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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell, 1984
Benjamin Muse understood the relationship of Civil War history to the civil rights movement. Born in North Carolina in 1898, he grew up in a world where the Lost Cause version of the Civil War and Reconstruction was powerful. After viewing D. W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation and reading Thomas Dixon's novels, Muse came to believe that black people should be "kept in their place." Extensive international travel while working for the U.S. State Department, however, led him to deem racial prejudice "provincial and unsophisticated." After moving to Virginia at the end of World War II, Muse joined the Southern Regional Council (SRC), an Atlanta-based organization whose members pushed for interracial justice and desegregation. In 1949, he started a column for the Washington Post, becoming, in the words of one historian, "Virginias most prominent and influential advocate of desegregation." Looking back at his earlier racial views, Muse realized how much they had been infected by the "poison" of "racist literature." Dixon's The Clansmen and The Leopards Spots put "salt on the lingering sores of the Reconstruction era and instill [ed] hatred and fear of the Negro." Muse blamed these writings for supporting the "swift contagion" of "race prejudice" that swept the South in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. He also noted the resurgence of interest in Birth of a Nation, which was "running in Little Rock on the eve of the 1957 riots." In order to develop "interracial friendship and understanding," Muse believed that whites needed to learn a different version of the Civil War. The "race problem," he argued, "fired the controversy which tore the nation asunder from 1861 to 1865." Segregation was an "unwholesome" solution imposed after Reconstruction to deprive "nearly all Negroes . . . of the franchise" and "separate the race from the mainstream of community life."1
This article examines the fight over history that Muse identified as a critical component of the civil rights struggle. In Virginia, segregationist politicians, such as Harry F. Byrd, Sr., J. Lindsay Almond, John Stewart Battle, Garland Gray, and William Tuck, intended to keep Lost Cause history alive by creating a series of history...