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A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
#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.
In Waging a Good War, 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 note the surprising affinities between that ethos and the organized pursuit of success at war. The greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century, he stresses, 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.
"Thomas E. Ricks gives us a new way to understand the civil rights movement in his illuminating, engrossing, deeply researched and vividly written Waging a Good War...If you want to understand how the people of the civil rights movement went about changing the United States in the 1950s and '60s, this is the book to read." - BookPage (starred review)
"War-fighting doctrine is an unfamiliar yet ideal way to frame America's 'civil rights revolution,' according to this penetrating study...[A] trenchant and stimulating guide to the strategies and tactics that can achieve sweeping social change." - Publishers Weekly
"A novel interpretation that conceives of the civil rights movement in terms of a sequence of military campaigns...A thoughtful contribution to the history of the struggle for civil rights in America." - Kirkus Reviews
"All of Thomas Ricks's military histories are brilliantly insightful, vivid, and full of heart, but Waging A Good War, the first military history of the civil rights movement, is my favorite. Extraordinary, heartbreaking, and illuminating, the book casts a bright new light on how the Movement worked as a benevolent campaign, with great heroes waging war against the great evil we know." - Anne Lamott, author of Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage and Bird by Bird
"In Waging a Good War, Thomas Ricks offers a vivid, compelling, and entirely new view of one of the most important human accomplishments in history. An acclaimed military historian and superior writer, Ricks brilliantly deploys the lens of military 'campaigns' to help the reader better grasp the strategic and tactical actions of the civil rights movement's leaders. Ironically, but crucially, his use of a military framework offers a profound understanding of a nonviolent movement that ultimately won the battle against hatred and violence." - James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
"Waging a Good War is a stirring, sobering military after-action report for the civil rights movement from one of the country's most readable and astute military historians. Is it worth closely scrutinizing how training, doctrine, unit discipline, logistics, and strategic planning were fundamental to the Movement's success? Emphatically, yes. For these are the means by which power is forged and the world changed, and how can any citizen seeking a healthy democracy in our troubled times not wish to understand that better?" - Danielle Allen, author of Our Declaration and Cuz
This information about Waging a Good War was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thomas E. Ricks was The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gamble, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and A Soldier's Duty.
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