Waging a Good War
A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
#1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks offers a new take on the Civil Rights Movement, stressing its unexpected use of military strategy and its lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world.
“Ricks does a tremendous job of putting the reader inside the hearts and souls of the young men and women who risked so much to change America . . . Riveting.” —Charles Kaiser, The Guardian
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
War-fighting doctrine is an unfamiliar yet ideal way to frame America's "civil rights revolution," according to this penetrating study. Pulitzer winner Ricks (Fiasco) illuminates episodes in the struggle against Southern segregation, including the 1956–1957 Montgomery bus boycott, during which Martin Luther King Jr. crafted his strategy of nonviolent action, and the 1960 Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins, for which activists received careful training, including role-playing sessions in which they were hit, spat on, and doused with coffee. The 1963 Birmingham desegregation campaign—the movement's "Gettysburg," in Ricks's telling—was won by the public-relations masterstroke of a Black children's march that braved public safety commissioner Bull Connor's fire hoses and police dogs, while the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration drive saw activists weathering violence—six murders, dozens of beatings and bombings—that scarred them, like shell-shocked soldiers, with "battle fatigue." Ricks's military metaphors sometimes feel strained, but they incisively spotlight the nuts and bolts of the movement's achievements: meticulous planning and organizing, shrewd analysis of goals and the means to accomplish them, maintenance of discipline and morale, and cold-blooded realism. The result is a trenchant and stimulating guide to the strategies and tactics that can achieve sweeping social change.
