The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks #1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks offers a new take on the Civil Rights Movement, stressing its unexpected use of military strategy and its lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world. In Waging a Good War, bestselling 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 Americans 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. An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the movement’s triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive, resistance – involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement’s adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool―the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new understanding of the Movement’s later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. 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.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, I'm Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we won.

We're so happy to have you back again. Thank you for tuning in as well to The Chris Vossshow.com. Hey, we won. We're so happy to have you back again. Thank you for tuning in as well to The Chris Foss Show, the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, the best kind of family there is. Today we have a returning author on the show. Thomas E. Ricks is on the show with us again. He was here, I think, a year or two for his book, First Principles, What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans

and How That Shaped Our Country. Brilliant discussion with him then. His newest book that's coming out October 4th, 2022, Waging a Good War, A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement is coming out very soon. You can pre-order it now

and be the first of your book club to read it. We'll be talking with him about his amazing new book, his insight, his research, and all the work he put into it and stuff that you can learn from his brilliance. Before we get to him, though, be sure to further share with your family, friends, and relatives. As always, go to youtube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss.

Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places. The TikToks are going on there as well. He is an amazing author. He's the author of multiple bestselling books, including First Principles, The Generals, and Fiasco, which was a number one New York Times bestseller and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A member of two Pulitzer Prize

winning teams in his years at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. He's been called the Dean of Military Correspondence. He lives in Maine and Texas. Welcome to the show, Thomas. How are you? I'm wonderful. I appreciate you having me back.

I appreciate you coming back. Thank you very much. And Waging a Good War, a Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954 to 1968, I should add, comes out October 4th. What motivated you to want to write this book, sir? Well, first of all, my wife was in the Civil Rights Movement. She was president of the High School Friends of SNCC, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the more radical civil rights groups of the 1960s. She was president of the Walkman, D.C. area chapter.

And all our lives, we've been driving along in 30 years of marriage, listening to something, a podcast like yours. Somebody would be talking about the Civil Rights Movement or some veteran of it, and she'd say, oh, I knew that guy, or I dated that guy. And so I was reading about the Civil Rights Movement, partly to understand better who these people were that she talked about. You know, the time she picked up John Lewis at the train station and he said, I've got to go to McDonald's. You have to go to McDonald's.

And as I was reading these books, I thought, wow, this was a war. This had all the aspects of war. And one reason the civil rights movement succeeded in changing America in just 10 years, probably the most successful social movement in the history of the United States, was it took a militant approach. That is, it resembled the military. It used a lot of the basic military tools, recruiting, training, preparation, logistics. So, for example, when you saw a demonstration, that was the result often of months of preparation before the sit-ins in Nashville and other cities to desegregate lunch counters.

They did months of training. They did role play. They'd sit, pretending they were at the lunch counter, while other activists in training would slug them, pour coffee on them, and taunt them. And then they'd reverse, and the people who were playing the attackers then became the protesters.

Before the Freedom Brides in 1961, they did scouting missions, a military operation. They actually sent people out to do reconnaissance, draw maps of bus stations that illegally were violating federal law at that point, you had to desegregate interstate travel. But in the South, the buses and the bus stations were remaining segregated. So they went out and studied those. They sent this kid, Tom Gaither, a young man, to go out, basically, gather intelligence. In what cities was the racial atmosphere most tense? He reported back, you're going to have problems in Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama. Wow. Anniston, their bus got burned, and Montgomery, the police

disappeared and left them to the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan. Wow. Beat the hell out of these people for 15 minutes with clubs, chains, and anything else that came to hand. So there's a very military approach to this. It's very militant.

It's aggressive. It's not passive resistance. It's nonviolent confrontational resistance. My favorite example of the confrontation is James Bevel, a smart young strategist who comes out of Nashville. He was in the pulpit once giving a sermon. He's a minister. He's in a pulpit of a small town church in Georgia on Sunday morning.

