Waging a Good War
Most of us have participated in a protest – a march, a write-in campaign, a work stoppage. Most of us did so without much fear or with any carefully laid out strategy. Mostly, if you are white and American, you didn’t experience nor were threatened with violence while protesting. Most of us can scarcely, viscerally imagine what that would be like.
In his new book, Waging A Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968, Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Ricks gives a detailed and very thoughtful account of the personal investment, courage and elegant strategy that was an essential piece of that movement. He related one strategy – a purposely planned element of nonviolent, confrontational protest – that, because it was so courageous and ingenious, leapt off the page when I read it.
When the black civil rights protestors decided to sit at the lunch counter in a southern diner, they knew that they would be jeered at and even spat upon. When that happened; when someone spat on them, they were thought to ask if they could borrow that person’s handkerchief to clean off the spittle.
What an exceedingly inspired tactic for possibly, maybe giving the racist person some pause? A moment that goes from the eyes to the head and then to the heart, offering a chance for transformation.