The Daily Stoic - Thomas Ricks on the Greatest War in American History

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

Ryan talks to Thomas Ricks about his new book Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, the philosophical methods that guided the leaders in the civil rights movement, the grit that it took to fight for the promise made in the Declaration of Indepence, and more.Thomas Ricks is an American journalist and author who has won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting multiple times. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and A Soldier's Duty.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits

that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. I told you guys now I'm writing this book on justice. The third book in the Carnal Virtue series first was Courageous Calling. Next game discipline is destiny. Both those are available if you haven't read them. I would love for you too. But now I'm working on what I think is the most challenging but also the most inspiring of the

virtues. And I've just loved, I talked about this with my guest today, I've loved living with these characters because they make me a better person reading about Martin Luther King, reading about Gandhi, reading about Truman, reading about these figures from history that they make you bigger, they make you better. And so I've long been a fan of today's guest. His book First Principles, I've had him on the podcast twice to talk about is an incredible book. One of the few new titles that I have added to the painted porch, I've raved about it a bunch of times. If you want to study what the founders of America were studying as they started this country, you should go to the first principles. What their first principles were, what they were basing those ideas on.

And as it happens, it was a lot of Greek and Roman philosophy, including the Stokes. So Thomas Ricks who wrote the book, First Principles, I've loved, we've talked about it twice, but I would have read this new book, even if he wasn't going to come on the podcast, because it's just an incredible concept. It's called Waging a Good War, a military history of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954 to 1968. Just an incredible look at some incredible people. He makes the argument that actually those who participated in those civil rights protests, that was America's greatest war, not World War II, and that those the people who participated in it, they are our greatest generation, which is a really interesting way to think about it. And this is a book

that's not just a history of the civil rights movement, but is really a history of how the civil rights movement worked and what we can learn from it strategically, tactically, philosophically, culturally, how we can learn those lessons,, tactically, philosophically, culturally, how we can learn those lessons, how they did it, how did they effectuate so much change so quickly, what led to their awakening, but more importantly, how did they create a similar awakening in millions of Americans and people all over the world just right up my alley. And I think right up the Stoic alley, right? Justice is a core virtue for the Stoics for a reason. So I've not had many people that I didn't have a pre-existing relationship with on this podcast

three different times. So that should tell you something about what I think about Tom Rex's work. His new book Wage in a Good War, A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement is out now highly recommended. His book, First Principles, is out everywhere, highly recommending and get those both to the paint-a-porge. And he has a huge booster in general, Mattis, who I'll give you, Mattis is blur because I think it shows you something. He says, I loved this book, learned a lot, and enjoyed it from start to finish. Tom Ricks brings the American Civil Rights movement vividly to life through his smartly conceived perspective. We better understand the movement's vision,

discipline, and conduct, as it fought for the soul of America. This is from a guy who's read a couple books. Certainly read quite a few books of Stoke Philosophy, and he's raving about it, which I wholeheartedly concur with. Here is my conversation with Tom Ricks. You can follow Tom on Twitter at TomRicks, but I'd love for you to read his books and grab them at the paint-a-port if you can. Or anywhere books are sold, I'm sure they're great in audio also. ["Soul of the World"]

Well, it's good to talk to you again. I'm very excited. Good to talk to you. How are you doing? I'm doing wonderful. Good to talk to you, how are you doing? I'm doing wonderful. You know, I had a problem when I was reading your book. I loved it, but I had the same problem. I read David Halberstam's The Children last year. And I'm working right now on a book about justice.

So you and I are on very similar wavelengths. But as I read your book and as I read his book, on multiple occasions, even seemingly minor occasions, I would just find myself completely overcome by emotion when I would read some of these exchanges. I wondered if you had the same problem as you were researching. Just like you have this sort of off-handed line at the beginning of the book that actually this should be our greatest generation, the people who participated in

the Civil Rights Movement, which I hadn't heard formulated that way. But I suspect that there's something to that. And when you read just the consistent and almost ordinary but also extraordinary heroism, it's hard not to be overwhelmed. It was very emotional for me, but generally a good emotion because of the feeling that wow, these are people of great courage who made the country a better place. It's sometimes a great personal sacrifice.

And so for me, it was, you know, while the clearly elements of this are tragic, it was a much better book to live inside while I wrote it, than say a book about a rack, you know, a bad war going badly for bad reasons. Here you have a good campaign to improve America that succeeds in about 10 years and making the country a better place. And one of the drivers for me in writing this was, hey, these people should be better known.

The second tier, and third tier, people like Amzim Moore, Diane Mash, September Clark. Again, I thought these are people who should be on post steps. And so that was kind of a nice thing about writing the book in contrast to my other words. No, no, even hearing the name sometimes, I get goosebumps. These are these people who stare down these incredible obstacles or had every reason to react with the exact opposite of the tools they chose to react with. These people would respond or endure with this quiet heroism that makes them some of the greatest figures of all time, and you're right, they're just not known at all.

There are these moments I love, like Fred Shuttle's worth, these this moonshiner, Terry Minister, and Birmingham, Alabama, and the local powers that be here in early in 1963 that Martin Luther King and his comrades might be coming to town. And they call up Reverend Schottlesworth and say Reverend could you come in to talk to us? He does he goes downtown to their offices and

These are like the Chamber of Commerce types and they say Reverend How can we stop Martin Luther King from coming to town? The lean's back in his chair with a grin and he says you know I've been bombed twice. Church got bombed, house got bombed. None of you ever called me. But now, Reverend Geek, Reverend Dr. King's coming to town. Oh, now you want to talk to me. The just the sheer grit of these people. And in fact, it kind of goes to your theme of stoicism. One way of looking at these heroes of the Civil Rights Movement is they are essentially stoics. In fact, I say at one point in the book that the gods of battle are not romantics.

They are stoics. And these people are in their hearts. You have a line from Shuttlesworth also in the Montgomery campaign where he's basically his house is bombed and the police thinking they're being nice, say, hey, you should get out of town as fast as you can. And that's what I would do if I were you. And he says, well, you are not me. And you can take all your clan friends and go to hell, basically.