And at the back of the church, the local sheriff walks in smoking a cigar, kind of disrespectful in church. Devil, not missing a beat in the pulpit, says, and the devil will be watching you. Now, God makes sure the devil always gives you a signal. Sometimes the devil, he always gives you a signal. Sometimes, the devil, he'll be smoking a cigar. Everybody in the church

laughs. This is so confrontational. The sheriff turns around and leaves. That night, the church is burned. This was a tough, difficult situation. Being in this movement was like being in a war. And these are American heroes

who should be better known. People like James Bevel, Diane Nash, Dorothy Cox, Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fred Shuttlesworth. These people should be our post-it stamps. There you go. And you profile them in the book as well. I love Fred Shuttlesworth. He's tenacious. He's almost the opposite of Martin Luther King. Fred Shuttlesworth is a minister in Birmingham, a former moonshiner, very tough, very pugnacious. He's bombed twice, not once coming to Birmingham, the local white power structure calls in Fred Schottlesworth and says, Reverend Schottlesworth, you've got to help us out here. How can we keep Martin Luther King out of town? Fred Schottlesworth says, you know, I was bombed twice. Nobody taught me that. Now you want to bomb.

These people are incredible. Yeah. And so you call it a good war. One of the things that's interesting is they use a lot of nonviolent protests. So even though they were waging a war-like strategies and tactics with planning, logistics, and stuff like that, they were still nonviolent. They kind of took on, I think, didn't Martin Luther King take on some of Gandhi's attitudes towards being nonviolent? Very much. Gandhi is a huge influence on Martin Luther King, on James Bevel. The movement had learned and absorbed and studied Gandhi.

For example, James Lawson, who was the trainer for the sit-in students in Nashville, Tennessee in 1960. Lawson was a young black seminarian. He'd actually been to jail as a conscientious objector. After being in jail, he went to India to study Gandhi. And he tells that, and he's teaching role-playing and how to do this stuff. For example, in role-playing, you learn to lose the fight-or-flee impulse, and it's dead to stay. Wow.

The nonviolence was key to this. It was militant nonviolence. It wasn't past resistance. Oh, wow. It confronted, like Beville confronted that sheriff. It was confronting the power structure again and again. They bomb you today, you march that afternoon. You hold on.

But it is a good war, and it was smart tactically as well as morally. By waging a non-violent war, they flummoxed the system of segregation. Remember the South, the system of segregation, like the system of slavery, stood on violence. Slavery was, at its base, a violent approach. S violent approach slavery said if you don't do what we tell you we will whip you we will chain you we might rape you if you run away we will cut off your toes and we will kill you if we have to well the non-violent movement says if you go with violence you're speaking their language. The Southern white power structure, the dominant caste, speaks violence fluently.

But when you take a nonviolent approach, you're constantly surprising them. One of the things they taught was somebody spits in your face, ask him for a handkerchief. Other times that human impulse will, and so there actually is an instance in Nashville, a guy spits in a guy's face. And he says, sir, do you have a handkerchief?

And the man reaches for his handkerchief and then sticks and says, hell no. For that one moment, he had been reached as a human being. So the nonviolent approach constantly surprised them. They didn't really know how to deal with it, especially this very confrontational, not mild, that grabs and says, no. The root of this is something that Diane Nash said in Nashville. She's 20 years old, young woman in Nashville, part of the civilian movement, and becomes very good at strategy. Now, she describes it. The basic question, she says, the first question of strategy is who are we?

Her answer, and the answer for a lot of people was, we are people who will no longer live with segregation. Now, you may have to kill us, but that's on you. That's not on us. We don't live with segregation anymore. We have changed ourselves. So that first question is both self-liberating, you define yourself, but also leads to a strategy. If we're people who no longer tolerate segregation, what does that mean?

