Waging a Good War
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 advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization—the hallmarks of any successful military campaign.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2025–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Tomas Rick's Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-68 should be required reading at this point
https://www.amazon.com/Waging-Good-War-Military-1954-1968/dp...
Ricks kinda beats a dead horse as he goes over and over again that non-violence is not unaggressive. It is typically quite militant when done well.
Non violence is a tactic, one that is typically better at achieving results than violence, as it tends to change the other side that is violent to adjust down to non violence as well. Like getting a drunk to be quieter by whispering to them (Note: that is a poor analogy).
Rick's book is just so very good and my poor internet comment can't possibly do it justice. He convinced me that the Civil Rights movement is so big because it gave the US a brand new tool in conflicts. It's not just violence or submission anymore.
- I am a resident of the Twin Cities and I agree wholeheartedly with this perspective. I found reading the book Waging A Good War very educational about the deliberate, strategic use of nonviolence by the American Civil Rights Movement and its ultimate triumph as a means to win support and achieve social change. It was a clear and inspiring parallel for me during the worst times of this year so far.
- The book Brett uses as his main source, Waging A Good War, is an incredible book that I strongly recommend. It treats the Civil Rights movement as a military campaign and analyzes it from the perspective of a military historian.
Not in the sense that it was viewed as a war by the protestors, but in the sense that the logistics, training, and operations of the Civil Rights movement were a well oiled machine that looked like a well organized, but nonviolent, army (including counterexamples where there was no organization).
One of the most memorable details is how James Lawson trained in nonviolence under Ghandi and came over to train protestors in nonviolent tactics. They gathered in church basements to scream insults and spit on each other to prepare for the restaurant sitins and other ops.
- Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 was really good. It looked at the history of the civil rights movement from the perspective of a military historian, analyzing each step as its own military campaign.
Before reading it I didn’t realize how much structure and organization went into the Civil Rights movement but the book goes over everything from the training of the “soldiers” in church basements, to the logistics of the ride shares that replaced the busses during the boycott.
- Absolutely. If I hadn't been assured there would be a lawyer afterwards (he represented us as a group btw), I wouldn't have done it...
I strongly recommend that anyone doing civil disobedience join up with an organization which can provide training, logistical support, and at least some degree of legal support. The first two are if anything even more important given that these situations tend to be chaotic and tense. The book Waging a Good War documents the intensive training that activists underwent during the civil rights movement which was crucial for their success.
Of course the situation is much more lawless now in places like Minneapolis and ICE is much more undisciplined than the police, which makes civil disobedience much more challenging and dangerous. That just makes training and legal aid all the more necessary.
