One of the producing partners for this movie is Higher Ground Productions, the banner under which former president Barack and former first lady Michelle Obama have produced several Netflix projects. While Obama was president of the United States, he posthumously awarded Bayard Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. At the November 20, 2013, White House ceremony, President Obama presented Rustin's award to Walter Naegle, Rustin's surviving longtime romantic partner.
Fellow Civil Rights leader Julian Bond often quoted Bayard Rustin as joking that "Martin Luther King couldn't organize vampires to go to a bloodbath," meaning that despite King's enormous gifts as a leader and an orator, King needed Rustin's and others' help with the organizational aspects of the movement.
Screenwriter Julian Breece penned the screenplay in 2015 for HBO Films with Lee Daniels originally attached to direct. Breece researched the project for two years, conducting over fifteen hours of interviews with Rustin's friends and colleagues from the Civil Rights Movement. Michelle and Barack Obama's Higher Ground Productions picked up the project in 2019, making it the first feature film under their Netflix deal (though they have produced several documentaries).
Bayard Rustin was a member of the board of trustees at the prodemocracy and human rights organization Freedom House. One of the marchers in the March on Washington is played by Elizabeth Rosen, who works at Freedom House today.
During a meeting with Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright), the march organizers list some of the celebrities who plan to attend. One of the movie stars listed, Sidney Poitier, starred in the original Broadway production of the Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun alongside Glynn Turman, who was twelve years old in 1959 when the play premiered; Turman was in his mid-seventies when he played A. Philip Randolph in Rustin. Other celebrities who attended the 1963 March on Washington included Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Diahann Carroll, Tony Curtis, Bobby Darin, Ossie Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Ruby Dee (another of Turman's costars from the original production of A Raisin in the Sun), James Garner, Dick Gregory, Charlton Heston, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Burt Lancaster, Rita Moreno, Paul Newman, Odetta, Gregory Peck, Jackie Robinson, Joanne Woodward, and Lorraine Hansberry herself.