The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, heavily surveilled Bayard Rustin due to his membership in the Young Communist League and the Socialist Party. While Rustin's 1953 arrest for "lewd vagrancy" in Pasadena was used against him, his political radicalism was the primary concern for federal authorities. Decades later, Rustin was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, marking a shift in his official historical standing.