Ep. 376: The Black American Civil Rights Movement Was One of The Greatest ”Military” Campaigns and Insurgencies in History

Thomas Ricks is the guest on this special January 2023 fundraising episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show.

Your generosity and support helps to sustain the podcast and to keep it free, not behind a paywall and available to all listeners.

He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of several books including The Generals, The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco.

Thomas Ricks' new book is Waging A Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968.

Ricks intervenes against the flat American mainstream history of the Civil Rights Movement as one of passive non-violence and shows how it was actually an active resistance movement and a type of insurgency that involved extremely sophisticated military tactics and strategy.

He details how the Civil Rights movement and its organizers, leaders, and soldiers were able to outmaneuver and defeat a Jim and Jane Crow terror regime that had a monopoly on force and violence as well as numerical superiority and many other advantages on the battlefield.

Ricks highlights these heroes and sheroes and some of their great “military” campaigns such as the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, Selma, and the March on Washington.

On this special January 2023 fundraising installment of the podcast, Chauncey DeVega reflects on his great adventure home over the holidays to see his mother, processes the anxieties and responsibilities of being an only child and member of the working class who helps to take care of his mother financially, and shares what he has learned and promised himself in the one year since the Event.

There is also a special Easter Egg at the end of this podcast where Chauncey recounts one of his formative romantic encounters as a journeyman lothario – and a troubling secret he uncovered about that experience during his recent trip home.

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