It means we don't recognize it. It means you may throw us in jail, you may beat us, you may kill us, but no. And that chain is so striking because the system has no answer for it, especially when it is televised nationally. That's what I was going to ask you. I mean, I think one of the big things that the proponents that really changed the American sentiment on slavery and civil rights was seeing on TV, you know, the Birmingham Bull Connor whips and dogs and stuff they said on. And people could see the effect of a bully and the horror of what was going on on TV. And that evidently really changed the sentiment. How much did you find that had an effect?

You know, that's absolutely right. It was very important. I think a couple of things come together here. Three things. First, you have a million black things come together here. Three things. First, you have a million black veterans coming home from World War II. They'd seen the big world out there, and they'd seen that

there were other ways to approach life than segregation. Second, in the 1950s, the Southern Black Church steps up for the first time, and that gives this new movement a home. It gives it a command and control structure. It gives it a place where they can meet securely.

Because remember, there are no black officials. There's no black politicians holding office anywhere. But the Black Church provides a secure headquarters for this new movement. So the veterans come together with the younger black ministers, and of those black ministers. Ralph Albert is a veteran. There are other veterans like Gamzee Moore, who's like a resistance fighter in Mississippi. Med What you see in Birmingham, as you mentioned, is children are out demonstrating, and they fill the jails. There are 2,000 kids in jail in Birmingham. Wow. And the movement rolls out some more kids. And because the jails are full, Bill Connor, the head of police and firefighters in Birmingham,

says, well, I'm just going to deter them from marching. And he turns on them, the police dogs, and the fire hoses. These are powerful fire hoses. So strong, they will strip the bark off a tree. And in fact, one young girl recalls when it hit her and it tore out her hair. Jesus. They're rolled down the street by these fire hoses. And the South, remember, has been telling the rest of the country, don't worry.

We know how to handle black people. We're familiar with them. They're like family to us. But instead, the South shows the true face of segregation, that it rests on a base of violence. And this is on TV, and it shocks the nation, and indeed shocks President Kennedy, who after that demonstration, for the first time, really commits to serious change in civil rights.

It's really amazing that it had to take us bringing TV and putting video to it to invoke change. And of course, we've seen with civil rights and, and, you know, recently with George Floyd killing, how video and, and bringing, bringing that to people so that they can, you know, people, I guess, gain more empathy from video. And, and, you know, it's, it's, when you see something with your eyes, you can't, you can't, it's hard to ignore it. You, you, you profile John Lewis in the book and kind of give him a new refocus. So talk to us a little bit about that, please.

John Lewis is one of the better-known heroes that comes out of the Civil Rights Movement. He's a young kid growing up in central Alabama, poor, picking cotton, gets himself into a seminary institute in Nashville, which I think cost about $45 a semester. He pays his way by working as a janitor. He gets involved in the early sit-ins. He's trained by that guy I mentioned, James Lawson, in Gandhian nonviolence. And then later, he's involved in the Freedom Rides and, of course, at Selma. Very typical of that group. Young, very disciplined, practitioners of aggressive, militant nonviolence. Similar, actually, to Bob Moses, a guy who should be better known. Bob Moses leads the Freedom Summer, the campaign in Mississippi in the summer of 1964,

which is almost as close to a conventional ground war as the civil rights movement comes. They send 1,000 young white college students from the North, Ivy League students, privileged kids, into rural Mississippi. And Mississippi really is like a war that summer. Churches are burned. People are shot. Houses are bombed. This is going on constantly.

Bob Moses leads this campaign, and they crack the toughest state in the country, Mississippi. Martin Luther King's group, the SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had found Mississippi really too hard. Bob Moses said, that's an opportunity for us. We're younger, we're more radical, we can take a hit. And they went and they took lots of hits. Moses, one day early in Mississippi, is riding in a car with another guy, and they get some machine gun.

The driver gets hit in the neck. A.45 caliber, some 19 bullets hit the car as this other car drives by. It really was like a war for them. They're heroes. And the one reason I wrote the book was I found their stories so compelling. There were dozens of stories like this in the book. Also, for me, as an old war correspondent, there was something really wonderful in writing about what I thought of as a good war.