And you just imagine that that's not just this moment of bravado to go to your book on the founders. These are people who, as they say these things, know that they are effectively signing their potential death warrant. And they do it anyway because it's the right thing to do. Are there people of great dignity and discipline who, I think through faith, training, and thought

have arrived at these positions, but of great moral and strategic strength. It goes to something that Diane Mash says in Nashville early on as the preparing for the city movements. And this is one great strength overall, the civil rights movement, is they're very good in strategic preparation. They begin formulaing strategy by asking themselves, who are we? In the answer that Diane Nash and Janice Lawson and the others in Nashville formulate in 1960 is this answer, we are people who will no longer live with segregation. Now she says, we understand that means the white people might kill us. We got that, but that's on them, not on us.

We simply are people who no longer live with it. And from that strategy, from the strategic self-definition, they arrived at tactics. That means we are willing to get on a bus, even when the FBI tells it's going to be burned tomorrow. And so when the federal government, when the Kennedy administration officials call Diane Nash and say, you know, you freedom riders, this is 1961, you freedom riders gonna get killed,

she says, oh, we know that. She says, no, you don't understand, you are going to get killed. She says, oh, we know that. She says, no, you don't understand. You are going to get killed. And she says, sir, you need to understand before we allow a volunteer to get on a bus. He has to sign his or her last will or testimony and write a last letter to their parents. Oh, we don't let them get on the bus

unless we think we can say if they're eulogy, why they died. Wow. Wow. Well, you know, I, I, and then I want to go back to the core concept of the book, because I think it's really unique. But I was thinking about this this morning, because I'm writing sort of on, I'm doing this chapter in the book now that's sort of on the chain from abolition to the women's rights movement to the civil rights movement, which are much more linked than people think that they are. And I found this speech for the right movement and the women's movement come out very much

in civil rights movement. Yeah. And I found this speech by Imaline Pankhurst, who actually it's called Liberty or Death, a nod to Kato as it happens. And she has this line, she says, you cannot kill a woman who refuses to consent. She says, you can kill her, but still she escapes you then. You cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent. And I think what's so powerful in all of those movements is this idea that this goes right back to the Stokes, which is that, yeah, they can kill you, they can hurt you, but you

always have the ability to decide whether you go along with what they want you to do. And the extreme power of the civil rights movement lies in the civil disobedience concept of like, I'm just not going to agree with this system anymore. I'm not going to do what you say. The one foot is, I'm not going to go along with this system no matter what. The other is, and I will pay the price. The consciousness that, yes, I understand what the price is and I've already kind of paid it. I mean, in some of them, I mean, Medgar Evers, if somebody else should be better known, Medgar Evers walks around Mississippi with a target on his back, basically. In one day, somebody shoots a hunting rifle bullet through his heart, through his from the back,

in front of his house, and still this man with his blown out heart crawls almost to his front door where his wife sees him as he dies and the bullet goes racking through his house through the walls off the refrigerator. It's just an extraordinary situation and it was so much more powerful that anything the other side had to offer. This goes also to the discipline required to practice confrontational nonviolence. One thing is they understood, the South really understood violence fluently. The white supremacist power structure spoke violence. They had run a system of slavery that rested on violence, or just one of the, you know, of lashings, beatings, rape, one of the punishments. Common for running away was to have your toes cut off. And then that makes a transition,

even more violent, after the the Civil War when the South violently rests civil rights back from the newly freed enslaved people. It struck me because I sang page one of the book, Shreveport, Louisiana, just one town. In the decade after the Civil War, 10% of military age black males were killed after this of a war. So this is extraordinary violent system. Well, how do you deal with that? They flummox them with nonviolence. They are always or a step ahead of the opposition

in very intriguing ways that the South, white South, the white supremacist South has a difficult time grasping. There's this one moment when James Bevel, who was married to Diane Mache, is in a Mississippi quarter with his wife. And the judge is trying to be humane. It says, sir, your wife is pregnant.

You know, you don't want her to have that baby in jail. And she stands up and says, any black baby born in Mississippi is born in prison. And the judge said, you don't want to go to these jails. And James Bevel stands up and says, Judge, you don't understand the early Christians. And he was in the mindset, oh, I'm an early Christian. This is what happens. They were so far ahead and above of the opposition. It's amazing of the opposition. It's amazing that they weren't able to sustain it. This campaign for 10 years,

with seeing the energy it took and the psychic toll it took, as their friends are beaten and shot and bombed and killed around them. Well, it's such a fascinating concept for a book, you write, essentially a military history of the Civil Rights Movement. When I first heard you were doing this book, I was reading about it and I thought what you meant was,

this was Truman desegregating the armed forces, this is Eisenhower sending in the airborne, that this is the way that black veterans were persecuted, etc. I thought it was about that actually remarkably interesting intertwining between the military and the civil rights movement, because they are related and the military was both on the forefront and last, you know, in a lot of ways to these changes going on in society. But actually you're, which I I gladly would have read that book, and if someone writes that book, I will read that in two seconds also. But

you're inside of thinking about the civil rights movement as a kind of military campaign, a just war, and then how they thought about everything strategically and tactically and how they won that war both on the battlefield and in the hearts and minds of people. It's a I think really an inspired take from something that's obviously been covered a lot and people think they know about. But I guarantee people haven't thought about it from this perspective. Well, thank you. I mean, I think there was a kind of problem with the subtitle, and we wrestled with it for months. Essentially, yes, you have it as a happy right.

It is a military perspective on the civil rights movement. Once you take this perspective, I came to think it was essential that you really can't understand the civil rights movement without viewing it in part in this through this military lens using military terms like retreat, surrender, attack, assault, counter attack, logistics, recruiting, doctrine, and training and so on. But it's been a hard book to convey to people, honestly. I think a lot of people are very puzzled by it. And then when they pick it up and read it, they go,

Oh, now I get it. And the nicest response, the most striking responses to me has been from people who know the movement either as scholars or as veterans. They say, oh yeah, this is what it was like. You got it. Well, I think that's something we get wrong about Gandhi also, right?

