Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 128

movement got the same rigorous training
in Gandhian nonviolence, tactics, objectives,
communications, and the like. There was no
unorchestrated showing up and sitting at a
lunch counter, just as there is no sauntering
onto a battlefield. You could, and many did,
flunk out of movement training (usually for
being reckless or ambivalent about nonviolence,
though some left voluntarily, perhaps
when they were required to write their own
eulogies). Both groups value their foot soldiers
and their mission above all, and act
like it. At best, America says, " You can be
anything you want. Come back when you're
a success. " The movement and the military
said, " You can be anything you want, and
we're going to show you how. " Hence, minorities
overachieve in uniform far beyond
any other sector of society. Hence, the dispossessed
and poorly educated overturned
centuries of oppression by being what Dr.
Martin Luther King described as " the best
organized and most disciplined " -not the
ones who were the most religious or bore up
under suffering most nobly. Ricks tells us
King believed that everyone should be involved
in their own liberation and these students
were doing exactly that: " And in the
process, many were experiencing profound
personal transformations, discovering a
new sense of self-confidence. " He quotes Diane
Nash, the brilliant Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee strategist and
" battlefield commander " honored by President
Joe Biden on July 7: " The movement
had a way of reaching inside me and bringing
out things that I never knew were there, "
she said, " like courage, and love for people. "
Unbidden now, these college students-
most of them not old enough to vote at
the time-would write their wills and give
sealed letters to Nash before missions, like
deciding in advance to throw yourself on a
grenade if necessary. Such was the unit cohesion
and commitment their intense training
created. It is hard to believe, though, that
a bunch of teens and twentysomethings designed
a tac op like this sit-in: " [James] Lawson
... deployed 124 students to three downtown
lunch counters ... They were the civil
rights equivalent of paratroopers-an elite
force of volunteers, well trained and highly
motivated, stealthily dropping in on unsuspecting
targets ... A leader appointed for
each group would speak for it, and also keep
128 September/October 2022
an eye on those under his or her wing [that
is, a squad leader] ... they slipped into the
lunchrooms, sat down, and politely asked
for service ... Lawson deployed observers
with instructions for them to stay at the
edge of each protest. [They were] to keep a
detailed running account of what was happening,
to send information back to headquarters
via runners, and to call the police
when mobs attacked protesters [so they
couldn't claim they didn't know] ... 'We had
white people who stayed in the background
and out of place ... so if we needed to have
court witnesses and information ... we had
it in place.' "
Five days later, they deployed 200 students,
then 300, then 400. In one instance,
Lawson concentrated his forces at a single
lunch counter. After the students had
been beaten and tormented-without
reacting-and dragged away by the police,
" another wave, notified by observers
and runners, moved in to take their places. "
Flummoxed, the police stopped arresting
the students after the third wave. Unbeknownst
to them, several hundred more
students waited at a nearby church. In a
cellblock, a sharecropper's cabin, or a college
dorm, these shock troops went to bed
that night victorious over white supremacy.
They must have walked on air.
While one might (blasphemously) question
the students' tactical abilities, there's
little question that they did the strategizing
based on Mahatma Gandhi's teachings.
(Lawson, for instance, was himself a student
of Gandhi.) Ultimately, they were after
America's hearts and minds.
One of the few flaws in this book is that
Ricks makes too little of the fact that many
of the key leaders of the civil rights movement,
such as Medgar Evers and Hosea
Williams, were military veterans themselves.
Still, Ricks points out that the goal
of every nonviolent protest is reconciliation
(unlike the military), and to do that,
the movement had to show southern racists
the self-portrait of attack dogs and
bombed churches. But it didn't have to
be. During one sit-in, a white man spit in
protester Leo Lillard's face. " Sir, " Lillard
said, " do you have a handkerchief? " Reflexively,
the man reached toward his pocket,
then caught himself: " Hell no. " During
that same campaign, Diane Nash met with
Nashville's beleaguered, desperate mayor.
As Ricks reports, " Trying to connect as a
human being, she asked him in an almost
gentle voice whether discrimination based
on color is moral ... No, it is not, he conceded.
So, she said, should the lunch counters
be desegregated? 'Yes,' the mayor responded.
They shook hands. With that exchange,
the desegregation of Nashville began. "
The counterinsurgency was immediate
and enduring: George Wallace, Ronald Reagan,
Donald Trump. White flight. The assault
on voting, police abuse, and a form of
predatory capitalism that ought to twirl its
mustache. Even Bull Connor never stormed
the Capitol. Perhaps, though, this is how we
circle back to my original question.
Carl von Clausewitz, Ricks says, emphasized
the importance of understanding the
nature of the war one was fighting. The students
in the movement did this. While the
NAACP, for example, focused on litigation,
the students asked themselves, " Who are
we, and what are we trying to do? " The answer:
" We are people who would rather die
than tolerate subjugation. "
Tactically, according to Nash, this meant
that there would be an end to segregation.
She said in an interview, " One of the things
that I have learned over the years is that you
really can't change anyone but yourself, and
what we did in the South was change ourselves
from people who could be segregated
into people who could no longer be segregated.
The attitude became, 'Well, kill us if
that's what you're going to do, but you cannot
segregate us any longer.' " Pure Gandhi.
Ricks doesn't presume to explain how
the strategies of the civil rights movement
can be applied to the challenges of today,
just as your radiologist can diagnose but
not treat your cancer. But apply them we
must. We need to become the people who
won't have their votes stolen. Be murdered
by the police. Let our children be taught
Orwellian drivel. We need to find the language
and take the actions that can recruit
the recruitable while not dividing the majority
we represent. This book is Ricks's contribution;
the rest of us are morally bound
to find our own lunch counters to claim.
Debra Dickerson, a Washington Monthly editorial
advisory board member, is the author
most recently of The End of Blackness.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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