[This new examination of the civil rights movement considers it in
terms of a military-style campaign.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

A COMPELLING MILITARY HISTORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS FIGHT  
[[link removed]]


 

Charles Kaiser
October 9, 2022
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This new examination of the civil rights movement considers it in
terms of a military-style campaign. _

,

 

Waging a Good War
A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
Thomas E. Ricks
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374605162

Thomas E Ricks has written a sweeping history of the civil rights
movement of the 1960s, retelling many of its moments of triumph and
tragedy, from the Montgomery bus boycott spawned by the courage of
Rosa Parks in 1955 to the bodies bloodied and broken by Alabama
troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge 10 years later.

The stories are familiar but Ricks is the first author to mine this
great American saga for its similarities to a military campaign.
James Lawson, a key figure in training a cadre of influential movement
leaders, called it “moral warfare”. Cleveland Sellers said the
1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi “was almost like a
shorter version” of the Vietnam war. Ricks points out that “the
central tactic of the movement – the march – is also the most
basic of military operations”.

But the greatest value of this compelling account lies in its capacity
to remind us how a relatively small group of intelligent, determined,
disciplined and incredibly courageous men and women managed after
barely a decade of pitched battles to transform the US “into a
genuine democracy” for the very first time.

As Martin Luther King
[[link removed]] Jr remarked,
the attempt to undo the ghastly effects of the 90-year campaign after
the civil war to keep Black Americans effectively enslaved became an
effort to “redeem the soul of America”.

The crucial ingredient was the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma
Gandhi. Ricks writes that it was “at the core” of how the movement
“attracted people and prepared them for action”. It was the
dignity of the marchers, who declined to counter-attack the hoodlums
who viciously attacked them, that would gradually “catch the
attention of the media, and thereby the nation”.

As Gandhi explained it, nonviolence did not “mean meek submission to
the will of the evil doer”. It meant “the pitting of one’s whole
soul against the will of the tyrant”. As an American disciple
explained, “Your violent opponent wants you to fight in the way to
which he is accustomed. If you adopt a method wholly new to him, you
have thus gained an immediate tactical advantage.”

Lawson compared the strategy to “what Jesus meant when he said
‘turn the other cheek’. You cause the other person to do the
searching … We will not injure you, but we will absorb your injury
… because the cycle of violence must be broken. We want the cycle of
violence in America and racism stopped.”

Early in the Montgomery protest, after a bomb exploded on the porch of
King’s house, “filling the front room with smoke and broken
glass”, the budding leader demonstrated his commitment. When
supporters gathered, he ordered, “Don’t get your weapons. We are
not advocating violence.” Go home, he said, “and know that all of
us are in the hands of God.”

King said Montgomery “did more to clarify my thinking on the
question of nonviolence than all of the books I had read … Many
issues I had not cleared up intellectually were now solved in the
sphere of practical action.”
As in a conventional war, martyrs played a vital role in inspiring
soldiers. Nearly all of the students who led sit-ins at Nashville
lunch counters had visions in their head of Emmett Till, the
14-year-old boy who was tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955,
after being accused of offending a white woman.

During Freedom Summer, in Mississippi in 1964, the brutal murders of
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
[[link removed]]
became the turning point in the campaign to get the federal government
to transform the nation.

Two of the victims were white. Ricks writes: “The simple, hard fact
was that the American media and public cared more about killings of
whites than of blacks. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee’s hard calculation about white lives mattering more than
Black ones had been confirmed … It was no different from Winston
Churchill celebrating the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”

But the most influential martyrs of all were John Lewis and 140 fellow
marchers who were brutally attacked as they tried to march from Selma
to Montgomery. The images blanketed network television, leading
directly to Lyndon Johnson’s speech before Congress one week later
in which he electrified the nation by declaring: “We shall
overcome.” Just four months later the president signed the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, one of the movement’s two most significant
legislative accomplishments.

“Now you were having brought into every American living room … the
brutality of the situation,” remembered Bayard Rustin, one of the
key architects of King’s March on Washington. “I think that if we
had television 50 years earlier, we would have gotten rid of lynching
50 years earlier.”

Ricks does a tremendous job of putting the reader inside the hearts
and souls of the young men and women who risked so much to change
America. In just three months in Mississippi in summer 1964, there
were at least six murders, 80 beatings, 35 shootings and 35 church
bombings, not to mention policemen who routinely put guns to the heads
of protesters and cocked them without firing.

 
“There were incipient nervous breakdowns walking all over Greenwood,
Mississippi,” Sally Belfrage wrote to a friend. Her roommate, Joanne
Grant, said it was an understatement to say she was frightened most of
the time. And yet, “as with all of us, it was the best time in my
life. I felt we were changing the world.”
Ricks of course points out all the reversals of this progress
accomplished by disastrous supreme court decisions and hatred
rekindled by Donald Trump. He ends by calling for a “third
reconstruction”, a new “focused effort to organize, train, plan,
and reconcile”.

I only hope this riveting account of the glorious exploits of so many
civil rights pioneers will inspire a new generation to make that
gigantic organizational effort.

 

_Charles Kaiser is the author of 1968 in America
[[link removed]], The
Gay Metropolis
[[link removed]] and
most recently The Cost of Courage.
[[link removed]]_

* The Civil Rights Movement
[[link removed]]
* Violence
[[link removed]]
* Nonviolence
[[link removed]]
* creative nonviolence
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]