Biography
A. J. Muste — Abraham Johannes Muste, born at Zierikzee in the Netherlands on January 8, 1885 — moved from the pulpit into labour and peace organising, becoming a central advocate of nonviolent direct action and a bridge between labour militancy and pacifist politics. He led Brookwood Labor College, and worked through the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, Peacemakers and the Committee for Nonviolent Action. He died in New York City on February 11, 1967, aged 82.
He was arrested repeatedly across nearly fifty years, and the pattern matters more than any single term: several separate political arrests and short detentions rather than one long sentence.
In February 1919, as spokesman for the striking textile workers at Lawrence, Massachusetts, he was beaten by police and pulled from a picket line, then charged with disturbing the peace and loitering. He was held about a week before eyewitness testimony supported his account and the charges were dismissed. In early September 1931 he was arrested at the Paterson silk strike alongside Norman Thomas and other labour supporters.
On June 15, 1955 he was one of twenty-nine pacifists who refused to take shelter during New York City's compulsory civil-defence drill and stayed above ground in City Hall Park. He was arraigned some nine hours later, bail was set at $1,500 a head, and the group was released within forty-eight hours after supporters raised more than $35,000. They were convicted on December 22, 1955 and their sentences suspended.
His best-documented jail term began on July 1, 1959, when he and other members of Omaha Action crossed the fence at a missile construction site near Mead, Nebraska. He refused bail and stayed in jail until his court appearance on July 9 — eight nights. The judge imposed six months and a $500 fine, then suspended both and placed him on a year's probation conditioned on his staying away from military-base demonstrations. He did not serve six months: later summaries sometimes confuse his suspended sentence with the imprisonment of other Omaha Action defendants.
On April 21, 1966, at eighty-one, he and five other American pacifists tried to demonstrate against the Vietnam War near the United States Embassy in Saigon. South Vietnamese police arrested them, held them in a detention room at the airport and expelled them from the country.
