Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968

A bestselling author’s innovative history of the civil rights movement, stressing its unexpected affinities with military strategy and lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in 1955, she set the struggle for racial justice in America on a new and momentous course. Why did the civil rights movement in its heyday succeed in expanding rights and galvanizing a nation? And what lessons can today’s nonviolent activists learn from its practitioners’ strategies, tactics, and decisions made at key junctures?

In Waging a Good War, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks presents new insight into America’s defining social justice campaign, using the unlikely prism of military history and thought. He 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 training, discipline, logistics, negotiation, and other indispensable tools for achieving change. Bringing King, Stokely Carmichael, 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, and Diane Nash foremost among them. And 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.