These are good people doing very difficult things that changed this country for the better. And after writing about things like the war in Iraq, it was such a relief. For other books, I've had to kind of drag myself to the writing table in the morning. This book was like a magnet. It pulled me in. In fact, I think of the eight books I've written, I enjoy this the most, and I think it's the best written book I've produced. Wow. I think books I finally learned how to write well. And this is pretty interesting. James Lawson is a pastor. He's still alive. He's 94 years old.

He spoke at John Lewis's recent funeral, rest his soul. And yeah, it's great that the historians break this down so that they educate people. You know, we've had so many great authors on the show. I didn't understand what Martin Luther King meant when he said, you know, we don't sit with each other on Sunday. And I didn't understand the history of the white church and the black church. And I remember, I can't remember who I had on the show, but one author, I pulled it up and saw the white churches that had the KK members sitting in the back standard there, the pews. And I was just like, wow. And I didn't understand the rise of the black church and how important that was. And you've made me understand with the book why they were burning those churches, because those were the central meeting and planning that they were doing for this

good war, as you put it. And behind King, something that really fascinated me in doing my research, there were a group of black theologians, Howard Thurman and others, who really constructed a black liberation theology early in the 19th century before world war ii i think it was thurman who said famously america is full of churches yet hardly one of them is christian yeah still and he says we need to think about jesus as someone defending the poor and the oppressed they kind of read how they want to think about Christianity. And, of course, King famously said that his single biggest surprise and disappointment was the failure of the white Southern church to come to the aid of the civil rights movement. He said, can you assume that white Christian churches would say, yeah, this is the right thing?

Wow. And he said it was a terrible disappointment to him. He writes about this in his letter from Birmingham jail, which I think is one of the great documents of American history. Anybody who hasn't read it should look it up and read it. He's great to support me. And he says, I understand the KKK. I understand the white militant segregationist.

He said, what I don't understand is the white moderates who constantly say, you're moving too fast. I agree with your goals, but not your methods. He said, my methods are my goals. Nonviolence is our approach. Nonviolence is our goal in the end. Nonviolence also change. Yeah. We're going too fast. That was such a beautiful letter. And I think the quote I cited where we don't sit together on Sunday, I can't remember the beauty of the exact quote. It escapes me. But, you know, James Baldwin wrote, said, you know, how long do I have to wait? You always want us to wait.

Like, how long do we have to wait? It also was shocking. I mean, Baldwin, I think, is the one who meets with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And Kennedy is saying, I could see maybe a black president in a hundred years. And Baldwin's response is, your family got off the boat 50 years ago. The Kennedys

are rarely, heavily recent Irish immigrants. My people have been here hundreds of years. Don't tell us. Maybe in a century. We're tired of waiting. We're tired of that. That's not going to happen in England. They take control of their own destiny. I'm glad you mentioned Baldwin. I think increasingly, he is becoming the most important American writer of the 20th century. And, you know,

all the people that I was taught in college when I was an English literature major, nobody ever mentioned James Baldwin. It's odd. I don't know why. I don't have a good explanation for it, that my professors at Yale did not recognize that that writer was the important writer of our time. Yeah, we had Eddie Glaude Jr. on the show a couple years ago, I think a couple years ago, for his book Begin Again. And what an amazing book and profile. But, you know, the sad and interesting, insightful thing that you can do which is about anything james baldwin wrote or said is you can literally cut and paste it from 1950 1960s or you know he was even talking in the 70s you could literally cut and paste it and apply it today 70 years later and we're it's the same it's the same problems the same the same problems, the same issues. I mean, especially when you look at

January 6th, when we have a Confederate flag inside of the rotunda. Points on that, that struck me again and again as I was thinking on this. First, yes, absolutely. A lot of the things that were issues then are issues now. So, King and the SCLC

are very much about voters' rights. And Kim Sumner has two basic impulses. Educate young black Mississippians on what their civil rights are and get people to register to vote. And that fight is still going on today. Stacey Abrams, to me, down in Georgia, has inherited that mantle of King. She's working on voters' rights.

