How to Win a Rigged Game

What is to be done?

Donald Trump threatens war with Canada. Republicans in Congress stand idly by while President Musk runs riot in the Treasury, ripping the copper out of the walls of America. No one even knows what madness is coming next week.

What is to be done?

To that end, I want to look to one of the most effective social movements of American history, one that succeeded despite facing the longest odds: the Civil Rights Movement. And I especially want to dwell on the strategic choices the Movement made in order to break the back of Jim Crow.

In our day, activists display great tactical acumen in organizing, planning, infiltrating, and finally throwing soup on a famous painting. But this does approximately nothing to advance their cause. Millions take to the streets in hand-knit pink hats, demanding Roe be preserved. But this does approximately nothing to advance their cause. We live in an era where the tactical aspects of resistance are studied intensively, even as they become increasingly disconnected from effective strategy. If we are to face the challenges of our time with the hope of victory, we need strategic clarity.

In the years between 1955, when Rosa Parks first refused to accept segregation on public busing, and 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the Civil Rights Movement waged a series of battles across the American South. These battles, taken together, brought about the end of Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement is worth studying not merely because they are morally admirable, but because they won. There are lessons to be learned in how.

Strategic Background

To understand the strategic choices made by the Movement, we must first understand the strategic picture they were facing. In retrospect, the Movement's victory seems inevitable; indeed it has become enshrined in the pantheon of the American civic religion. From the perspective of 1950, things looked quite different.

Since the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of Reconstruction in 1873, Jim Crow had spread its way across the former Confederacy. Many attempts had been made to stop or resist it. These were all met with overwhelming violence from the white community: met with murder, rape, the burning of entire neighborhoods. In addition to extravagant acts of violence, like the Tulsa Massacre in which between 36 and 300 were murdered, Jim Crow was maintained by routine acts of personal violence: more than four thousand men and women were lynched across the United States in this period that we know of.

From the perspective of 1950, Jim Crow looked like the hardest wall in history, a wall that had stood through decades and would murder you in the night for so much as looking at it sideways.

Jim Crow had on its side more than mere violence. Like all social systems, Jim Crow legitimated itself with a narrative. In the story of Jim Crow, Black Americans were not equal human beings oppressed out of pure animus. Rather, in the story of Jim Crow, Black Americans were fundamentally incapable of self-government; they were lazy, criminal, violent, driven more by animal urges than human reason. And so Jim Crow was necessary, to "keep them in line."

And yet. Jim Crow was not absolute. Beginning in 1951, the NAACP waged a yearslong battle against the legal concept at the heart of Jim Crow. In 1954, they won. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka held that "separate but equal" was a vacuous concept, and that segregation in public schools inherently violated the Constitution.

The South, by and large, simply ignored Brown. Segregation of schools, segregation of public facilities, the denial of the right to vote, the routine murder of black men and women: these all continued.

The Movement Begins

In Montgomery Alabama in 1955, Rosa Parks sat at the front of the bus and refused to give up her seat to a white bus rider. Prior to this, Parks had been an official with the NAACP and had attended the Highlander Folk School, where she studied how to implement Brown v. Board in practice. Her calm refusal to give up her seat was her putting that plan into action. When the police came to arrest her, she asked them "Why do you push us around?" "I don't know," the police officer answered, and then arrested her.

In a largely forgotten bit of history, Rosa Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her seat that year: that was Claudette Colvin, who was arrested for violating the same ordinance. Colvin, unlike Parks, fought and struggled with the police officers, and was a teenage mother to boot. Local leaders made a cold-blooded calculation: Colvin could not be the face of their movement. Parks could.

A one-day boycott of the Montgomery City Lines was rapidly arranged, achieving a startling +90% adherence rate in the Black population, as Thomas Ricks documents in his Waging A Good War (15). Shortly afterwards, a local minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, gave a speech articulating the goals of the boycott. It's a striking speech; I recommend you take a moment and read it yourself. It opens in clear terms:

"We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our love for democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth."

Over the course of the speech, Dr. King repeatedly returns to these themes: freedom, democracy, citizenship, the Constitution, and of course Christianity. He articulates the reasons for the boycott and its goals: for the Black citizens of Montgomery to ride the bus on equal terms with white citizens, as the Constitution requires.

This sounds like so much boilerplate.  But it too is a choice among alternatives.  At one point, the Back to Africa seemed like a more plausible alternative; at later dates other forms of Black nationalism would.  In another context, the gay rights movement would face a similar choice between assimilationist and anti-assimilationist approaches.

Nonviolence

The nonviolent approach pursued by Parks and King was not the only option on offer. At some points during the boycott, some suggested readiness to use violence in self-defense. Others suggested killing a few local whites, to show they meant business (24). These proposals were shut down by King and other leaders.

This was both a moral and a strategic choice. Morally, the Movement was deeply Christian, and believed not merely in breaking Jim Crow but in the redemptive power of Christ to save the souls of the oppressors. Strategically, it is important to note that violent resistance to Jim Crow had already been tried—repeatedly. The Tulsa Massacre noted above involved more than a hundred armed Black men, including veterans of World War I, attempting to prevent a lynching by force. They, and all similar attempts, had failed.

In the pursuit of nonviolence, the Movement was influenced from the start by the work of Gandhi in India, who had succeeded in breaking the British Empire with nonviolence (17). As with Jim Crow, there had been numerous attempts to resist or evict the British through violence; as with Jim Crow, these had failed. But Gandhi had succeeded.

In other words, from a strategic perspective, the Movement recognized that as the weaker party in physical terms, they could not win through physical violence. Instead they pursued a different strategy. Jim Crow had to be confronted—directly, aggressively, with great force—but not with physical force. As Gandhi said, "[Nonviolent resistance] does not mean meek submission to the will of the evildoer, but it means the pitting of one's whole soul against the will of the tyrant." Or, as Dr. King would put it, meeting physical force with soul force.

