Lessons in Training, Strategy, and Discipline From the Civil Rights Movement

Overall, the civil rights movement was better organized and its participants far more methodical and careful than tends to be recognized now. That is regrettable, because  movement veterans again and again make that very point in discussing their approach to bringing about social change. Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a veteran of the Movement who served for years in Mississippi, summarized it as “struggle—disciplined, thoughtful, creative struggle.” 

Consider those four words. Even read them aloud. They are worth such emphasis because they are essential to understanding how the movement operated. Discipline in military operations is most often thought of as following one’s training and obeying legal orders, and both of those are indeed crucial. But the foundation of it all is self-discipline, most often in simply being persistent, of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, of keeping control of one’s own emotions and fears. This was also true of front-line volunteers in the movement across the South. In the movement, an additional form of discipline was maintaining the message that is being sent out to the world. Again and again, members of the civil rights movement emphasized and exhibited self-control in their public actions. As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it, “Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks.”

The views of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great activist for Indian independence, on tactics and strategy are quite relevant here. Civil rights leaders did not study military history and were not affected directly by military principles, but several—especially Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel, one of his principal advisers on strategy—were deeply influenced by Gandhi, who often invoked military analogies. Gandhi taught, “There is no civil disobedience possible, until the crowds behave like disciplined soldiers.” Gandhi’s impact on King and the Movement, both directly through his writings and indirectly through American followers such as the Black educators Mordecai Johnson and Howard Thurman, probably has been underestimated, even now. The major reason for that misapprehension by historians, I suspect, is that the influence of Gandhi generally is more evident in King’s actions than in his words—as will be seen in the discussions below of the campaigns in Birmingham and Selma.

Looking at the civil rights revolution as military history additionally can teach us a few things about the significant but elusive subject of strategy—which also is important to the future of our country. Strategy is a misunderstood concept, often confused with tactics, which deal with the subject of how one actually fights. Strategy, by contrast, involves the larger subject of understanding who you are, and next identifying one’s goals, and only then developing an overarching plan for developing tactics to achieve those goals. One of the Movement’s great strengths was that its leaders formulated a strategy, then studied tactics that fit their chosen approach, and finally gave to the people who were assigned to execute those tactics the training they needed to do so. Each of these three levels fit together, with each action carrying a message—the flesh carrying the word, as it were. That meshing is harder than it looks. The contemporary American military, by contrast, often tends to be good tactically while lacking an overarching strategy, as in Trump’s recent war on Iran. That’s a major problem, because tactical excellence without a strategic understanding resembles a Ferrari without a steering wheel—the vehicle may be powerful and look good, but it won’t get you where you need to go.

Training: Nashville, 1960

Training was key. The civil rights movement was often creative, but it was rarely spontaneous. Its members did not just take to the streets to roll the dice and see what would happen. Rather, weeks and even months of planning and preparation went into most of their campaigns. They used maps, studied targets, and developed insights into how the opposition might react. 

In Nashville, Tennessee, before the sit-ins there began early in 1960, James Lawson, a young divinity student at Vanderbilt University who had travelled to India to study the teachings of Gandhi, set the example by taking months to train his volunteers. Diane Nash, a Fisk University student who became one of Lawson’s most effective trainees, later explained, “The first step was investigation, where we really did all the necessary research and analysis to totally understand the problem. The second phase was education, where we educated our own constituency to what we had found out in our research. The third stage was negotiation, where you really approached the opposition, let them know your position.” Only then would come marches, sit-ins, or other public acts. “The purpose of demonstrations,” Nash explained, “was to focus the attention of the community on the issue, and on the injustice.” This would be coupled with withdrawal of cooperation from the system—boycotts, strikes, and other forms of simply not working with existing structures. If the civil actions were successful, the final stage would be reconciliation, the working out of a new, post-crisis relationship.