The second thing is, somewhat more radically, is Black Lives Matter. Focus more on police abuses, which reminds me a lot of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was focused on how the white power structure was holding down black people and abusing them with the police as the leading edge of that. So these fights live on. But one connection here, and you mentioned January 6th, that's the second point I want to make on this.

The direct connection is this. I just love this. Who is the chairman of the January 6th committee? Benny Thompson, congressman from Mississippi. Benny Thompson is a congressman from Mississippi because of Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer gets thousands of people to register. Then the Voting Rights Act, which follows on to Freedom Summer, gets many more Black Mississippians to register. Benny Thompson, a young man at the time, becomes mayor of his town in 1973, beginning his career in politics. So the head of the January

6th Committee is in that position because of a life that was changed by Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Wow. It's just extraordinary what takes place during that time and how you document it. You know, a lot of people look at these historical books like this and they go, you know, it's history, whatever. I always say this is my quote. The one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. And we just go in these circles. That's why James Baldwin is still relevant in everything he said today. In fact, yesterday, I just posted an article from the Washington Post. Jennifer Rubin, columnist, wrote a great article and a study, which I think was from PRI, which we've also had Robert, I forget his last name, from PRI on the

show for his books. But they found that they did a study of the republicans democrats they found that nearly nine and ten white republicans 87 support efforts to preserve the legacy of the confederacy my god you know i sat there i sat there watching that confederate flag in the rotunda on january 6th and i went my god we haven't settled the freaking Civil War? I mean, I'm just dumbfounded. We haven't settled the Civil War. There is still, I would say, a significant portion of American society, perhaps 10%, perhaps 20%, that has no problem with white nationalism.

Which is to say, white people defining what the country is, enforcing their view of the country, and imposing it on others through control of power. And if they can't win that power democratically, then they will win it fraudulently. They will pack the Supreme Court. They will gerrymander districts. So even though you have states like Mississippi that have large black populations, there was only one black congressman from Mississippi because they basically have divided it up in a way that takes away political power from the black voter. So this is an ongoing fight in this country about whether we are going to be a genuine multiracial democracy.

And yet there's a big chunk of the country that doesn't believe in that. Fortunately, it is a minority. And the majority in this country has to stand up and say, no, we believe in the aspirations of this country. We believe in the Declaration of Independence. We believe in the Declaration of Independence. We believe in the rule of law. It's amazing to me that the Republican Party has gone from being law and order conservatives to really undermining law and order, attacking authority. The only law they seem to believe in is the Second Amendment, which is a bit of a joke. When Ronald Reagan was governor of California,

he supported gun control. Why? Because the Black Panthers were carrying loaded weapons legally. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information

and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Yeah, it's really interesting.

And I think they've done that because they've learned that, you know, they can get out their base better with fear than without. And, you know, they've really built up this thing. And we're really heading towards a fascist sort of thing, in my opinion. Because if you can't win elections by cheating the system or doing whatever you you resort to violence i mean in her poll her ppis or pri's poll they found that the highest of the core of today's gop and magma movement has the highest structural racism measure among demographics surveyed white evangelical protestants have the highest median score at 0.64. Latter-day Saints, Catholics, and mainline Protestants, median 0.55. So just incredibly high rates of things.

And you see the Republican politicians preying on the fears of people on what do they call it? White rage or white. It's basically that whites will lose power by 2050. A sense of white victimization. Fortunately, as I said, they are a minority in this country. The vast majority of people in this country want a genuine democracy where people are treated equally as full citizens with the right to vote. The problem with that is the hard right, the reactionary right, recognizing it can't win at the ballot box, is seeking other ways to hold and exercise power. And we have to draw a bright line here. Political violence is illegal, it's wrong, and it's un-American.

