In this presentation, author Thomas E. Ricks’ presents the ideas featured in this new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968. In Mississippi, it used to be illegal to teach Black students their constitutional rights. Ricks’ book explores this and offers a new perspective on the American civil rights movement, depicting it as highly disciplined and carefully planned, with a focus not on “passive resistance” but on confrontational nonviolence, a much more aggressive stance.
About the Presenter
Thomas Ricks is a writer and the military history columnist for The New York Times Book Review. Ricks covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999, he had the same beat at the Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for 17 years. He reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait,
Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of eight books. His best known is Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003-05, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