Because we think of non-violence, we think of him as inherently a passive figure. And we also don't think about him as an innovator because we think of throw, we think of other forms of civil disobedience. But it was helpful to me when I was first studying Gandhi realizing that Gandhi invented like up until basically the late 1800s where Gandhi is campaigning in South Africa. If one wanted to resist the state or fight for rights or fight against some cause or for some cause, violence was effectively the only means available. So you think about some of the early labor movement, right there throwing bombs, their strikes

and then strike breakers. There is inherently this physical clash. And both sides are engaging in that physical clash, proving to go to military history, von Klauswitz's dictum, which is that politics is the war is the extension of politics. So basically you take something as far as you can politically, then it stops working and that's when you get out the bombs or the swords or the knives or the violence. And Gandhi invents, you know, not that long ago, the idea that there is another playbook. There is another way to effectuate or actualize change.

And it is removing violence from the sphere of war, but it is still an active battle that one is waging. And I think that's a paradoxical thing that's difficult to grasp, at least at first glance. You're absolutely right that there's, Gandhi is anything but passive resistance of the civil rights movement, hate of the term passive resistance. It was active, confrontational nonviolence. And I think what Gandhi did, I was listening to you, a sort of preembe of a thought. There were a lot of nonviolent tools out there that people had kind of intuited

and done as just villagers, villagers not paying taxes, engaging in various forms of resistance. And Gandhi's great insight is to take all these tools and take, put them together as an arsenal and then to train people for them. Gone these great insights, it's take all these tools and take them, put them together as an arsenal and then to train people for them. Yeah. The idea of training for nonviolence is brilliant because it gives you and energy the other side doesn't expect and is constantly shocked by it. So the students, very much training in the Gandhi

tradition for the city and movement in 1960 in Nashville. They train not just for weeks, but for months in this aggressive non-violence. It's important because one of the things they learn to do is overcome the fight or free impulse. It's common to all human beings. When you get lackedacked on the back of the head, the impulse, the body says either get out of here or confront it. And instead, you just sit there and maintain your human dignity and discipline. First of all, you're just operating at a level above the person who just hit you. Sure. Second, you're standing up as a human being and asking to be recognized as a human being and the nation, the people respond to that. They see that in photographs and the television.

And you establish a moral authority that the other side simply doesn't have. I am willing to absorb this violence because I believe that we can live better as human beings, that we have rights. And I am asking for the recognition of my rights. I am willing to go to jail for this. So it really strikes me as a contrast, by the way, to the civil rights movement, and the people who attack the US Capitol building of January 6th.

They wanted to have, you know, go in and make a mess, but they weren't willing to pay you the dues. They didn't want to go to jail. Law and order, that's for someone else, that's not for me. Whereas Martin Luther King says explicitly, if you think I'm violating this law, which I think is unjust, you better put me in jail. And I'm not gonna accept being bailed out either.

I want to do the time. Well, very much among the national students, King by the way hated jail. And so frequently when we accept the bail, God be loved jail because he thought I was a place to rest and reach retreat and right. Well, it's interesting hearing you talk, right? Passive resistance, not only is it a misleading term, but it's to use the military lens

that you look at in this book. It's essentially both a tactic and a strategy, right? So as a tactic, okay, I'm being attacked by a police officer in a march, the tactic is don't respond, you know, everyone jump on top of me to protect me, you absorb the blow, right? But where it operates as a strategy where I think so often people miss the brilliance of Gandhi and the civil rights movement as well, is Gandhi plans a campaign. He goes on the salt march, John Lewis puts himself

on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. They're putting themselves deliberately in a position where the then tactical use of nonviolence is effective, right? And so it's operating on this dual level where they're not just going about their lives, being a practitioner of passive resistance and hey, if I get attacked by a KKK member on the street, I'm not going to fight back, it's let us go into the lions den, let us seek out publicity and attention so that when we are attacked, it has a maximum effect in impact.

And I think the book, the strategic patience and then the physical discipline of those two things are working hand in hand, and that's why it's such an effective strategy. Gandhi's turn for this, and Hindu actually translates into English as clinging to the truth. And that really conveys something. It's a physical, in its ethnicity, one of the principles that this goes to and talking about tactics and strategy

is turn negative energy and deposit of energy and never let an attack go on-answer. So if you get bombed as they did in Nashville in 1960, they marched the same day, 2500 people, the biggest civil rights demonstration in Southern history. They marched in silence across the city of Nashville. Nobody had ever seen this in Nashville. They marched to the steps of the city hall.

And they confronted the mayor. And actually the mayor trying to be a good guy, he asked I and that little lady, she ignores the tacit insult. And she says, do you think segregation is human? He said, no, I don't. She said, well, let's end it. They take that tremendous negative energy

and turn it into a positive. Now, it wasn't always that simple in Birmingham, Alabama. It took months. But again, you get that discipline, the persistence that we're going to be here today. We're going to be here tomorrow. We're going to be here the day after tomorrow. One aspect of this discipline also that strikes me is you begin by educating and training your own people. The end phase for them was educating and training the former enemy. They always had their eyes on the prize. Reconciliation is the goal of the end. It strikes me that the last step on the Birmingham can't pay. Maroodle, nightmarish at times, children being rolled down the street by firehoses, police dogs biting them. The last step in that campaign, after they won desegregation

of downtown restaurants, the civil rights movement would call ahead to restaurant owners and say, hey, we're thinking of coming in for lunch tomorrow. What time would be convenient for you? First of all, it's a very polite notice. There's still a notice we're coming in. The second thing is, is training your former enemy to live with integration. Think of how philosophically informed that is, to say the last phase in your war is to

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podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Right, right. Even just, you wrote a great piece. I think it was in Politico. We were talking about how military leaders could learn so much from the civil rights movement, which is having some idea of what the prize is, having some sense of what winning actually is, planning, assuming you will actually get there, as opposed to thinking, hey, I'm just going to stir up all this thing, or I'm going to vanquish

my enemy in this, whether it's the court of public opinion or the literal battlefield, and then it's for somebody else to figure out what comes next. Absolutely right. I mean, a good example of this is a negative example from the Civil Rights Movement. When they were so distraught, they were not able to follow some of their basic principles. And that's the bombing of the Birmingham Church in September 1963. Four little girls are killed by a packet of dynamite against the wall of the church. And they have a funeral service for three of the four girls. And then Martin Luther King and the

other civil rights leaders present at the funeral, no white officials, by the way, present. They all go to the cemetery for the burial. In Diane Mesh stays behind and watches this angry crowd standing outside, roiling with emotions and anger and energy. She writes a scathing memo, the king and Andrew Young and the others and says, you made a major mistake. You cannot ask people to practice nonviolence

and then not give them a leadership they need at the crucial moment when they are boiling over with energy. She was absolutely right. And this goes to another point about the civil rights movement. They really believed in telling the truth to each other. The understood that strategy is hard, that you need to spend a lot of time thinking about who you are and what you're trying to do. And you need to remind yourself and remind us around you of principles.