Maintaining the principles of nonviolence was a continual struggle. If a man slaps you, you get angry and you want to hit him back. Looking him in the eye and calmly asking "What kind of man are you?" is harder—especially after he does it again. Retribution, at least in prospect, is emotionally satisfying. And the enforcers of Jim Crow were constantly trying to provoke a violent reaction from the Movement. Violence was a terrain they could master both physically and narratively. A slap in the face provokes a punch in response, which in turn justifies the cop drawing his gun and emptying the magazine. Afterwards the cop will say he had no choice, and people will believe him, or enough will. The forces of Jim Crow were always going to be better armed. And an out and out battle suited their narrative perfectly. The Movement had to work constantly to maintain the discipline of nonviolence.

It helped that the Movement was always rather small. The Montgomery bus boycott involved about seventeen thousand people (22); the Freedom Rides and the Freedom Summer only a few thousand each. The largest protest the Movement ever assembled, their moment of maximum effort, was the March on Washington, which clocked in at around 250,000 participants. The George Floyd protests put more than fifteen million people into the streets in cities across the country. It is simply far easier to maintain ideological and emotional cohesion in small groups than in chaotic masses.

Actions

Between December 1955 and December 1956, the Movement organized a continual boycott of the Montgomery City Lines. This included a carefully organized carpool service to transport people to and from work, legal defenses for those jailed by anti-boycott ordinances, defusing a disinformation campaign from city leaders, and maintaining morale and discipline in the face of bombings and violence (22). That November, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. That December, the city finally caved, and integrated the bus line.

After their victory in Montgomery, the Movement pursued a similar playbook in cities across the South, in a series of carefully planned and organized battles: the integration of the lunch counters of Nashville, Tennessee in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the Freedom Summer of volunteer schools and voter registration in Mississippi in 1964, voter registration drives in Selma Alabama in 1963 and 1964, and many others. In each of these cases, the Movement pursued a similar playbook, modeled on their success in Montgomery.

They did not always succeed. Their campaign to integrate Albany, Georgia in 1961 and 62 was stymied by the local chief of police, Laurie Pritchett. Pritchett had studied the Movement's tactics, and therefore avoided violent confrontations, overcrowded jails, or even enforcing explicitly segregationist laws (107). Instead he calmly arrested protesters for protesting without a license, incarcerated them through a cooperative jail network across neighboring counties, and in general defused the Movement's ability to frame the narrative of violent segregationists assaulting peaceful protesters. In response the Movement simply sought out more dramatic conflicts with more violent segregationists, like Bull Connor in Birmingham. The Movement picked its battles deliberately.

These actions were, in many ways, tactical and organizational masterpieces, as Ricks documents in some detail. But they also reflect a consistent and considered strategy. As noted above, the Movement controlled no formal levers of power in the South. They did not hold political office, and indeed were systematically denied the right to vote. They were smaller in terms of numbers and the capacity for organized violence. They had some economic power, which would be repeatedly expressed through boycotts, but this was generally limited to specific businesses in specific towns—the attempt to organize a nationwide boycott of Alabama, for instance, went nowhere (278).

Instead, the Movement correctly identified that their victories would have to come through persuasion—but a persuasion that went beyond a well-written op-ed. They arranged situations in which they could demonstrate the righteousness of their cause through actions. Even now you yourself remember these images: young men and women sitting quietly at a lunch counter, assaulted by mobs, or walking to school past white faces twisted with hate. The Movement sought always to confront Jim Crow on terrain where they would have the moral and narrative high ground. The act itself was the message.

As noted, this required aggressively managing the media. Jim Crow would always try to paint the Movement as lawless, dangerous thugs. In war the other side gets a say. Fair or not, the Movement constantly had to fight to get its own signal through the noise. And so they worked overtime and overtime again to reassert that they were nonviolent, normal, Constitution-loving Americans, who wanted only to be treated as free and equal citizens.

The Strategic Center of Gravity

Ricks emphasizes that the Movement was always concerned about reconciliation after victory. After the bus system of Montgomery was integrated, ministers rode on every line during rush hours to ensure that everyone remained civil and respectful (33). The paramount goal was always to establish a new social order—which would require buy-in from the white majority. The Movement understood that victory consisted not in a law or a speech or a ruling, but a durable change in the behavior of the mass of people.

But here is another forgotten bit of history: this tactic largely failed in Montgomery. After the formal integration of the bus line, aggressive white violence maintained de facto segregation of the busses, and the city passed new ordinances strengthening segregation in other domains. As a result, the Movement understood that while their tactics might be aimed at localities, the strategic center of gravity they needed to capture was national—in particular, national public opinion, national elite opinion, and national power. Actions like the Freedom Rides and the Freedom Summer were aimed as much at national media as they were at southern segregationists. These deliberately chosen confrontations with Jim Crow advanced their preferred narrative in the national consciousness.

And, in the end, it worked. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally enforced the 14th Amendment's promise of racial nondiscrimination across America.

This, along with Brown v. Board discussed earlier, reflects the necessity of the inside/outside strategy, discussed in more detail in my How Movements Win. The Movement had a policy package ready for implementation once they had won the narrative battle. Their demands, in other words, were both calculated to effect real change and to be acceptable to the national majority.

Did it end racism in America? No. But it did end Jim Crow. Easy to write. Harder to do. The Movement fought for more than a decade. Their victories were less than they hoped. Many of them lost their lives in the struggle. But they changed the world.

We can too.

Featured image is Image Box IB-P0070/80, "Negroes and a few whites picket Charlotte department stores," 2 July 1960, in the Don Sturkey Photographic Materials, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. Used with permission.