And I say that for the left and the right. Right now, it's the right that's the real problem. Fox News tends to emphasize the left supposedly burning down American cities. I keep on thinking, does any of the viewers ever see an American city? Yeah. And the fact of the matter is the people who were there at the Capitol on January 6th were not left-wingers. They were people tearing Confederate flags, and they were people attacking uniformed

police officers. Yeah. I had a famed radio host, Tom Hartman, on the show. He's been on several times just recently, actually. And I remember having him on a week after January 6th. And he said to me at the end of the show, he goes, you know what, January 6th, what they call January 6th, don't you? And I go, what? He goes, rehearsal. He goes, that's a warm-up. And I about fell out of my chair, and I think about it ever since. I can tell you, though, I disagree with that assessment for this reason. I was terrified after January 6th.

I thought that that was the beginning. I thought we would see things like attacks on federal judges. I thought we'd see nullification juries saying, no, we won't convict people despite overwhelming evidence of guilt. We haven't seen that. We haven't seen states refuse federal authority. What we have seen instead is the judicial system standing up. So you have more than 50 cases of fraud brought before judges who is handling the evidence and say, get out of here. You have no evidence of fraud. You have this former president alleging the election was stolen.

And then again, the judicial system saying, no, there is no evidence of that. We are a country based on laws and production of evidence. So I've been kind of pleasantly surprised by the lack of follow-up on January 6th. And it leads me to think that these people don't have the courage of their convictions. And this actually leads me back to the Civil Rights Movement. The people in the Civil Rights Movement were willing to go to jail for their profound belief in the country and the need to change the country put us in jail if that's what you need to do the law is wrong and here we are to give testimony these people the january 6 people when faced with the prospect of jail started wailing and weeping no one could ask You know, dudes, if you really believe that the country is being stolen from you, that this is a matter of life and death, act like it.

They don't. They wanted to be able to commit crimes and get away with it because they don't think law and order is for them. They think it's for other people. And I think the real lack of follow-up shows that this is really an empty threat. Yet these people talk civil war, but they don't really do it. And again, the civil rights movement was all about preparation. They spent months preparing for demonstrations. They didn't just say, let's go invade that building.

Let's cause chaos. Every demonstration had a purpose, had a message, had a meaning. When the teachers in Selma, Alabama demonstrated, they carried their toothbrushes with them. What were they saying? Number one, we're teachers. We are public employees. We know we are putting

our jobs, our livelihood at threat here. At danger here. Second, we're carrying our toothbrushes because we are willing to go to jail for what we believe. Those are people who were trained, disciplined, and understood the message.

January 6th, basically, that was a right-wing, they just thought they were going to have a fun time, you know, and let's go pick crap in the Capitol. Well, they took a crap on America. They did. They did. They did. And I hope you're right.

I don't like the planning that's gone into, you know, having these new recorders in office that can fuck with the vote, the legislations that have changed that, and, you know, the sort of craziness that can come from that. But you're right. I mean, and there were people like Martin Luther King who were willing to die for the country. King fully expected. One of the most striking anecdotes.

There are many stories in this book that just bring tears to my eyes. One is a Hollywood producer once took the king aside and said, I'm interested in doing a biopic about Martin Luther King's story. And during the conversation, he said lightheartedly, well, I'm not sure how this would end. And King said, I know how it ends. I get killed. Jesus. Imagine living with that knowledge. I know how it ends.

Yet, and he continues on. Yeah. He goes to Memphis. This is a man who got death threats every day of his life for 10 years. The amount of courage and fortitude it took in faith. This is one thing we should talk about is the faith of these people. This was a movement, really Christianity. They used Gandhian methods, but the foundation was Christian.

I love that King, again and again in his speeches ends by quoting from the book of amos he said and eventually righteousness will flow down like water and he believed that and that's why he was willing to sacrifice his life and the moral cause that all men are created equal or that in in some cases people like him believe that god created all men and even bull connor was a human being another moment in the book that i was just thinking about last night it's this young man freeman have browsed despite his last name he's a young black man in birmingham i think he was 12 years old at the time but quite bright and he was in high school and he was actually leader of a group and he led a group to pray on the steps of the city hall in Birmingham.