As Diane and Nash does, she and James Bevel are husband taking their own advice. Think, well, what are we going to do about the Birmingham church farmers and their first thought is to abandon nonviolence and to form a team that will track down and kill the bombers. They're full of emotion too they recognize it. After they put that aside and they say no let's stick with nonviolence. Let's shut down the capital of Alabama nonviolently. It It actually right out of campaign how you might do this. And actually King puts it aside and says, by MB series, I have to go to the White House and so on. But Nash and Bevel hold with it, sticks with it, and through it, and eventually it morphs

into the Selma campaign two years later. Selma is a beautifully run campaign. They're running an all-selling, they know exactly what they're doing. And the Selma campaign concludes with a march from Selma to Montgomery that does what? It nonviolently shuts down the capital of Alabama, the former capital of the Confederacy. So they achieve that goal and they take all the negative energy of that Birmingham church bombing for many people, the lowest point in their lives, and they turn it into a brilliant victory. Do you think that that's an issue I think we

struggle with today? Causes that I tend to agree with or historical perspectives that I agree with. They sort of do an effective job using the tools that we have, studying history, puncturing holes in various narratives, myths of our nation. They do a bad job articulating what exactly is supposed to come after this, or what narrative is supposed to replace it. So it's almost as if you're stirring people up, you're getting them very upset, but there's not a compelling counter-narrative or, as you said, a direction for that energy to go. And so it's obviously still better than what was before, which was based on lies or intimidation or simply inertia, but it's not exactly making or improving anything because you're not selling a better world to be, you're not selling anything to anyone that they

can do anything with, you're just reinvigorating or reun-enidating certain long-embrane conflicts. I think it's hard to deal with the reactionary phase and what we're dealing with right now is a reactionary phase in American life. Peniel Joseph, who teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, has written a very good book called The Third Reconstruction, which argues that the last ten years of American life, which was last twelve years at this point, are really a third Reconstruction, the first being after the Civil War, the second being the Civil Rights Movement, and he says this third Reconstruction we're right now is actually much more like the first Reconstruction, the 1870s, because that's when you have this

violent pullback by white supremacy of rights of black people. Black people in the years right after the Civil War in the South had voted on property held public office, they were sheriffs, they were police chiefs, and you get this violent attack in the rise of Jim Crow that last really, the 1870s into the 1920s. It's a hard time, it's hard to show people hope. What you're trying to do is, in what you see right now with Stacey Abrams or at Black Wise Matter, they're saying, we want to hold our voting rights in the face of efforts to chip away at them or we don't want the police to keep shooting black young black men It's a hard negativity hard reaction everything to deal with now. That's that's really interesting

Yeah, one of the things I I have taken from my study of history, one of the most heartbreaking things, and you talk about this in the book, to go to the point about the history of the military and the civil rights movement. Imagine you're a black man, you serve in World War I and World War II. This is what ultimately desegregates the US Army. When Truman hears the way that his fellow veterans were treated, not just black Americans, but also Native Americans who had served in the Army and were denied burial in certain cemeteries and such,

I can't imagine the betrayal and anger that a returning veteran who had just come back from fighting literal Nazis in Europe would have felt. And then also how familiar that voice of, you know, that voice in the car driving by your house, screaming racial epithets or throwing bombs or shooting guns at you, how familiar that must have felt like they they they fought that enemy in the open in France or Belgium or Germany To come home and see it in a new way or to also see it that it was keep that it kept happening

Must have been just sort of a final betrayal that could not be that could not be accepted I think that that was a strong impetus. You see people like Amsy Moore and Megarevers, both World War II vets in Mississippi. They were no longer containable. They were going to fight the system. What intrigues me is you have a million black vets coming back to the United States, most of them in the South. We can see and understand their reaction.

What I don't understand is the black church for the first time steps up at about the same time, kind of revs up in the late 40s and early 50s and in Montgomery in the bus boycott. For the first time, you really see the black church in the forefront and Ralph Abernathy in Alabama as another black veteran. So somehow things are coming together in a way they didn't before. And the refusal, again and again, of black veterans to put up with this, I think really sets an example for the black community. And it is well, is a real challenge to white supremacism. Columbia, Tennessee, there's what was called a riot, which basically was a police attack

on the black community, which was faced back, back, with a lot of black vets sitting on roofs with rifles and knowing how to fire them and how to aim them. I think one of the things that I have the most trouble with when I when you really study the civil rights movement and I quite enjoyed Taylor Branch's Syria on the series on the civil rights movement as well. I quite enjoyed Taylor Branch's series on the Civil Rights Movement as well. I think people tell themselves a version of this in which it is individuals acting on racial prejudice that are driving segregation at that time. I think we have trouble seeing it as it actually was, which was state enforced apartheid. Right? Like it would, and it, it's almost helpful, I think, to see it as state enforced, because it helps you see it as, as it so nakedly was. Like this was, hey, we are, we are outnumbered as a population. And if this is to be a representative democracy,

we will lose all our power like that. And when you see it as actually a kind of a coup that the taking back of these civil rights which came from the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment after Reconstruction, 14th, and 15th Amendment after reconstruction, you realize, oh, this wasn't like the racial prejudice was almost the ad hoc justification afterwards for what was essentially a political coup

to disenfranchise people who were not like you or maybe had different priorities than you. Yeah, I mean, James Baldwin has a terrific essay on the movie in the heat of the night, and which he says, look, it's not about having a prejudice, but white sheriff, you just need to show you really are a human being. It is a whole damn system.

