AP PHOTO
Ricks’s book begins with the Montgomery bus boycott.
This article appears in the December 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968
By Thomas E. Ricks
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In the middle of the 20th century, between approximately 1950 and 1970, Black Americans and assorted allies attacked racial oppression along a variety of fronts. Racial dissidents prompted the military to abandon racial exclusion, nudged courts to invalidate the constitutionality of racial segregation, moved governments at the municipal, state, and federal levels to outlaw racial discrimination in markets for public accommodation, employment, and housing, and pushed the federal government to remove obvious racial barriers to Blacks seeking voter registration.
In what is often called the “classical” or “heroic” civil rights movement, racial justice advocates were nourished and led by an array of organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and many kindred organizations.
For readers looking for an introduction to this subject, Thomas E. Ricks’s Waging a Good War offers a synthesis derived from close readings of leading academic texts. With a keen eye for evocative detail and memorable quotation, Ricks condenses detailed studies into succinct and vivid chronicles that he strings together into an accessible narrative. But he does not succeed in his larger ambitions to use military history and strategy to provide new insights into the struggle.
Ricks begins with the Montgomery bus boycott. In that stirring episode, the Black community of Montgomery, Alabama, surprises itself, the South, and the nation by decisively rejecting a continued accommodation to Jim Crow seating aboard city buses. The immediate trigger for the conflict was the arrest of a Black seamstress, Rosa Parks, who defied the order of a bus driver to relinquish her seat to a white man pursuant to the dictates of white supremacist etiquette. In response, Black Montgomery boycotted the buses for 381 days, created an alternative governing structure for itself, and also sued city and state authorities, winning a judgment at the Supreme Court that extended Brown v. Board of Education’s invalidation of segregation from schooling to transportation. This episode also pushed to the fore an extraordinary 26-year-old minister named Martin Luther King Jr., who served as the principal guide and spokesman for the protest.
With sympathy and verve, Ricks also describes other episodes in which racial dissidents broadened the boundaries of racial fairness. He takes readers to Nashville, Tennessee, where activists honed tactics of nonviolent disruption; to Birmingham, Alabama, where activists put children on the front lines of struggles against pigmentocracy; to towns in Mississippi where young whites from outside the South joined Southern Blacks to challenge maniacal racial protocols; to Selma, Alabama, where protesters armed only with unrelenting faith and a determination to vote took on brutal state troopers; to Chicago, where the tactics of the Southern civil rights movement were shown to be unsuited for conflict in a Northern metropolis; and to Memphis, Tennessee, where King was assassinated while supporting a strike by garbagemen.
While Ricks almost invariably analogizes the civil rights movement to military operations, he might usefully have considered disanalogies.
A commendable feature of Waging a Good War is Ricks’s level-headed assessment of the tactics of both those who insisted upon nonviolence and those who, in the latter part of the 1960s, increasingly indulged in violent rhetoric and posturing. He rightly stresses the tough-mindedness and heroism of the former. A misperception held by some on the left is that King and other rigorous advocates of nonviolent resistance were naïve. To the contrary, they were keenly realistic. They understood that the white supremacists they faced would welcome and prevail in any violent confrontation. So prudent dissidents stayed away from the terrain where their adversaries were strongest—the ground of unreasoning force—and instead positioned themselves where the white supremacists were weakest—the ground of open appeal to noble national aspirations such as liberty and justice for all. There was nothing wimpy, complacent, or cowardly about pacifistic protesters such as King and John Lewis who practiced what Ricks terms “aggressive nonviolence” as they battled white supremacism in the shadow of governments that were themselves conspicuously devoted to illicit racial hierarchies.
Other dissidents indulged in rhetoric and conduct that valorized reaching for the gun to deter or punish racially motivated anti-Black violence. Their vocabulary included “off the pigs,” “up against the wall, motherfucker,” and “by any means necessary.” Their leaders included Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the now-legendary founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. These figures are, in some quarters, the exemplary heroes of the drama. In contrast, in Ricks’s account, they are rightly portrayed as significantly less realistic and effective than their nonviolent rivals. The performative militancy of the Black Panther Party, for example, generated a momentary thrill. But its life span was tragically brief, foreshortened by three related developments: ferocious repression, internal dissension, and narcissistic macho posturing. If you declare, as did the Panthers, that your goal is “the total destruction of the racist decadent imperialist American society,” you had better be prepared for surveillance and subversion on the part of those dedicated to the preservation of the threatened old order. The Panthers were not prepared, a sign of dangerous, misguided bravado.
