In Waging a Good War, best-selling 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 note the surprising affinities between that ethos and the organized pursuit of success at war.
The greatest victories for Black aAmericans of the past century, he stresses, were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization — the hallmarks of any successful military campaign.
Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events and overlooked aspects of America’s civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change — and one that offers vital lessons for our own time.