Yeah. And the system, by the way, would also slap down white people who got out of line with it. So good example is in one town in Mississippi during freedom summer, a local couple who invited in a worker, a civil rights worker, and a visiting minister for dinner. The response of the town was to poison their dog and the guy loses his business. And they actually have to leave town. But it was a system built fundamentally on violence. His first response was economic.

If you try to register to vote, you will lose your job. You will find a bunch of other economic penalties there. The bank will call in the loan on your house, that your car will get reapsed. That they'll enforce that in a variety of ways. It wasn't just that people were afraid of it. They're afraid of it being hurt. Yeah.

The second line of defense was legal. We will make life awful for you. We will fight you in the courts. We will fight federal law. We will not enforce it. We won't, if you can't vote by the way, we will fight federal law, we will not enforce it. If you can't vote by the way, you can't serve it a jury, so all your juries are gonna be all white,

and all white juries won't find anybody guilty if you're killing a black man of this state. It's tough like that. But the third line of defense, and surprising how quickly they got to it, was violence. I was talking the other day, just in Nashville, the guy wrote a book about a murder and rural Georgia. And he said the local DA was sort of the Sunday school type

and upstanding teacher, but he said to the lawyer who was thinking of defending a black man, he said, you know, we might have to kill you. He said it just matter a fact, we think some stuff was a decent man, but just you're threatening the system here, we might have to kill you. Yeah, it's effectively a terrorist regime, right?

And that feels very hard to wrap your head around where it's like an organized crime syndicate that takes over a town or a market or an industry, right? I mean, and I think the more you study the civil rights movement, once you sort of, once you're given that lens, it's hard not to see it. Like Martin Luther King starts to be a successful civil rights leader and what happens? He's very quickly audited and faces criminal charges

on these basically bogus, like tax fraud charges, right? So it was this multifaceted way of keeping people in line where you had to have an immense amount of, not just physical courage, but you had to be willing to give up any chance of your children going to a good school or of owning the, continuing to own the family farm or, having access to selling your products at market,

that they could, they could cut your legs out very quickly. And most importantly, they would do that, right? These weren't idle threats. Everybody knew somebody it had happened to. One thing I didn't know going into this was that Mississippi, it was not allowed to teach black children French, Spanish, or their basic civic rights. I mean, literally, said, this will not be taught in black schools. The tools, made tools of repression. But what's striking also about this is from at the outside, if you look at the 1950s, the white South looks

to be omnipotent. It has the police. It has the schools. It has everything. Yet, is Erika Chenoweth writes in her book on what everybody needs to know about nonviolence? A third time regimes tend to be more brittle than they appear to be. Partly because they're big and dumb and stupid, they're kind of like big dinosaurs. And because they're so brutal, because they are so built on violence, they're not very adept at responding. You can kind of see this with Putin versus the Ukrainians right now. Putin just does big dumb stupid things.

If you do a precise strike on my favorite bridge, I will simply send missiles into your cities, randomly killing people. Just sort of the big dumb stupid response. James Bevel had a great feel for this. Bevel is once in the Silver Rice Movement, giving a Sunday sermon as a visiting minister in a little wooden church in rural Georgia. And in the middle of his sermon,

the local white sheriff walks in, smoking on a cigar and stands in the back of the church. And Bevel, without missing a beat, says people, the devil will come after you. But the devil will always give you a sign. Sometimes he's carrying a pitchfork. Sometimes he's got a little fork tail. And sometimes he's standing in the back puffing on us a car.

Well, the whole church laughs. In suddenly you almost sense like the parish structure being turned upside down, this figure of fear is suddenly being laughed at and the the the the share of turns on his heel and walks out. Well, that night, the church is burned. Bevel, simply say, all I've done is show you the true face of the sheriff and of the system he represents. It is built on violence. They can't stand being mocked. And it was a brilliant thing because all those people

in that moment were suddenly freed. The system was still out there, but they just laughed at the sheriff. We have the sheriff is the sort of outer symbol of the violence of that regime. It's the guy who will break your knees, your kneecaps in the mob, but he's not the one making the decisions,

but he is the representative of that system. And I think with the civil rights movement, especially figures like Bevel or Lawson or Abernathy and Shuttle's Writh are so brilliant at, is they realize that that is the guy who has no ability, he is selected for his sociopathic or psychopathic tendency towards violence, which he cannot contain or reign in. He doesn't have the subtle touch that the actual people behind the scenes have, who that's the reason the system has endured for so long. So they do such a really a job of provoking that guy on television most of the time in a

way that understand the center of gravity of these movements to the military term and they know exactly who to provoke into screwing up. And that guy is selected, as you say, for those violent tendencies. So what you do is find ways to turn that against him. One of the teachings in Selma during the training sessions, when people say, what do I do if the sheriff comes after me? They say, that's not the point here is the sheriff is not coming after you. You are going after the sheriff.

Wow. And so when John Lewis is standing on the steps of the Selma courthouse, in the Kathy courthouse in Selma, and Sheriff Jim Clark screams at him, did you hear what I just said? John Lewis responds yes, did you hear what I said? There's always a proper response if you've been trained to think about it. Another point, CT Vivian is throwing down the spares of the Courthouse, the stone spares. He turns around and looks back up and says, what do you tell your wise and children about what you do?

It's the most human question. When you go home at night, what do you say you did today? And to get in again to force these people to frame themselves as human, to think about themselves in human terms, it's quite powerful. One of the teachings that Lawson had in Nashville was if somebody spits in your face, asked them for a handkerchief, and you'll find actually, one instance this happens, and the guy says, sir, you have a handkerchief, and the guy

reaches for it, that's as hell no. But for one second, that basic were human beings. And another point, Lawson was talking to a young thug who was prepared to attack him and realizes that the guy has, I think, like a Harley emblem. And Lawson knows all about motorcyle. Well, what kind of bike do you drive? And they end up having this conversation about the panhead, the panhead Harley, at the end of which this conversation about the pan had the pan had hardly.