Putting that systematic approach into practice required time and work. The preparation of soldiers is a neglected subject in most military histories, often treated as a necessary but dull preliminary to the real story. But it is of critical importance. Every good military leader knows that intense training is essential to everything that follows, playing a large role in whether an organization fails or succeeds. The more rigorous and realistic the training, the better. The ancient historian Josephus wrote of the Roman army, “Their exercises lack none of the vigor of true war, but each soldier trains every day with his whole heart as if it were war indeed. . . . He would not err who described their exercises as battles without blood, and their battles as bloody exercises.”

The civil rights movement paid close attention to training as well. It was in lectures, discussions, and role-playing sessions that the philosophy of nonviolence was imparted. Those sessions prepared new volunteers to endure the ugly violence many would face, and also made them familiar with the overall strategy of the Movement. Indeed, a 1934 book by the Gandhi disciple Richard Gregg concluded with two full chapters on training. Gregg’s work was influential in the Movement. King had read it in 1956, recommended it to others, and contributed a prologue to an American edition published in 1959.

Gregg wrote that the ideal size for a group being trained is no more than a dozen. “When there are more than twelve, it is very difficult to have free, active and steady discussion,” he observed. He had settled on an interesting number, one familiar to every soldier. In modern infantry units, squads are usually made up of eleven to thirteen people. Smaller than that, and the group becomes vulnerable when it suffers combat losses; bigger than that, and it is difficult to develop and maintain tight cohesion. Hence this small unit is the basic building block of military organization. Gregg had recognized what most civilians never see—that the “primary group” of about a dozen people is the key building block in military units. And of course, Lawson, a deeply religious man, had another example before him: twelve disciples had gathered around a leader named Jesus. “A small group of twelve gets to know one another well and comfortably,” Gregg wrote. “They can easily feel strongly as a unit, can think and plan effectively as a unit and can act swiftly, perseveringly and effectively as a unit.” Gregg endorsed the analogy between nonviolent actions and combat operations because he thought that many of the same behaviors and techniques that humans had developed over thousands of years to wage war could be repurposed for nonviolence. He wrote, “The nonviolent resister will, like soldiers, need courage, self-respect, patience, endurance and the ability to sacrifice himself for a cause.”

Done right, a thoughtful training program also will identify potential new leaders—those who learn fast, show persistence and self-discipline, and are even able to help along laggards. The Nashville civil rights movement is particularly striking for its development of leaders. Out of its initial small group of about forty or fifty students grew a cadre of people who would become a major force in the civil rights effort—first in  Nashville sit-ins, then in forming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then in the Freedom Rides across the South in 1961, then in the Birmingham marches in 1963, and finally in Selma in 1964. In addition to Diane Nash, this group included John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard LaFayette, Jr., and Marion Barry.

Conditions were ripe in Nashville, but Lawson was to be the city’s “special ingredient,” said one local leader. Lawson believed that he could turn the city into “a laboratory for demonstrating nonviolence,” and that doing so could plant the seeds for “many Montgomerys.”

Preparing for the sit-ins took almost two years. On March 26, 1958, Lawson conducted the first of what he called “workshops,” but the American military would call intense training and indoctrination. These took place on Tuesday nights, Saturday mornings, and Sunday evenings in church basements, at first with about ten participants, none of them students. But in the fall of 1958, students began to participate, and the size of the workshop group doubled.

The purpose of the workshops, explained Lawson, was to train people so that when conducting an action, they would coordinate their approach with an understanding of the ultimate goal—that is, to ensure their tactical actions reflected their strategic aims. “You have to have a common discipline when you have twenty-five people on a protest,” he said. “A protest cannot be spontaneous. It has to be systematic. There must be planning, strategy.” What Lawson called “a common discipline” is known in the U.S. military as “doctrine.”

