The despicable racist hacks on the Supreme Court have eviscerated the hard won national Voting Rights Act passed in 1965: an email from the national citizen action group Indivisible speaks to this moment.
Civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis advised us. “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”
He encouraged us. “Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.”He challenged us. “I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
Waging a Good War: a military history of the Civil Rights Moment: 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks could not be a more timely read if we are to take up John Lewis' challenge to continue his good struggle. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post covering our wars and military affairs, Ricks long wrote a fascinating blog in Foreign Policy in which he dialogued with past and present military personnel about their profession.
In this 2022 book, he explores the civil rights campaigns, "the Movement" as it was known, from the perspective of a war correspondent.
In the1960s the United States became a genuine democracy for the first time in its history, as laws and practices that prevented many Black Americans from voting were challenged by the civil rights movement. ... Now, six decades later, a significant part of the American political establishment has succeeded in repealing many of the voting rights gains of the 1960s.
This national arc led me to go back and read hundreds of books on the civil rights movement. The more I delved in that history, the more I found myself calling on my own experiences as a war correspondent to interpret what I was reading. I saw the overall strategic thinking that went into the Movement, and the field tactics that flowed from that strategy. ... I began to see the Movement as a kind of war -- that is, a series of campaigns on carefully chosen ground that eventually led to victory. The Siege of Montgomery. The Battle of Birmingham. The March on Washington. The final assault at Selma.
He saw what was coming and what is now before us:
... The same antidemocratic faction of American life that opposed the Movement in the 1960s has been resurgent lately ... there are signs we are once again threatened by the ancient and powerful forces of caste and oligarchy. If America is to have what most Americans want -- a multiracial, multiethnic democracy -- we will need to renew the promise of the peaceful voting rights crusade ...
And he brought a prescription for understanding that past which has lessons for our future struggles:
... to my surprise no studies have looked at the Movement through the prism of its similarity to military operations ...
... the perspective of military history is helpful, even perhaps imperative, if we are to discern how to apply its lessons to our predicaments today. No, the civil rights movement was not a traditional army with weapons and a single command structure. Yet from 1955 to 1968 a disciplined mass of people waged a concerted, organized struggle in a cause greater than themselves.
Many died; many more shed blood; thousands were put behind bars. In conducting their campaigns, activists made life changing decisions with inadequate information while operating under wrenching stress and often facing violent attacks -- circumstances that are similar to the nature of leadership in war, making the military lens a useful one in understanding what happened and why.
The bulk of the book is a vivid telling of the incidents of the culminating civil rights campaign of the mid-1960s. There was plenty of drama and not a few setbacks along the way, but there was also planning and strategic brilliance.
... Overall the civil rights movement was better organized and its participants far more methodical and careful than tends to be recognized now. ... Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a veteran of the Movement who served for years in Mississippi, summarized it as "struggle -- disciplined, thoughtful, creative struggle." ...
Discipline in military operations is most often thought of as following one's training and obeying legal orders, and both are indeed crucial. But the foundation of it all is self-discipline, most often in simply being persistent, of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, of keeping control of one's own emotions and fears in order to serve a greater good. In the civil rights movement, an additional form of discipline was maintaining the message that is being sent out to the world. ... As King once put it, "Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks."
... Strategy... involves ... understanding who you are, and next identifying one's goals, and only then developing an overarching plan for using tactics to achieve those goals. One of the Movement's great strengths was that its leaders formulated a strategy, then developed tactics that fit their approach, and finally gave to the people who were assigned to execute those tactics the training they needed to do so. Each of these levels fit together, with each action carrying a message -- the flesh carrying the word, as it were. That meshing is harder than it looks.
The contemporary American military, by contrast, often tends to be good tactically while lacking an overarching strategy ... tactical excellence without a strategic understanding resembles a Ferrari without a steering wheel -- the vehicle may be powerful and look good, but it won't get you where you need to go.
The Orange Toddler's "excursion" into Iran sure confirms that last point.
As a movement foot soldier of the Sixties and also of the subsequent women's and gay movements which were spawn of the Civil Rights Movement, I was also interested in how Ricks applied his military frame to the time after the Voting Rights Act was won -- and Movement leaders asked themselves, "what's next?" His observations hold lessons for us today as we envision turning back MAGA fascism. We have a chance to win that battle and we must, as decisively as possible. But then what? Ricks writes about the problems of successful struggles:
... Success in war inevitably unleashes a new set of problems. As the end of the struggle comes into sight, bonds between allies begin to fray. This is not just a failing of human nature, though festering personal grievances, feelings rubbed raw in the friction of war, often are part of the cause. There are realistic political reasons as well. As the danger presented by the enemy recedes, allies lose much of the incentive they have had to submerge their differences. Instead they begin to focus on them ... As Winston Churchill said midway through [World War II], "The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are still no less difficult."
... as resolution nears, leaders necessarily begin to contemplate the next task, and because of their differences they often disagree on what that should be. For the civil rights movement, a set of questions arose: ... what is our next step? Is it to go into elective politics? ...Or to remain outside the system, pressuring it...? ... centrifugal pressures worked on the Movement during the Selma campaign. And so by its end, old comrades began to look at each other in new and more critical ways. ...
We're in a battle; we're in campaigns. We don't know how any of our agonies will turn out. But we can learn from those who went before.
