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Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 Audiobook
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This program is read by multiple-award-winning narrator JD Jackson. #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.
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"We've long known what the people of the civil rights movement did; they changed America and then the entire world. Now, we can know how they did it. This book outflanks our ‘memory’ of the Movement by detailing, for example, the activist nature of Gandhi's non-violence, with camouflaged ‘fire control officers’ orchestrating the waves of well-trained protestors refilling each lunch counter seat as quickly as the mob emptied it. The Highlander Folk School trained their ‘generals,’ while ‘basic training’ sites on Southern Black campuses and churches prepared the rank and file. This work shows all this without in any way minimizing the multi-hued bravery and sacrifice required to end Black Americans' de jure second class citizenship. This is the book we who stand in awe of the Movement didn't know we were waiting for—but we were."
— Debra J. Dickerson, former Air Force intelligence officer and author of An American Story and The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners
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"[A] penetrating study . . . Ricks’s military metaphors . . . incisively spotlight the nuts and bolts of the movement’s achievements: meticulous planning and organizing, shrewd analysis of goals and the means to accomplish them, maintenance of discipline and morale, and cold-blooded realism. The result is a trenchant and stimulating guide to the strategies and tactics that can achieve sweeping social change.
— Publishers Weekly -
A novel interpretation . . . [and] a thoughtful contribution to the history of the struggle for civil rights in America.
— Kirkus Reviews -
I loved this book, learned a lot, and enjoyed it from start to finish. Ricks brings the American civil rights movement vividly to life. Through his smartly conceived perspective, we better understand the movement’s vision, discipline, and conduct as it fought for the soul of America.
— James Mattis, retired United States Marine Corps General, 26th US Secretary of Defense, and co-author of Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead -
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 -
In a book that is both comprehensive and compelling, Ricks examines a critical period in our country’s history and shows how the strategic approach employed by civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 60s advanced American democracy. A central theme emerging from this sweeping narrative is that struggle and purposeful action are key elements of social change and that democracy warrants these efforts.
— Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, former chair of President Obama's President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans, and author of The Empowered University -
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 -
Tom Ricks’ Waging a Good War is first of all, a superb account of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from 1954 to 1968. Equally noteworthy are Ricks’ deep military analyses and reflections on the campaigns and battles fought by African Americans, many of whom were World War II veterans, to achieve ‘a genuine democracy’ in America. Finally Ricks’ most recent work is a great read, insightful, enjoyable, and informative. Highly recommended.
— Adrian R. Lewis, David B. Pittaway Professor of Military History at the University of Kansas and author of The American Culture of War -
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 -
Thomas Ricks’s chronicle of the civil rights movement is a timely reminder that Americans have the collective capacity to correct course and redeem democracy’s promise. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, Black citizens mobilized in a sustained, hard-fought struggle to make America a better place for all its citizens. Waging a Good War is a distinguished military historian’s inspiring tribute to the Movement’s discipline and self-sacrifice, strategic vision and tactical genius.
— Peter S. Onuf, professor of history emeritus at the University of Virginia and co-author with Annette Gordon-Reed of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs
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About Thomas E. Ricks
Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times bestselling author, is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he covered US military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including The Generals, The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
About JD Jackson
JD Jackson is a theater professor, aspiring stage director, and award-winning audiobook narrator. He is a classically trained actor, and his television and film credits include roles on House, ER, Law & Order, Hack, Sherrybaby, Diary of a City Priest, and Lucky Number Slevin. He is the recipient of more than a dozen Earphones Awards for narration and an Odyssey Honor for G. Neri’s Ghetto Cowboy, and he was also named one of AudioFile magazine’s Best Voices of the Year for 2012 and 2013. An adjunct professor at Los Angeles Southwest College, he has an MFA in theater from Temple University.