At the end of which the guy is totally forgotten his intention to attack Lawson. It is kind of incredible, right? Because so many of these figures are long dead. Many of the civil rights leaders that some of them you mentioned like Megarev were murdered. A lot of the big leaders in the movement were older, so they're no longer with us. But it's so easy, I think, to see this as something that happened a really long time ago, to see this as history, because it's black and white. But my mother-in-law gave me a children's book for my kids about Ruby Bridges.

And she inscribed it in the front and this has changed how I think about all of this. She said, but I went to high school in Louisiana. I believe Ruby Bridges is like three years older than me. And or something like that, right? In realizing that, oh, these people, the people you see in the pictures on both sides, the people who were being attacked, but also in many cases, the juring mobs, like at the University of Mississippi, those people are

alive right now. Or they're, their, their friends hold public office or they still hold public office to a certain degree. And this wasn't ancient history. This is a battle that is still playing out even in this very moment. It actually is quite striking that in recent years, as Black Lives Matter came together, and a movement was trying to focus on police brutality, one of the things some of the members of the movement did was reach back to the civil rights movement. So one point, a young woman who's involved in this goes to James Lawson. The teacher in Nashville, still alive.

And his message for her is the test of a demonstration is not how many people you put out on the street today. The test of a demonstration is whether you can do it again tomorrow. To nasty. Yes. Sure. That's the point he makes to her. Bob Moses, another hero of the civil rights movement, one of the people who ran freedom of summer in Mississippi in 1964. Bob Moses attended a BLM Black Lives Matter convention in New York City shortly before he died. He died about, I guess, a year ago now. So yeah, these people, the vibes are still out there. In fact, the history is shaping us even now. One thing that really strikes me about these connections is Benny Thompson, Chairman of the January 6th Committee,

Congressman from Mississippi. His political career began in the wake of Freedom Summer. Before Freedom Summer in Mississippi, 64, 7% of eligible black people in Mississippi could register to vote. By 1968, 59% of black adults in Mississippi were registered to vote. In the wake of that, he gets elected to local office and he gets elected mayor of his small town, and eventually he gets elected to Congress. So here you have Benny Thompson running a committee that is trying to protect our democracy holds office because of the work of the Civil Rights Movement in expanding

our democracy. Yeah, I felt a whiff of that recently. I've, as part of this Justice book, I was reading a lot about Harvey Milk. And then learning that Harvey Milk and Diane Feinstein serve on City Council together, right? They come up together and you realize, oh, we're still in the midst of these movements or the progress that these movements were making. There's a line in Halberstam's, the children,

I think it's towards the end. John Lewis is Congressman, and he meets this man who's now a general, I believe, and that general had been like an infantry officer driving Lewis around as they were protecting one of the freedom rights convoys. It's actually Sonny Montgomery, who was the Mississippi National Guard, Lieutenant. He was on the bus that the Freedom Riders took into Jackson, Mississippi where they were delivered basically directly to prison in violation of their civil rights.

Later on John Lewis, yeah, them an elevator with Sonny Montgomery. They're both members of Congress. And Lewis mentions, oh, we've met during the freedom rights. And Montgomery says, yeah, the difference is you have the vote met. Yeah, it's, it, it, this steps on going. And, and I think there's one exchange that Martin Luther King talks about.

He's sort of on an airplane. And he's sitting in first class or something. And he's talking to this young man. And this young man has this real convoluted sort of convenient explanation for why, although in theory, he supports civil rights, why he's actually on the fence about what Martin Luther King is doing. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but it's worth reading for everyone today,

because, look, there's a bunch of problems with, for instance, Black Lives Matter. There's an anti-Semitism component to some of the leaders, if I remember correctly. It's been a terribly run organization that's had a number of financial issues. Looks like some of the creators were personally enriching themselves. You could go down the list. You could find reasons to object to it. But what you're really doing, what the tendency was then, what the tendency is now, and I find myself doing it, there's a voice in my head.

It sounds a lot like my father's voice who's pretty conservative It's a voice that tries to get you off the hook that tries to get you to not have to be involved It's the voice that says this is not my fight or that this issue is less black and white than it looks and therefore I'm just gonna let these other people figure it out. Yeah. I find myself thinking more and more about police violence in America. The single fact that strikes me most about it is there are no good numbers. It turns out the FBI collects those numbers of police killings on a voluntary basis from departments. Yeah.

Actually no rigorous collection. We actually don't know how many people are killed annually by the police even now. Because we don't want to know. We don't want to know. Yes. We don't have an important piece of information is because you don't want it. And then you can't write an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that says, Hey, actually, I know you're hearing a lot about police violence against black people,

but let me show you why the statistics show that this isn't actually true. And then you can go back to doing what you're doing. Let me show you the statistics of black on black crime. And then you're, again, morally off the hook and you don't have to care about it, right? So we don't want the numbers because the numbers would indict what's happening, and then we would feel morally compelled to do something about it just as we would when you see, when you hear about what happened to Amade Arbery, you know, the first instinct, that is not a

case that America would have known about, where it had the prosecutors and government in Georgia had their way. It was against their will that that came out. And now one of those people is going to jail also. Like, we don't realize the levels of deception and obfuscation that prevent us from having to stare this thing in the face. Well, I think this was the billions of the civil rights movement. Until television came along, the South had been able to reassure the rest of the country,

hey, we know how to handle our black population. And if you hear about Ireland, it's really just outside of agitators. And then the civil rights movement says, let's show you how the system works. And they Birmingham, 1963, the nation sees police dogs and fire hoses. And they say, you know, the way you guys are handling it doesn't look so good on TV.

So the issue is how do you show the rest of the country what is really going on, which seems to me the strategic problem that the civil rights movement was so good at dressing but also as you said it proposing a solution not only do you get Birmingham 63 the nightmare of bull corner it's followed up in August 63 by Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement as a whole, presenting themselves in the March on Washington. This is what we want.

This is who we are. We are fundamentally decent people asking for equal justice before the law. And so the brilliance of the movement is it shows the nightmare vision and then it says we have a dream. And that's what he says, you know, I'm here to cash a check, which I think is one of the most to go to your point about the founders and first principles. If there was anyone who understood the first principles of American history, it was Martin Luther King.

