Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968. Thomas E. Ricks. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022.

Ninety years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, Blacks faced a dominant caste system in the 1950s that used the violence and power of the state to deny equal treatment or opportunity across the deep south. In more general terms, when confronting an imbalance of power, a subjugated people faces a choice between submission or finding a way to alter the nature of the fight. To overcome this disparity, the Civil Rights Movement developed a strategy that aligned their actions to their desired change. 

Thomas E. Ricks’ Waging a Good War applies the lens of military considerations to explain the success of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954-1968. Not unlike his writings on the U.S. military from World War II to Iraq, Ricks’ account of the Civil Rights Movement focuses on senior leadership, their strategy, planning, and tactics. However, Waging a Good War provides an account of how a protracted struggle found success by aligning tactics to strategy. 

Finding a Leader and a Doctrine

This effective campaign was born out of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts of 1955. Ricks highlights the intensity of training, planning, and sustainment required to execute the city-wide protest sparked by Rosa Parks’ defiant act. Counter to the popular image, Rosa Parks was more than a tired Sunday school teacher who refused to give up her seat on a public bus. Parks was an activist who spent several weeks training on nonviolent direct action[1] at the Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee.[2]

Four days after Parks’ arrest, a 26-year-old preacher who had just arrived in Montgomery, spoke to the gathered crowd at Holt Baptist Church and called for nonviolent protest, declaring “not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we’ve come to see we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” Over the following year, an elaborate system of dispatchers managed carpool routes, providing free transportation to participants while churches served as command posts and countered mis-information efforts.[3] The protracted protest and the violent response of bombing the preacher’s home attracted international attention, and the Supreme Court ruled an end to Montgomery’s segregation of public transportation. From this debut, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the new strategic leader of the Civil Rights Movement.

Through careful study of Mohandas Gandhi's social movement in India, King found an approach that aligned with his desire to avoid “using immoral means to achieve moral ends.”[4] King and his circle of advisors bridged tactics to their political objective and adapted to shifting dynamics over time. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King explained that “nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”[5] The Movement’s new strategy centered on nonviolent direct action to challenge unjust laws by employing “creative tension” that overwhelmed the system of segregation.

Movement leaders knew from “painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”[6]  Waging a Good War describes how, after a defensive action in Montgomery, King chose a series of battles over the next decade that presented southern whites with a dilemma between a loss of political power or resorting to increased violence to maintain a system of segregation. This escalation of violence, and the growing attention it received outside the South, forced a reluctant federal government to intervene to enforce equal treatment.[7]

The Movement’s new strategy centered on nonviolent direct action to challenge unjust laws by employing “creative tension” that overwhelmed the system of segregation.

Adapting the Campaign to the Environment

In Nashville, the Movement transitioned from the defensive act of denying patronage to the offensive approach of demanding service at the city’s downtown lunch counters. As in Montgomery, leaders thoroughly planned these defiant actions and demonstrators displayed remarkable discipline. Waging a Good War describes how, drawing inspiration from Gandhi, James Lawson and Diane Nash led workshops in church basements for several months. In squads of twelve, they taught Nashville students about nonviolent action and executed realistic rehearsals that included name-calling and spitting to simulate the violent reactions expected from angry crowds. Lawson observed that “a protest cannot be spontaneous. It has to be systematic. There must be planning, strategy,” what he called “a common discipline.”[8]  

As in any campaign, the Movement faced setbacks. The strategy devised by King relied on two external components—violent reaction from opponents of integration and outrage from a broader public—to force the federal government to act. King argued, “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action.”

King focused on identifying locations where the most likely reaction would be violence. The strongholds of racism became ideal targets for the Movement—Montgomery, Nashville, Mississippi, and eventually Selma. However, their efforts stalled when the Movement faced an adaptive adversary in Albany, Georgia. The segregationist Albany Police Chief understood his enemy, planned well in advance for mass detentions, made arrests on charges that couldn’t be challenged as segregation, maintained police discipline during arrests, and engaged directly with the Movement in negotiations. In Albany, the Movement leadership culminated, withdrew, and learned to better choose its adversaries and to adapt its tactics.

In Birmingham’s Public Safety Commissioner, “Bull” Connor, King found an adversary he could rely on to escalate violence in ways that could enable the campaign to achieve progress. Thomas Ricks describes a training center set up in Dorchester, Georgia, to prepare demonstrators as a “school for noncommissioned officers of the civil rights movement.” However, Birmingham was so oppressive that, in the early days of protest, only a handful of demonstrators volunteered to march, knowing it would result in beatings and jail time. Sensing a faltering initiative, King volunteered to march and face arrest. This act, and the publicity generated by publishing his “Letter from The Birmingham Jail,” brought journalists to the city, but the Movement still needed demonstrators.

James Bevel, an advisor that Ricks compares to General William Tecumseh Sherman, introduced a new approach in Birmingham.[9] Through local radio station disk jockeys, Bevel recruited a new army of protestors—children. This was a risky gambit, with profound ethical implications, but King agreed, and every child received training in nonviolent tactics. The beating and arrest of Blacks had not sparked the outrage King’s strategy required, but when “Bull” Connor unleashed dogs and fire hoses on children, the nation noticed. President Kennedy declared “the ugly situation in Birmingham” was damaging the nation’s image, white business leaders forced the city to acquiesce to the Movement’s demands, and for the first time the Gallup Poll reported Americans considered civil rights “the most important problem facing the country.”[10] The Movement adapted its tactics to the requirements of its strategy and seized the initiative.

The Civil Rights Movement offers, to a military that has repeatedly struggled against insurgencies and faces a future where the global balance of power is shifting, an invaluable case study of a political conflict with its own share of violent means. Leaders of the movement, like James Lawson, recognized this parallel, noting “protracted struggle is a moral struggle, like warfare, moral warfare.”[11] From strategy and planning to training and tactics, Ricks demonstrates the similarities between these two forms of warfare.

The Movement adapted its tactics to the requirements of its strategy and seized the initiative.

Applying the Movement to the Military

Waging a Good War provides students of both social movements and military strategy a new perspective on developing an effective campaign that aligns tactics to strategy. From decision-making and planning to training and rehearsals, Waging a Good War delivers an abundance of parallel examples for military audiences to consider. Ricks’ descriptions of post-traumatic stress through quotes from battle-tested participants of the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi will ring hauntingly familiar to combat veterans.

In the final chapter, Waging a Good War brings the reader forward to consider current social justice challenges. In doing so, Ricks offers military leaders a way to consider and discuss issues of systemic racism, police brutality, ballot access, and democracy in a productive manner that avoids the trap of partisanship. Once again, Ricks provides a broad audience a window into human conflict and the leadership, planning, and unity of effort required to achieve success.

Christopher G. Ingram is a U.S. Army Strategist and President of the Military Writers Guild. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

Thank you for being a part of the The Strategy Bridge community. Together, we can #BuildTheBridge.

Header Image: Lunch counter at the old Woolworth's "five and dime" store, Greensboro, North Carolina, 1946 (Carol M. Highsmith).

Notes:

[1] “Non-violent direct action” refers to methods of protest or resistance to achieve goals that involve use of personal power, often by removing or denying economic support through boycotts or sit-ins.

[2] Thomas E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022),14.

[3] Ricks, 23-32.

[4] Ricks, 17, 150.

[5] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sites/mlk/files/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw_0.pdf, 2.

[6] King, 2.

[7] Ricks, 227.

[8] Ricks, 42-43.

[9] Ricks, 153.

[10] Ricks, 164-165.

[11] Ricks, xvi.