And Bo Conner, the police chief, happened to be standing there. And Conner looks down and says, what do you want, little nigger? And Hrabowski looks up and says, sir, we came to pray. Conner spits in his face. Wow. Freeman Hrabowski grows up to become a great college president. I don't know if you've ever looked at the University of Maryland, Baltimore campus. Oh, wow. He takes that college over and turns it into a powerhouse. One of the things I love about him is he said,

we're not going to have a football team. We're going to have a chess team and it's going to be the best chess team in America. And he recruits for the chess team, like other colleges recruit for football teams. And he puts together a great chess team, like other colleges recruit for football teams. And he puts together a great chess team. Again and again, he does that sort of thing. My daughter went there and I was interested. When she graduated, he said, I want everybody in the crowd here who worked a job while they were in college here to put up your hand. And like half the crowd puts up a hand.

He said, okay, I want everybody who worked two jobs simultaneously to stand up with the hand in the air. And about a quarter stand up with the hand in the air. And he said, and if any of you worked two jobs while raising two kids as a single mother, remain standing. And this one woman remained standing. Wow.

Two jobs, two kids in a college degree. So, Hrabowski confrontation this young man, this kid, confronting Will Connor, to me, it's like a hinge in American history. One era ends and another begins. Slavery and segregation end in that moment in some ways. Hrabowski becomes a great college president.

Yeah. Watching, seeing his body transported over, over the, was it the Selma Bridge? Do I have that right? The Selma Hayek Bridge? Selma Hayek Bridge. My God.

It's Friday, man. The brain's completely gone out. I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's the,

watching it go across the bridge. It's the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Edmund Pettus Bridge. There we go. Confederate general. Yeah. See John Lewis's casket being carried across that. And then, of course, the juxtaposition, watching him being beaten down and almost killed. I think he got a concussion from it, didn't he? Yeah. Actually, one thing I love about my research is SNCCs in particular,

a student nonviolent coordinate committee, kept great records. one thing I love about my research is SNCCs, in particular, Student Nonviolent Coordinate Committee, kept great records. One of the things they had was people on pay telephones calling back to the office in Atlanta, just dictating what they were seeing. You can read all these transcripts now. And one of the things he says,

John Lewis has just been brought back into the church. He got knocked out. He has a hole in his head. I can see the hole. Jesus. And literally like a chunk of his skull. Yeah. He got knocked off by this extraordinarily vicious beating they were given. They had guys, posse men, on horses with lead-lined whips wrapped in barbed wire.

Jesus. But the ability of somebody like John Lewis to say, these are still human beings, and this is something that's important about the Civil Rights Movement, you've got to see them as human beings because at the end you have to live with them. The Civil Rights Movement, and this is one reason the military approach intrigues me, is better at strategy than I think the U.S. military is. The U.S. military, to me, is like a Ferrari without a steering wheel. Powerful engine, great tactically, but they don't have a steering wheel to get to where they want to go,

which kind of explains Iraq and Afghanistan. By contrast, the civil rights movement, from the very beginning of a campaign was thinking about the end. So in Birmingham, after they win the agreement to desegregate the restaurants downtown, they call ahead to the restaurants and say, Hi, we'd like to have some people come in for lunch tomorrow. What time would be convenient for you? First of all, this is polite. Second of all, it's a polite way of saying, hey, we're coming, giving notice. And third, it's a way of training the white community.

So the last thing you do, first you train your people and you win your victory, and then you train the opposition. But they also monitor their own. So in Montgomery, after the bus boycott successfully desegregates the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, they actually put monitors on the buses. They said, if you're not willing to ride politely, if you can't get on the bus without taunting the driver, you're not ready to ride. Keep walking. Wow. They put monitors on each bus to monitor the behavior of the black passengers and to say, let's learn how to do this right. Let's learn to live with these people. Look, we're all not going to be buddies. We're never going to like Bull Connor, but let's try to figure out a way to live with that.

