Waging a Good War by Thomas E. Ricks

Author:Thomas E. Ricks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Making ink spots

While in military terms more conventional than most civil rights campaigns, the SNCC operation in Mississippi retained some aspects of insurgency. James Forman’s concept of the Mississippi operation that summer was informed by the “ink spot” theory of insurgency, in which control begins in various spots and gradually expands. “I think you have to think of it in terms of guerrilla warfare,” Forman later explained. “You develop a little base, and then you develop another little base, another little base … [and] then you move in, you know, into the stronghold.”

Each of the seventy-three SNCC and CORE projects around the state that summer amounted to one of Forman’s ink spots. Thirty-three were voter education projects; another forty were Freedom Schools. Every interaction with a community expanded a localized engagement, and also gathered more intelligence, which plays a larger role in insurgency operations than it generally does in conventional war. Zoya Zeman and a colleague, working on a health education project, visited a drugstore, the only local Black doctor, a nursing home, and local welfare officials. They were not telling local people what to do; they were asking how they could be most helpful. What needed to be done? “Our objective was to let these people know of the program we were planning in health education, and to ask their advice about the needs of the community,” Zeman noted. This was remarkably different from how the U.S. military operated four decades later in Iraq, where American officials often decided what they would do and then informed Iraqis of their plans. They also would conduct an action and then try to figure out what to say about it. When at its best, the civil rights movement, by contrast, would figure out first by meeting with locals and holding strategy sessions what it wanted to say, and then would figure out what sort of physical action would convey that message. This did not always happen, but it did often, especially when James Bevel was involved in planning.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.