Rides we have gone into rent strikes, boycotts, community organization, and political action. As a consequence of this natural evolution, the Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socioeconomic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs but human needs generally.

These propositions have won increasing recognition and acceptance, but with a curious twist. They have formed the common premise of two apparently contradictory lines of thought which simultaneously nourish and antagonize each other. On the one hand, there is the reasoning of the New York Times moderate who says that the problems are so enormous and complicated that Negro militancy is a futile irritation, and that the need is for "intelligent moderation." Thus, during the first New York school boycott, the Times editorialized that Negro demands, while abstractly just, would necessitate massive reforms, the funds for which could not realistically be anticipated; therefore the just demands were also foolish demands and would only antagonize white people. Moderates of this stripe are often correct in perceiving the difficulty or impossibility of racial progress in the context of present social and economic policies. But they accept the context as fixed. They ignore (or perhaps see all too well) the potentialities inherent in linking Negro demands to broader pressures for radical revision of existing policies. They apparently see nothing strange in the fact that in the last twenty-five years we have spent nearly a trillion dollars fighting or preparing for wars, yet we throw up our hands before the need to overhaul our schools, clear the slums, and really abolish poverty. My quarrel with these moderates is that they do not even envision radical changes; their admonitions of moderation are, for all practical purposes, admonitions to the Negro to adjust to the status quo, and are therefore immoral.

The more effectively the moderates argue their case, the more they convince Negroes that American society will not or cannot be reorganized for full racial equality. Michael Harrington has said that a successful war on poverty might well require the expenditure of a $100 billion. Where, the Negro wonders, are the forces now in motion to compel such a commitment? If the voices of the moderates were raised in an insistence upon a reallocation of national resources at levels that could not be confused with tokenism (that is, if the moderates stopped being moderates), Negroes would have greater grounds for hope. Meanwhile, the Negro movement cannot escape a sense of isolation.

It is precisely this sense of isolation that gives rise to the second line of thought I want to examine-the tendency within the civil rights movement to pursue, despite its militancy, what I call a "no-win" policy. Sharing with many moderates a recognition of the magnitude of the obstacles to freedom, spokesmen for this tendency survey the American scene and find no forces prepared to move toward radical solutions. From this they conclude that the only viable strategy is shock; above all, the hypocrisy of white liberals must be exposed. These spokesmen are often described as the radicals of the movement, but they are really its moralists. They seek to change white hearts -by traumatizing them. Frequently abetted by white self-flagellants, they may gleefully applaud (though not really agreeing with) Malcolm X because, while they admit he has no program, they think he can frighten white people into doing the right thing. To believe this, of course, you must be convinced, even if unconsciously, that at the core of the white man's heart lies a buried affection for Negroes-a proposition one may be permitted to doubt. But in any case, hearts are not relevant to the issue; neither racial affinities nor racial hostilities are rooted there. It is institutions-social, political, and economic institutions-which are the ultimate molders of collective sentiments. Let these institutions be reconstructed today, and let the ineluctable gradualism of history govern the formation of a new psychology.

My quarrel with the "no-win" tendency in the civil rights movement (and the reason I have so designated it) parallels my quarrel with the moderates outside the movement. As the latter lack the vision or will for fundamental change, the former lack a realistic strategy for achieving it. For such a strategy they substitute militancy. But militancy is a matter of posture and volume and not of effect.

Rustin's views were not without "traction," but he was made a pariah. Recognize that both Malcolm X's, King's and Rustin's view were greatly affected (as were so many other civil rights leaders) by their travels abroad. The idea that American civil rights were part of a larger movement of human rights -- in Africa, in Asia -- was not lost on them.

All of this speculation on a successor -- read that as "singular" successor -- to King is just speculation constructed on the idea that the political establishment cannot deal with more than one "leader" of the civil rights movement at a time, and that leader must fit the establishment's preconceived model.

It's time we recognize that every aspect of the civil rights movement contributed directly to its progress -- even when, at times, much of that progress was almost immediately eroded by white backlash. There was logic and reason, non-violent protest, violence and riots, appeals to conscience, shame, cooperation, shared sacrifice and responsibility.

It was the push and the pull, the yin and yang -- inside and outside of the movement -- that made it, well, move. Thinking that it can only be led by one person at a time, or move in one direction at a time, or achieve one goal at a time, by one method at a time, is just flawed thinking.