Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 127

How to Get From
Bravery to Victory
A former war correspondent sees the civil rights
movement as a kind of military campaign-
and helps us envision how to win
the current war for democracy.
By Debra Dickerson
W
here did they find the courage? What makes someone who is hated, hunted, and
hounded by their country intentionally bring down more of the same, or worse, on
their head? Their community's? The whites of the civil rights movement, what made them
walk away from their privileged lives to tramp through southern fields of strange fruit, asking
the oppressed to court more abuse, while wondering if each day would be their muchless-privileged
last? For many of us with the survivor's guilt of having been unable or unwilling
to participate or who never experienced Jim Crow, this question is the distillation of
all the books, movies, statues, and Black History Months: How did they find the courage?
Thomas Ricks, the veteran war correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner, and prolific and
best-selling author, has a different question in his new book, Waging a Good War: How did
they win-like, specifically? In only about 13 years, the movement made an actual democracy
of America in which nearly all those eligible could vote. But 60 years later, unreconstructed
Republicans have reversed much of those gains and aren't nearly done with their
anti-democratic blitzkrieg. So how, Ricks wondered, do we identify and replicate the tactics
and strategies forged at Dixie lunch counters that changed the world? Ricks shows us
how to get from bravery to victory over today's peculiar institution, the modern GOP.
My question is wide-eyed with reverence, his squinty-eyed with purpose. Yet their answers
are the same. Dismayed with America's fervid re-embrace of voter suppression
and the racial gerrymander, Ricks immersed himself in the movement that defeated
structural tyranny once, he says, and found himself " 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. Problems
I was familiar with from covering military operations in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan,
and Iraq, and from writing books about World War II and the conflicts in Korea
and Vietnam, were all addressed in careful, systematic ways by those in the civil rights
movement-recruiting, training, planning, logistics, communications, and more. 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 frontal assault at Selma. "
" Witnessing " that crusade through Ricks's " war reporting " answered the wide-eyed question:
The movement's foot soldiers found the courage to put their lives on the line because,
in a world carefully constructed to make them feel small, stupid, unworthy, and afraid, the
movement believed in them. We know it believed in them because it invested everything
in them, much as the U.S. military does today with minorities (and as it did with me, a
working-class Black woman who rose through the enlisted ranks of the Air Force to become
an intelligence officer). Recruiters' dependence on volunteers required them to both embrace
whoever showed up and believe that they had what it took. So everyone in the student
Washington Monthly 127
Waging a Good War: A Military
History of the Civil Rights
Movement, 1954-1968
by Thomas E. Ricks
Macmillan, 448 pp.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2022