Benjamin Muse

thumb|Muse as a Virginia senator in 1936 Benjamin Muse (April 17, 1898 – May 4, 1986) was an American lawyer, soldier, diplomat, newspaper publisher, author and politician. Quotes thumb|Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party. Governors of Virginia are appointed by Harry Byrd, subject to confirmation by the electorate... He ruled not with a command but with a nod. As quoted by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 266 Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party. Editorial writing for the Manassas Messenger on 26 April 1949, as quoted by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 295 The American Negro Revolution (1968) The American Negro Revolution: From Nonviolence to Black Power, 1963-1967. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, hardcover. The end of the Negro revolution is not yet in sight. Yet the civil-rights movement of sit-ins, parades, and nonviolent exhortations that spread across the nation in 1963- and accomplished a significant change in the status of the Negro in the United States- has run its course. The violence which climaxed in the upheavals of Newark and Detroit marked the end of that phase of the revolution and the beginning of another. In carrying the story to the end of 1967, I have attempted merely to raise the curtain on the new phase, whose magnitude and duration no one can predict. p. xi The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People continued to flourish in 1967. It busied itself with protesting racial discrimination of every type, pressing for stronger enforcement of civil-rights laws, lobbying for the cause in Washington, and defending the interests of Negroes in hundreds of local situations through negotiaton or legal action. It was significant that so large an element of the Negro minority was identified with this organization, which, despite some Black Power sputtering within its ranks, kept the even tenor of its way. However, the 441,000 members of the NAACP were drawn largely from the Negro middle class. It was frequently charged that the Association was out of touch with the urban slums. Its membership was also between 10 and 15 percent white, and the friendly relations of its leaders with whites in positions of authority raised a suspicion of collusion with "the enemy" and aroused bitter hatred in extremist circles. In June, 1967, police foiled an alleged plot of sixteen members of a secret organization of fanatics, calling itself the Revolutionary Action Movement, to assassinate both the NAACP's Roy Wilkins and WHitney Young of the National Urban League. p. 275 The Supreme Court, beginning with its great decision against public school segregation in 1954, had been a consistent bulwark of the Negro's struggle for "the equal protection of the laws" and equal citizenship. It continued to destroy surviving legal relics of a more bigoted era. In a decision of March 24, 1966, it had outlawed the poll tax as a prerequisite to voting in any election. The poll tax, long used to keep Negroes from the polls in the South, had all but disappeared already. The Twenty-fourth Amendment proscribed it in federal elections and, when knocked down by the court, it was in force in state and local elections in only four states, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia.In a decision in a Virginia case [Loving v. Virginia], handed down on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court upset the antimiscegenation laws that made it a crime in sixteen states for white and Negro persons to intermarry. p. 280 Impatient with delay and evasion in ending public school segregation nearly thirteen years after the Supreme Court had declared it unconstitutional, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals at New Orleans on March 29 ordered seven school districts in Louisana and Alabama to complete desegregation of all classes by the beginning of the next school term in the fall. Indirectly the order applied to all cases arising in the territory of that court- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. The Supreme Court refused to stay the circuit court's order. p. 280-281 A tide of migration was segregating American private life faster than all the efforts of government and private agencies were desegregating it. The Census Bureau estimated than in six years the Negro population of central cities had increased 24.4 percent, while the white population had decreased 2.5 percent. In the suburbs, while the small Negro population had increased only slightly, the white population, twenty times as large to begin with, had increased more than twice as fast. As low-income families crowded the inner city and more prosperous residents left, tax resources lagged further and further behind the skyrocketing cases of expanding school systems, swelling welfare rolls, slum clearance, and dealing with delinquency, crime- and the recently exploding riots. The problem of separate jurisdictions also arose in any project that might cross the city-suburb line.Remedies proposed involved bold innovations and vast expenditures. The principle of a "guaranteed annual income" was seriously discussed, and the "negative income tax"- by which persons with incomes below a specified minimum would receive not a tax bill but a check from the Internal Revenue Service- was no longer regarded merely as an amusing fantasy. Whitney Young's 1963 proposal of a $145-billion "domestic Marshall Plan" and the $185 billion "Freedom Budget" put forward by A. Philip Randolph and company in October, 1966, were given serious consideration. In city-rebuilding projections, figures up to a trillion were mentioned. But apart from all the other difficulties in the way of bold and costly domestic projects, the nation was engaged in a major war against a foreign foe. p. 281-282 When Harry Golden urged a $100-billion Marshall Plan before a Senate Committee on