PACIFIST, FOUNDER OF CORE

Out of Step.

In the 1940s few Americans were more out of step with public opinion than Abraham Johannes Muste. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the country rallied behind the war effort; Muste, one of the most ardent pacifists in American history, counseled those resisting the war. After World War II the nation slowly but certainly closed ranks around the struggle against the Soviet Union; Muste dissented, propagating the Cold War "third camp" position—opposing both Communist political tyranny and capitalist economic oppression. And while many Americans in the postwar years came to support black equality, few did so with the fervor of Muste, who helped form the trailblazing civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He also popularized Mohandas K. Gandhi's philosophy of peace in the United States, teaching nonviolence to a generation of civil...