Martin Luther King understood the American narrative so well that he was able to jujitsu it back into people's faces and forced them to go oh yeah that is what I believe and this thing that I'm tolerating over here is in opposition to that this cognitive dissonance cannot last I think one of the problems was say critical race theory and some of the black lives matters discussions that we're having is that they're not actually rooted in something that people can coalesce around and agree to and go, yeah, that is a high principle that I have long held. That is a national tradition.

Lincoln, of course, does this brilliantly too. You have to be able to sell an alternative dream, otherwise you're selling a kind of nihilism, or you're just telling people they're being hypocrites, and you're not showing them what they should be doing instead. I'm not sure I agree with it. I think in some ways, the system, in this wave of entrenched reaction

in the last 10 years has made it very difficult for Black Lives Matter to get to the microphone, to portray itself. This goes back to Diane Mash in Nashville in 1960. They begin with self-definition and Black Lives Matter, the reaction to police violence has never really been, had the moment to define themselves in the public space.

Now, that's a good thing. We have this torrent of denunciation and led by Fox News and social media. I mean, I just sat and talked last week to a young activist in the Nashville. Interestingly, there was basically a law passed banning him from the state capital. And it wasn't really a law. It was a agreement between the state legislature and the local DA. His response was, he just got himself elected with state, state representative. So now they have to let it out of me because he got elected. Total believer in nonviolence

by the way. I think a lot of voices like his are being drowned out. I just think we have a Gerontalker scene these days. Yes. I want to hear from more people in their 20s like this guy, Justin Jones. They have a lot to say, but somehow they're not getting to the national microphone right now. No, that actually is a really good point. And you could also argue that one of the problems with social media is that it is created a kind of, it's so decentralized that unlike the civil rights movement, you don't have a handful of singular figures of great moral authority and weight who can speak on behalf of a movement. And thus not just represent the movement in discussions with the president as Martin Luther

King did many times, but also be something that the movement aspires to be like. Like you show in the book the list of trainings that the student activists were supposed to do. The last one is remember the teachings of Martin Luther King, right? They're like, they're basically saying, don't let Martin down, right? And that's what happens when you have a singular figure who represents something to people. You know, I think as most of the, if you're looking at Black Lives Matters, most of the figures that people could identify with it are tragically the deceased victims of various crimes. We know the names of Armored Arbery or Trayvon Martin or George Floyd. We know their names, but we don't know the name of the person who has

stepped up in his leading said movement. And that may be why some of the things aren't breaking through, which to go to the military point is, it's why you need great generals. And I'm not sure there's the great generals. Yeah, their answer, as I understand, has been to say, yeah, but what happened in civil rights movement when leaders emerged, they were murdered. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and then the Black Panthers emerged, and the US government declares more on them. Yeah. And over 40 Black Panthers emerge and the US government declares more on them. And over 40 Black Panthers are murdered by police with FBI support and I think a four-year period. So their answer has been the alarm.

We're going to come up with another approach here. It's hard. When the system is engaged in a savage reaction or a wave, it's hard, I think, to get traction. I think they're still figuring that out. So tell me why, as one of my heroes, is General Sherman? Why is James Bevel like William to come to Sherman? I think Sherman was the best general in American history, probably.

Me too. I think he was a brilliant thinkerer and he thought deeply about the nature of the war. I mean, I love that in one of his strategic assessments, late in the war, he writes to Grant Lincoln that words have lost meaning. And this is part of his military assessment. He's saying that things are, he's paying attention to what people are saying, what they mean by them. But what I was thinking, specifically when I wrote that about Bevel was that Sherman invented a new way to fight. He said, I can march across Georgia with no lines of supply or communication.

Literally, Grant and Lincoln didn't know where he was. The nation wandered for several weeks as he made his way across Georgia. In his writings to them, he had said, I might have east, I might have south, and I might have west, he knew which way he was going. He had studied the census tracts for central Georgia and figured out where the richest plantations were with his intention of bringing the war to the rich white southerner and making a distinction as in his orders. Black people we will supply and help white people who don't fight us we will ignore rich white people who fight us we will, we will make them hell.

Similarly, devil is very good at thinking strategically and deeply about who we are, what we're trying to do. So in Birmingham, when the Birmingham campaign falters, it turns out the adults of Birmingham don't want to march because they know they live in a totalitarian regime. You lose your job, you lose your house, you'll get beaten and jail and what for. Bevel brilliantly says we'll have the kids march. It's a better way of showing America the nature of the regime because the regime will attack them. And there's no economic punishment for the black community

because these kids don't have jobs yet. It imposes an economic cost on the city because they still have to turn on the lights and feed the kids and the jails. They swamp the jails. Literally so much so there's no room in the jails. The kids are being held some of them out of the county fairgrounds where an detective interrogates an eight-year-old girl about Marxism. And the little girl said, well, we didn't learn nothing about communism, but we learned about nonviolence. When you have to have an detective asking a little girl about communism, you've already lost your fight. Bevel again, things strategically in the Selma campaign. He takes the negative violence of Jimmy Lee Jackson

being murdered by police, shot in a stomach as he's trying to protect his mother. And he says, I need to work off their energy and do some thinking, I'm gonna take a walk from Selma to Montgomery. And that's where the idea for the march comes from. They have this march of thousands of people. It captures the nation's attention. And as I said earlier, they shut down the capital of Alabama, the capital of the confederately, non-violent way. So again and again, devil takes an interesting novel approach.

He thinks strategically and comes up with new tactics, which is another parallel, I think, to Sherman. Yeah, and the interesting thing about Sherman, who is of the Union generals, one of the, let's say, had the least progressive views on race. But if Sherman's vision of reconstruction had been allowed to be brought to bear, the whole history of the next 150 years might have been quite different.

He was the one that his field orders put out the idea of 40 acres of an immuole, the idea of redistribution of this ill-gotten exploitative wealth being giving the people who had built these plantations a chunk of money or land to go off and rebuild with, who knows how things might have turned out. Sure, but also had lived in the South in Louisiana. Yeah. And a tell of southerners early on, you people have no idea what you're getting into. Yeah, this nation will be bathed in blood, he said.