Ricks hopes to provide a different and illuminating “angle” on the civil rights movement by analogizing it to a military enterprise. It is understandable why this might have seemed to be a promising strategy. The rhetoric of the Black freedom struggle and commentary about it is full of references to “battles,” “skirmishes,” and “campaigns.” Ricks, moreover, has written several books about military conflicts. It made sense to think that the trained eye of a military correspondent would unearth overlooked facets of fights for racial justice in the 1950s and 1960s. The movement, Ricks maintains, “can be better understood if it is viewed in military terms, especially those of strategy and tactics.” Perhaps. But in few if any instances did I derive new insight from Ricks’s military prism. His good book would be no less good if all of his references to generals, battles, tacticians, and military lingo vanished.
Ricks’s dragooning of military analogies is all too desultory, ad hoc, and fragmentary. Spying is often an important feature of warfare. The Black freedom struggle was beset by spies. Hundreds attended planning sessions, marches, speeches, and rallies and then reported back to agencies such as the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One of the leading civil rights movement photographers, Ernest Withers, was an FBI informant. (See Marc Perrusquia’s A Spy in Canaan: How the FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement.) So, too, was Jim Harrison, a key accountant for the SCLC. (See David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.) Yet Ricks offers little that sheds light on the extent of such betrayal or its consequences. He briefly mentions that chiefs of security in local branches of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles were FBI informants, but otherwise leaves that striking fact unelaborated.
GENE HERRICK/AP PHOTO
Ricks largely ignores the campaign to desegregate the armed forces, which led to multiracial military bases.
While Ricks almost invariably analogizes the civil rights movement to military operations, he might usefully have considered disanalogies. Armies have a structure in which commanders can coerce subordinates. The soldier who defies orders or betrays his side can be lawfully punished, even killed. Social movements, in contrast, typically rely upon inspiration and peer pressure to keep followers in line.
Ricks’s interpretation of the civil rights movement is deficient in another way reflective of a lapse in much of the recent literature on the Second Reconstruction. He largely ignores the campaign to desegregate the armed forces, an effort that led to multiracial education, housing, and recreation on military bases way in advance of civilian facilities in many locales. While white supremacists in many parts of South Carolina were pulling out the stops to entrench racial segregation, military commanders at Fort Jackson were abandoning Jim Crow. Why and how segregation was overthrown in the armed forces without legislation or judicial intervention is a neglected subject that surely ought to be focused upon in an analysis of the civil rights movement written from a military perspective.
At the end of Waging a Good War, Ricks maintains that “a polarized America has developed three distinct accounts of the classical [Civil Rights] Movement, as seen by the mainstream right, center-liberals, and the left.” The right says that “the Movement achieved reforms that were in retrospect necessary and went far enough.” The center-left says that “we must do more than the movement did, but believes we can do so by working to deepen America’s foundational commitments and to expand existing institutions.” The left says “that there has been almost no real progress since the 1960s because America is a white supremacist country through and through, with a race structure reinforced by grinding capitalism.”
Alas, Ricks declines to indicate clearly which of these views he finds most persuasive and, perhaps, more important, how one might best assess these contending positions. I suspect that he embraces the center-liberal perspective, though his description of that position lacks specificity regarding what the movement accomplished. What he ought to have concluded is that the right-wing take on the civil rights movement is excessively triumphalist. It does not appreciate the limitations of the movement’s triumphs, much less its defeats, much less retrogression at the hands of conservatives.
Any judgment of the civil rights movement must consider, for example, that the most innovative and effective single legislative reform of the Second Reconstruction, the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, has been recently disabled by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), with no prospects in sight for congressional restoration. Ricks should also have concluded that the perspective he posits as the view of the left is fatuous (though it must be added that many on the left would reject the version of leftist history that Ricks proposes). “No real progress”? The invalidation of segregation. The prohibition of most significant forms of private racial discrimination. The righteous assault on racial disfranchisement. The change in the social, cultural, and political environment such that an African American could become president (Barack Obama), vice president (Kamala Harris), secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice), secretary of defense (Lloyd Austin), chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Colin Powell), etc.
The current situation in the United States is frightening and deplorable, which includes ongoing racial wrongs. A strong grip on history is thus especially needed now. Any realistic understanding of the American past entails appreciating how far down African Americans had been submerged and how much ground they regained through the Black freedom struggle. In assessing the civil rights movement, it is useful to ask: compared to what? Does American history, indeed world history, disclose an analogous episode in which a formerly enslaved, persistently stigmatized racial minority group accomplished more absent massive bloodletting than did African Americans between, say, 1950 and 1970? There is good reason to see the mid-20th-century struggle against racial injustice in the United States as an inspiring episode.