November 30, 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy said: We're not going to appropriate the kind of sums you're talking about in the immediate future. If the Vietnam War is over, five years from now perhaps we might be doing that." The United States in mid-1967 had 453,000 men in Vietnam; 10,253 Americans had been killed, 61,425 wounded; and the war was costing over $2 billion a month. With that preoccupation, it was not to be expected that a domestic problem of this magnitude would receive an adequate share of the nation's attention or its resources. p. 282 A phase of the Negro revolution- the phase of sit-ins and non-violent demonstrations that spread across the nation in the summer of 1963 and staged its dress parade in the majestic March on Washington- the movement led by King, Wilkins, Young, Farmer, Lewis, Randolph, and Rustin, dominated spiritually by Dr. King- was indeed coming to a close. The fuse was burning toward an explosion that would give the revolution a new character, new dimensions, and new elements of crisis. What the new phase would accomplish must be left to future historians to appraise. The first phase had accomplished much; and it had also failed in important respects.The Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, said the first phase of the movement "had accomplished and written into federal law" what he would call "a national conscience on civil rights." Discrimination in public education and in employment were still widespread, but in both it was now unlawful. The whole apparatus of legal segregation in the South had been dismantled. Qualified Negroes were able to vote freely in almost all sections. Actions of the courts, of the executive, and of Congress had established a charter of equal citizenship, which, whatever the waves of racist reaction, was unlikely ever to be revoked. Millions of whites to the contrary notwithstanding, the nation had set itself against racial discrimination. p. 284-285 With the high expectations, the many disappointments, and the current rebuffs, civil-rights leaders were inclined to emphasize the distance still to be covered rather than the progress already made. But a transformation had taken place in American life. A visitor to the United States after an absence of more than four years might have felt for the first time that he was not in a land with an ostracized Negro minority, but in a biracial country. He would be struck with the absence of the "Colored" and "White Only" signs, once omnipresent in Southern and border states, and at the number of well-dressed Negroes mingling with whites in hotels, restaurants, theaters, churches, and public meetings. He would see Negroes on television programs every day, and would be impressed with the growing popularity of Negro stars in movies and theater. If he visited government offices, especially in Washington, he would be surprised to find many Negroes in important positions; a few were in the highest echelons of government. p. 285 Five weeks after the publication of the report of the Commission on Civil Disorders, Negroes rioted in Washington, D.C., and in many other cities across the land. It was not a trivial incident that set off this upheaval. It was a tragedy of immeasurable proportions: the greatest Negro leader, and one of the greatest Americans of our time- the apostle of nonviolence- had been murdered. In Memphis on April 4, 1968, the career of Martin Luther King, Jr., was ended by an assassin's bullet. Dr. King's passion for the Negro cause never turned into hatred of the white man, and he cherished to the end a faith that the day of interracial justice and brotherhood would yet dawn in the United States. p. 324-325 Quotes about Muse Many of us, like our forebears, live through epochal events without any sense of being in the presence of history. Such lack of awareness was more understandable in ages past than it is in this day of widespread literacy and mass communication. Unlike, say, a foot soldier in the Trojan war or a shopkeeper in Elizabethan England, the typical American today is inundated by the "news." His sense of contemporary history is stunted not because he gets too little information but because he gets too much. Even if he has the skill, he is unlikely to have the time and patience to search out the enduring significance in the transient happenings of the day.This is what Benjamin Muse has done for us. He has given order and meaning to that bewildering rush of events in recent years that collectively compromise the "Negro revolution"- surely one of the major social forces of our century. Harold C. Fleming, Foreword to The American Negro Revolution (1968) by Benjamin Muse, p. ix This virtue is attributable partly to the fact that Mr. Muse is an experienced and consummately skillful reporter. But more important are the personal qualities of the man himself- compassion, humaneness, intellectual honesty, and the immovable conviction that dignity is the national heritage of every human being. These are the traits that Benjamin Muse has exhibited not only as observer and writer, but also as an able participant in the field of race relations. The Potomac Institute is pleased that in can claim a share of the credit, however modest, for having made this book possible. Harold C. Fleming, Foreword to The American Negro Revolution (1968) by Benjamin Muse, p. x Darden won a handsome primary victory on August 5, 1941 against two antimachine candidates. Although an appendectomy limited his campaigning, he repeated his success in the November election, handily defeating Republican Benjamin Muse, who was running only to preserve the semblance of a two-party system in Virginia. Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, p. 267 External linkds Category:1898 births Category:1986 deaths Category:Lawyers from the United States Category:Publishers from the United States Category:Politicians from North Carolina