Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African American History, American History, Civil Rights Movement, nonfiction, U.S. history
Pages: 448
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on October 4, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Waging a Good War, the bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America’s greatest moral revolution—the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization—the hallmarks of any successful military campaign.

An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the Movement’s triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive, resistance—involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement’s adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool—the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new understanding of the Movement’s later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events and overlooked aspects of America’s civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change—and one that offers vital lessons for our own time.

My Review:

In his influential but incomplete work, On War, military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defines war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”. Martin Luther King, Jr., of course followed the example of Mohandas Gandhi in preaching and practicing nonviolence during the Civil Rights Movement and afterwards.

Violence on the one hand, nonviolence on the other. What does Clausewitz have to say to King? Quite a lot, actually, for what King was seeking was indeed to compel his opponents to accede to his will and liberate his compatriots from an unjust system. While the instruments of King’s will did not include bombs or guns directed at his oppressors, they did include thousands of people trained and sent on campaigns to sap the will of their opponents until they ultimately fell back.

Does this sound like a war? In his book Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, war correspondent Thomas E. Ricks makes the case that a military analysis of the strategies, operations, and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement offers a useful point of view for understanding its history — and applying its lessons to current and future conflicts.

Reality Rating A: While the idea of doing Clausewitzian analysis of King’s strategy is not new, military theory is not exactly the most common framework for viewing the Civil Rights Movement. Presumably few, if any, civil rights leaders were referring to their well-thumbed copies of Clausewitz. However, Ricks’ book makes it clear that the movement included many aspects of a series of military campaigns. For example, just as a U.S. soldier is not dropped onto a battlefield without having going through extensive training in their arms and tactics, civil rights protesters received extensive training on how to conduct themselves. That training was essential; very few people are naturally inclined to sit down in the face of mobs, howling dogs, and fire hoses without either fleeing or striking back.

The Civil Rights Movement conducted detailed reconnaissance of enemy territory before engaging in a campaign. Those campaigns included significant advance planning of the aims of the campaign as well as the logistics required – safe houses, escape routes, lists of sympathizers, and plain old cash. The very strategy of nonviolent direct action was very intentional.

Quoting King from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

The Civil Rights Movement of course would have had little hope of forcing negotiations by violent actions; one against nine are never good odds. But what it could do was highlight injustice and create situations to encourage the state to overreact in the name of preserving that injustice. Fortunately for the protesters, that overreaction often ended up on the nightly television news. Over time, the will to maintain Jim Crow was whittled away as the contradictions revealed by the protests made the status quo untenable. (It is interesting to note the degree to which many of the opponents of the Civil Rights Movement were tactically and strategically stupid. Had more Southern police chiefs acted like Laurie Pritchett rather than Bull Connor by minimizing brutal responses to the protests, the Civil Rights Movement could easily have required much more time to achieve its aim.)

The foregoing just scratches the surface of Ricks’ book, which details the strategies and tactics of several campaigns including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the March on Washington — as well as failed campaigns such as the one in Albany, Georgia. As such, it also serves as a useful capsule history of the Civil Rights Movement during 1954-1968, including the many leaders, foot-soldiers, and organizations involved — as well as their many disagreements. As with any war, the Civil Rights Movement has its casualties, which Ricks describes as well.

From one point of view, the Civil Rights Movement ended successfully with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. From another point of view, there is much left to do to pursue justice. These old challenges — as well as new threats to democracy — make Ricks’ military history of the Civil Rights Movement essential reading for those who want a clear-eyed history of its strategies and how they can be applied to current problems.