And he has such a vision of that, I think, in his Tennessee service. I think people think he's crazy, and he kind of is crazy, but he sees just how bloody this war is going to be. At a time when I think many other people didn't really grasp or most people didn't have no idea. Yeah, I think of that speech that he gave. I think he was like a professor at what became LSU as the South is succeeding. And you wrote a great piece about, you know, is there a civil war coming in America? And I think of that speech when I think of naive or stupid people,

awful people who talk in a blase way about the potential for some sort of civil conflict. I don't think one, they understand what that would actually look like, and I don't think they understand actually how the nation works. Speaking of that, I actually had a piece in the Washington Post about six weeks ago explaining why I am not as worried about the civil wars I used to. That's what I was thinking of. Yes.

And I'm really struck that nothing happened after January 6th. In the contrast to the civil rights movement is striking. The civil rights movement, first of all, never did anything like invade the capital and attack cops. One of the rules that actually beveled talk in Birmingham was protect cops. If you see a cop being attacked,

interpose yourself. But the people who attack the Capitol just lack the courage of their convictions. All the things, I was really worried then, that we're gonna see nullification juries, we're gonna see state conventions to stop obeying federal law, we're gonna see assassinations as judges.

We're going to see bombings of federal buildings. None of that happened. These people wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They didn't want to really stand up and send the message. They didn't say, like, the civil rights movement did, I'm going to jail, and this is why why using the moment to speak to the nation. But don't you think it's wrong? Evaporated. Don't you think it's remarkable though given that how intimidated people who have a constitutional

duty to not be intimidated by those people seem to continue to be? It is remarkable and I don't understand why there was such a lack of self-respect in the U.S. Congress. People to say, I'm a member of Congress, this is the core of this system and we are coming to as defense. Rather, it was the judiciary that came to the defense of the system in the wake of January 6th. And only very slowly has a small part of the U.S. Congress stepped up to defend itself as an institution. Why people like Mitch McConnell decided they would tolerate this attack on the institution?

I mean, one of the things I almost hated about the U.S. Senate when I covered it was they had such self-respect. They always refer to themselves as the world's greatest deliberative body and so on. When you asked why you guys doing this, because we are the US Senate, we have to stand up. And instead, they left basically a bunch of jerks, de grade, the US Congress, and wave the flag of the Confederacy, and a lot of them have tried to minimize and ignore it and collect it, but kind of didn't happen, and even seen the kind of support it. I don't know.

Don't you think it's the say some versions, some modern version of the same dichotomy we were talking about before, where, sure, you disavow the over or the disgusting psychopathic violence of the Southern sheriff. You tell yourself you're different, but really you're just a higher brow boot on those same people's necks. And so you're really telling yourself, okay, you know, you shouldn't storm the capital and smear your feces all over the halls of Congress, but I still do believe in my right to hijack said system and get it to work for people just

like me. And I'm not going to do anything that would jeopardize that illegitimate control, that systematic undermining of what representative democracy is supposed to look like. So I can't actually condemn those people because we are effectively working for the same thing. We just disagree on what's palpable or what's palatable, especially when cameras are rolling. That's a good point that the you know, country-club racism is linked fundamentally to that ferocious sheriff, and they really did know it. And I think you're right, the same way, you know, the Tom Cotton's and Ted Cruz's of the

world understand that the Capitol invaders and them are on the same side. Yeah, it's at the end of the day, we're a minority rule, right? I think if you look at what the southerners were doing and what you see today is, and it's not always about race, sometimes it's the financial system, sometimes it's about corporations, whatever.

But the idea is we've got, this system is supposed to represent the will of the people, but we have figured out a way to circumvent that or grab the commanding heights of it, and we use it how we think it should be used for our religion, for our class needs or whatever. And, you know, we don't want to storm the capital, but we're not going to give up that minority stranglehold of the system. Yeah. If we can't, what they're also fundamentally saying is if we can't define America, if we can't be in control, if being a democracy means we're not running the thing, we don't want democracy. Yes, yes.

Which is really what the Southerners, if you think about what the Civil War was to go to our point, the Civil War was, hey, we agree that this is a democracy provided, we get to continue to own slaves. And the second that's threatened, we'll tear this, we'll burn this thing to the ground, because that's what we actually care about. And that's always actually to go back to my first principles. That was the threat at the Constitutional Convention, which is if you guys have a whiff of getting rid of slavery, we won't be part of this thing. And once we're not part of the thing, Georgia and South Carolina say we're out, that

gives Europe and France and Spain a toll hold back on the continent, and the future of America looks very doubtful. So the Constitution is a ceasefire document that lasts until the Civil War. And basically a big part of this country has not accepted any existence of the amendments that follow that that say, no, we're actually gonna be a multi-racial democracy. We're still fighting that question.

Yeah, it's like first, the three fifth compromise gives people, gives the Salta extra-represented representation in Congress, then the Civil War happens, then Reconstruction, and they say, okay, we're going to put in Jim Crow that effectively does the same thing. And then they go, okay, fine, we've lost all that. Well, now we're going gonna take over the Supreme Court illegitimately, and we're gonna gut the voting rights act,

and we're just gonna effectively veto any law that removes any, that threatens again, this sort of minority or oligarchic control of the system. Why exactly that has to be the case? I do not understand, I don't understand that energy, or oligarchic control of the system. Why exactly that has to be the case? I do not understand. I don't understand that energy.

But it seems to be a kind of a dark matter, a dark energy that's been running through the American system right underneath the first principles you were talking about since basically day one. I think it goes back to the point that slavery is a system built on violence. And so we have an American system that's designed at the beginning to include, as you say, this very negative energy, this violent energy, and it's always been there and it lives on.

But it leads me back again, as always, to Aristotle Aristotle that there are various forms of government, the most dangerous, and the least viable is when you have an oligarchy allied with the mob. That's the American system today. Wow. Well, when we talked last year, it was, or actually two years ago, I was absolutely in love with the book that you've just written, and now I am back in absolutely in love with this one, and I just, I got it, I got so much out of it, and it's such a unique and novel way of thinking about a period of American history that everyone ought to understand, And I'm just very grateful that you wrote it. And I love that we got to talk again. Thank you very much.

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