Culture | War without war

How the civil-rights movement succeeded

Thomas Ricks argues it had the strategic and tactical brilliance of a great military campaign

March 1965: American civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968) and his wife Coretta Scott King lead a black voting rights march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery; among those pictured are, front row, politician and civil rights activist John Lewis (1940 – 2020), Reverend Ralph Abernathy (1926 - 1990), Ruth Harris Bunche (1906 - 1988), Nobel Prize-winning political scientist and diplomat Ralph Bunche (1904 - 1971), activist Hosea Williams (1926 – 2000 right carrying child). (Photo by William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Waging a Good War. By Thomas Ricks. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 448 pages; $30

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “War without war”

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