What the military could learn from the civil rights movement

A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and veteran defense correspondent whose bestsellers have chronicled U.S. wars, Thomas E. Ricks was drawn to study the civil rights movement through the war stories of his wife, Mary Kay Ricks. 

“We’d be driving along, listening to NPR talking about civil rights, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy.’” She was co-president of her Washington, D.C., high school’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

“I was reading about it partly trying to understand my wife’s experience, things she said to me over 30 years of marriage,” Mr. Ricks says. 

The more he researched, “the more I thought, ‘This is a generation of heroes – this is the greatest generation.’”

He also found himself thinking, “Wait a second – this was a war. I know how to write about this.”

Out this week, Mr. Ricks’ new book, “Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,” explores the strategies and tactics of the leaders and foot soldiers in the fight for Black equality. 

“Everybody knows what the civil rights movement did,” he says. “But what struck my eye as a military reporter is understanding how it happened.” 

And that, he adds, was writerly inspiration. “With Iraq, I kind of had to force myself to get to the desk. Here, every morning, it was like a magnet pulling me in.” He spoke with the Monitor from his home in Austin, Texas. 

So how did the civil rights movement make use of the kind of strategy we’d normally associate with the military? 

One of the things that fascinated me was the preparation that went into anything publicly visible. Demonstrations, boycotts, strikes would be preceded by days, weeks, months, and in a couple of cases, years of strategizing: What are we trying to do? How are we going to do it? How do we recruit the right people for this? How do we train those people? 

The role-playing they did, for example, to protest a segregated lunch counter: Some activists played sit-in demonstrators and others played the white mob attacking them – pouring coffee and ketchup on them, slugging them. 

One of the things it prepared activists for was how to deal with the fight-or-flight impulse – to sit there and not move, to deal with it in a way that surprised, even flummoxed, the attackers.

I love that one of the things they taught was if somebody spits on you, ask for their handkerchief. It just gave people pause.

You point out that this military-style organization extended to marches, too. How did that work?

Marches were organized by block, and that in military terms first of all meant cohesion: You knew these people on your left and right. You were surrounded by familiar faces, and that really helped in times of attack or danger. The second thing it does is to deter infiltrators or provocateurs.

But in order to have people march block by block you had to say, “Who will be there? Who’s going to get them out to march? What do they need?” 

So part of the civil rights movement was making sure there were babysitters. And people are going to be hungry when they come back, so let’s have people cooking food in the church. That also gave people who couldn’t march or wouldn’t march or were afraid to march or were too frail to march, that gave them roles. They could babysit; they could be cooking food; they could be monitors along the parade route, watching and taking notes in case you needed witnesses in court. 

You talk about strategic and tactical innovation as well. What are some examples?

One of the things that struck me, that the U.S. military doesn’t do, is that every march had a message. Remember, a lot of these people are ministers, and for them the march was “the Word made flesh.” The march should somehow convey a concrete message sent.  

In Selma, [Alabama], one of the things the white power structure said was that Black people are too ignorant to march. In response, the Black people of Selma marched carrying their toothbrushes. The message is, “I’m willing to go to jail.”

There’s also tactical innovation. When they couldn’t get the adults in Birmingham, [Alabama], to march in spring of ’63 – because they knew they were living under a near-totalitarian structure, and they would lose their jobs and be beaten and jailed and so on – [minister and civil rights leader] James Bevel went out and recruited students to march. Not just high school students, but kids as young as 8. 

The purpose of this was first to get people on the streets. Second, he recruited so many students he was able to swamp the Birmingham jails. So [Eugene] “Bull” Connor, the police chief, says, “I can’t arrest any more of these kids – I have thousands of them in jail. I’m going to bring out the police dogs and fire hoses.”

What Bevel does is show America that the white power structure is so insistent on preserving this racist system they will do this to children – these fire hoses are so powerful they’d knock the bark off a tree. And it shocked the country. 

It was a risky move. [The Rev. Martin Luther] King wasn’t sure he was for it. King and Bevel actually have a confrontation about this. King says, “They’re children.” And Bevel says, “They’re believers. They go to church. I’ve taught them nonviolence. If they can be members of the church, they can march.”

You write given that the civil rights movement relied heavily on nonviolence, it might be jarring to think of it in military terms – but did Black leaders often invoke this analogy? 

This is actually one of the themes of the book – that nonviolent resistance is not passive resistance. It’s confrontational resistance. It’s aggressive. It’s saying, “Anytime we get attacked, we respond – but we respond in our own fashion.”

Nonviolent philosophy emphasizes the importance of reconciliation. What do you think the civil rights movement could teach the U.S. military about this?

One thing that I think the movement was better at than the U.S. military is reconciliation – what the military would call Phase 4, or the endgame.

After the Montgomery, [Alabama], bus boycott [having won their yearlong fight to desegregate], Black organizers assigned two ministers to ride each line during rush hour to monitor the behavior of their own people. [Dr. King instructed his victorious followers to resume riding the buses with courtesy, Mr. Rick writes, and advised anyone who couldn’t quite do that to “walk for another week or two.”] It’s teaching not only the other side, but your side how to live under the changed circumstances.

In Birmingham, a bitterly divided city – really the Gettysburg of the civil rights movement in 1953, 100 years after Gettysburg – it was all about the endgame from the beginning.

One of the things Black activists did, when they won an agreement to integrate segregated restaurants, would be to call ahead to the restaurant and say, “We’re thinking of coming in for a meal tomorrow. What time would be convenient for you?”

This did a couple of things: It was in simple human terms polite – why cause trouble for people? It was also a way of saying, “We’re coming in. This isn’t theoretical. This is really going to happen.”

What that also did was train the white population to live with integration. Think of the brilliance of that: The last phase of your operation is to train the opposition. 

It’s not going to be everybody embracing each other, but it’s seeking a form of human reconciliation: “We are trying to find a way we can live together in a different way – and we will work to make that happen.”

How did you feel about being a white historian writing the story of a movement of predominantly Black civil rights leaders – did anything about that give you pause?

That’s a good question, and one I mulled as I researched and wrote this book. The obvious answer is that the civil rights movement brought about one of the most important social revolutions in American history, and so should be of interest to all Americans.

But there’s more to it than that. 

I think that looking at the movement through this military lens underscores how much work and courage went into [it], and how much it achieved. I think many readers will be both inspired and moved by the stories about people like Diane Nash, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, and others.