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Nonviolence From a Military Angle
A new history of the civil rights movement gets a lot right but falls short in trying to reframe the story.
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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...