Waging a Good War
book title
Waging a Good War
Thomas E. Ricks
Published Date : 2022-10-04
Amazon
Description
A bestselling author’s innovative history of the civil rights movement, stressing its unexpected affinities with military strategy and its lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world. In Waging a Good War, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks offers a radical new perspective on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and its legacy today, arguing that it had much more in common with military campaigns than is generally understood. If we see how much attention Movement leaders and stalwarts paid to issues such as recruiting, training, discipline and organization, and especially to strategy and tactics, we can develop a better grasp of why they succeeded. Taking this novel approach, Ricks deftly follows Martin Luther King Jr. and other key figures from one campaign to another, demonstrating that the philosophy of nonviolence was an active and even aggressive method of confronting foes and achieving victory. In vivid anecdotes and stories, he calls attention to the Movement’s deft use of military-inspired or military-like tools for achieving change. Bringing King, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis and other leaders into new focus, Ricks also offers fascinating appreciations of less renowned figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into a potent weapon—the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also explores the Movement’s later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. Rich with novel episodes and resonant lessons, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change. At a time of extraordinary stress and division in America, Ricks offers a surprisingly optimistic conclusion, contending that if we understand better how the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in the 1960s, we can make even greater strides in our own time.
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