Review Essay: The American Civil Rights Movement as a Military Campaign

Thomas E. Ricks, Waging a Good War. A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022. Ricks’s book has been labelled a “tour de force” by “interpreting one of America’s most consequential social movements as a classic military operation” (Nightingale). Ricks “examines the struggle for racial equality through the analytical framework of military history” (Grenier), focusing on the Movement, the people who shaped it, its long-term goals, its strategies, its actions, and its consequences.