One of the first students to attend Lawson’s meetings, which focused on the nature of justice, was John Lewis, a bright but awkward son of Alabama sharecroppers who had been puzzled as a boy that he was not allowed to set foot in his town’s public library. “Those Tuesday nights . . . became the focus of my life, more important even than my classes,” Lewis recalled. “It was something I’d been searching for my whole life.” He was a student at American Baptist Theological Seminary, which trained Black ministers. Tuition cost him $42 a semester. To help pay that bill, Lewis worked part-time as a dishwasher and then as a janitor at the college.

James Bevel, a friend of John Lewis’ and of Lewis’ roommate, Bernard LaFayette, Jr., had heard Lawson talk and had been distinctly unimpressed. Then one day Bevel dropped by at the end of a session to give Lewis and LaFayette a ride. Lawson was talking about a man who was spat on and asked his assailant for a handkerchief, used it, and returned it with a word of gratitude. Bevel was astonished, thinking to himself, “He thanked the man who spat on him for letting him use his damn handkerchief ?” Lawson said that the act was so simple yet so profound that it disarmed the attacker. “That amazed me,” Bevel recalled. “At the same time it felt like lights going on. The possibilities and the uses of nonviolence became instantly apparent.” Bevel himself went overnight from skeptic to devotee. Never one for half measures, he visited the Nashville Public Library and left carrying every book it had by or about Gandhi. 

Lawson sent Lewis, Bevel, and LaFayette to a session at the Highlander Folk School, the same place that had helped prepare Rosa Parks for her moment in history, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955. For the first time in his life, Lewis saw white and Black people cooking, eating, and cleaning together. He also got some advice in workshops about not letting older people take over their embryonic movement. He was especially impressed by Septima Clark, the regal woman running the workshop. “I left Highlander on fire,” he would write years later.

The students at Lawson’s sessions soon outnumbered the adults, especially at the meetings held near Fisk University. Recruiting took off. Long before the U.S. Army discovered the value of an all-volunteer force, the civil rights movement lived by it. In particular, one of those recruits, Bevel, later observed that there was a particular type of person who made a valuable addition to the nonviolent movement: “They have a sense of rightness, fair play and justice about them. They have open hearts and minds. They listen.”

One such addition was Diane Nash. Determined, intelligent, and stylish, Nash had grown up in Chicago. In September 1959, when she enrolled at Fisk, she was surprised to encounter rigorous legal segregation for the first time. Angry and frustrated, she heard about the workshops on nonviolent protest that Lawson was conducting. She was taken with them. She also was taken with Bevel, and eventually would marry him. As a couple, they would become a Movement powerhouse, greatly influencing the campaigns in Birmingham and Selma.

Birmingham, 1963: Preparing the battlefield

The Birmingham operation was so well done that it amounts to a model of how to plan and execute a Gandhian nonviolent campaign.  

The first step, as we’ve seen, is educating yourself by studying the situation. Next comes formulation of demands and a private presentation of them to the opposition, so it knows what you want and is able to begin measuring whether any fight is worthwhile. While those negotiations are under way, you prepare your own followers for direct action—a process that, again, can be surprisingly long.  Then you begin holding meetings to stir people up. Fourth, you go public, issuing a statement, really an ultimatum, making it clear what your goals are and what will happen if your demands are not met. When they are not meant, you move to the next step, which is direct action. This take several forms—boycotts, strikes, acts of civil disobedience, marches. When everything goes right, this should lead to a negotiated settlement and, finally, some form of reconciliation. 

Planning for the campaign began in old missionary school in Dorchester, Georgia, far from Alabama and just outside Savannah, Georgia. Training also began there. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a fiery former moonshiner turned preacher in Birmingham, selected potential leaders from the major Black sections of the city. These people traveled to Dorchester to be prepared by James Bevel, Dorothy Cotton, Septima Clark, and Andrew Young, who all wound up on the staff of the SCLC, an extraordinary lineup of seasoned, determined, and captivating teachers. “We planned to go into Birmingham with trained leaders in every key neighborhood,” wrote Young. “The demonstrators in Birmingham would be under tremendous pressure and we knew that a large number of well-trained folk would be necessary to maintain discipline in the face of the violence that was sure to come from Bull Connor and his men”—this a reference to Theophilus “Bull” Connor, who oversaw the city’s police and fire forces.  The lessons were sometimes remarkably detailed: To endure the brutalities of Connor’s jails, the trainees were instructed to wear to demonstrations clothes that could keep them warm while behind bars, and also to put in their pockets a comb, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste. Toothbrushes would become a surprising symbol of resistance—marchers would hold them up to affirm their willingness to be jailed for the cause. 

