A bestselling author’s innovative history of the civil rights movement, stressing its unexpected affinities with military strategy and lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world.When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in 1955, she set the struggle for racial justice in America on a new and momentous course. Why did the civil rights movement in its heyday succeed in expanding rights and galvanizing a nation? And what lessons can today’s nonviolent activists learn from its practitioners’ strategies, tactics, and decisions made at key junctures?In Waging a Good War, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks presents new insight into America’s defining social justice campaign, using the unlikely prism of military history and thought. He deftly follows Martin Luther King Jr. and other key figures from one campaign to another, demonstrating that the philosophy of nonviolence was an active and even aggressive method of confronting foes and achieving victory. I