Yeah. And that's a good example of what we should be trying to do now instead of trying to fight each other and still face this stupid war. The Civil War, can we just end it already and just learn to live each other and others' people? Some people don't want to give up the privilege of defining the nation. People who call themselves patriots. It's my backup because a real patriot supports America, supports America's challenges, supports the Constitution, supports not just the Second Amendment, but the First Amendment,

the right to peaceable assembly. So there are people who want to define America that, as you say, smells of fascism. They don't want to give up their power. They want to define what the country is on their own terms. They don't want other people to have political power, power to vote. By the way, nonviolence is a very American approach. What's the most nonviolent form of political power? The voting. And when you say, I don't want these people to vote, you are saying you don't want the American system to work.

Yeah. It's against democracy. It's frankly anti-American. Yeah. You know, people, the old House on American Activities, you know, do not support the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and equality of citizens. That might be an interesting thing. I think, you know, I see on right-wing watch these preachers that are just extraordinarily, I mean, they're not even preaching the gospel anymore from the pulpit. They're literally preaching politics.

They're almost like politics fairs than they are rallies than they are preaching. And you see why people are getting fired up and being told these lies and everything. So, you know, it's going to be really interesting. We're going to find out a lot what happens at the next election, who gets elected, whether or not the guardrails of democracy hold challenges, people's anger if their team doesn't win. I tell people all the time, my team is the constitution. I vote for a president that is, it's a relay race. And I vote for the president that's going to take the next four or eight years and take this democracy, this young democracy, to the next stage and pass it on to the next person.

And that's really what we should all be about. We should all be on Team America. It's the American experiment. And there is no guarantee that it lasts or that it succeeds. All of us have to recognize as citizens that we have a responsibility for tending this democracy. We have all been a genuine democracy, I think, since about 1968. And with the rise of money in politics, with the rulings on Citizens United, I worry that we are losing our hold on our democracy, that we're becoming increasingly an oligarchy

by the rich, the rich running politics. And we talked about this last time on my book, First Principles, the dollar becoming more important than the vote. So we inherited from our parents a democracy that is in some ways struggling, and we need to work on it. And it has to be a conscious effort by americans to support

things like free speech and i support free speech even repugnant speech from the right i do not support violence on the left or the right it is un-american and it needs to be yet hard exactly exactly i totally agree with you we are the stewards of this democracy. It's very young and very fragile democracy. Let's not blow it, you know? No, let's not blow it. And it can end overnight. I mean, you say Hungary fell pretty much as a democracy in 2020.

It can happen overnight. I think January after the last election, Trump genuinely was looking for ways to end the American democracy, knowing he really had lost the election. He knew for months he was going to lose the election, trying to figure out a way to hold on to power, even at the cost of destroying the American democracy. Yeah, we've had a lot of authors that have covered that too.

And I think Maggie Hamerman's new book that will be coming out in October, we're trying to have her on. We'll expose much of that too. It's been wonderful to have you on again thomas thank you very much for coming on we really appreciate it man you're welcome i appreciate it enjoyed the conversation thank you my myself as well give us your plugs your dot coms are people going to find out more about you on the interwebs you can follow me on the you can follow me on Twitter at TomRicks1, T-O-M-R-I-C-K-S, numeral one. Otherwise than that, I keep a pretty low profile. The best way to follow me is to go on Amazon

or to your local independent bookstore and to buy my book. There you go. Order the book wherever fine books are sold, folks. Don't go to those alleyway bookstores. You might get a tetanus shot and you'll need it. Waging a Good War, a military history of the civil rights movement 1954 to 1968 the year i was born 1968 not 1954 please

it ordered up wherever fine books are sold october 4th 2022 is coming out we'll definitely look forward to it amazing author thank you very much thomas for being on the show thanks to monics for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time and that should have