They also were given training for how to spend time in jail, with instruction in how  to organize their days behind bars with education, exercise, and contemplation, to make it a meaningful experience and also to maintain cohesion.

Surprisingly, the next phase, the educational steps, took place even farther away, in two distant cities. SCLC staff reached out to allies in Washington and New York to bring them into the plan so that they would understand the campaign as it unfolded. Thus the northerners would be able to knowledgeably explain events to reporters who called them for comment. As Andrew Young put it, they could “function as a part of a national network without day-to-day contact because they had been briefed in advance.” 

Similar briefings on methods and goals were given to an advisory committee of middle-class Blacks in Birmingham. This reflected long-range thinking on the part of Movement strategists. The city’s Black bourgeoisie was not likely to play a major role in demonstrations—indeed, most were wary of King and of actions in the streets—but they were expected to play a role in the closing phases of the campaign. The Movement viewed the endgame—what the U.S. military would call Phase IV post-conflict operations—as the time for reaching genuine understanding with the opposition. At that point, it would be essential to have the Black middle class engaged. These were the teachers, ministers, independent business owners, and other professionals regarded as pillars of the community. “Had they not been involved at all through the process, they wouldn’t have been prepared to bring leadership in the period of reconciliation that followed,” Young later explained. Treating this group as initially neutral or worse, but potential allies in the endgame, was a brilliant move, showing deep understanding of how movements succeed.

Then came meetings with Birmingham’s white economic power structure—the leading store owners and the Chamber of Commerce officials. They were told what the Movement’s demands were and what would happen until those demands were met. It was helpful, Young said, to meet with them before people began to get caught up in the anger and tumult of the moment, with blood on the pavement and perhaps tear gas in the air. In war, before launching a battle, armies often use “preparatory fires,” artillery barrages to make the enemy take cover and perhaps kill a few in the process. The civil rights equivalent was going to foes and telling them what was about to happen—that is, shaping the environment. “Basically, what we were doing was educating our opposition,” Young said. “In Gandhian terms, it was . . . to come together from our different perspectives to seek a new truth—this situation in Birmingham was intolerable.”

Young informed Birmingham’s white business leaders what the Movement wanted them to do: desegregate the city’s store and lunch counters, hire Blacks as clerks and cashiers, and drop charges against nonviolent demonstrators. The Movement also called for a committee to develop a way forward for school desegregation, but according to Ralph Abernathy, that demand was included simply to give white negotiators something to throw out.

The white businessmen were not much interested in any of the demands. Thus the education process continued, as Movement leaders came to recognize that “they were not going to change until we made them uncomfortable. It was not a test of reason or justice that we were being required to meet: it was a test of power.” Indeed, the whites were quite contented with the existing arrangements that kept Blacks subjugated. The question facing Movement leaders was how to make them less comfortable. 

Birmingham’s white establishment responded to this initial contact by going instead to the city’s leading Black businessman, A. G. Gaston, to ask for help. Gaston told them they needed instead to speak to the Reverend Shuttlesworth, who had been fighting for civil rights in the city for years, having been bombed twice and also beaten. The pugnacious Shuttlesworth agreed to confer with the white men, but he cut them no slack. Oh, sure, they were talkative now, he told them. But consider this, he added: “I been here now sufferin’ for five and six or seven years. Church been bombed twice, and nobody said nothing.” But now, he chortled, they wanted to talk.

Sidney Smyer, the head of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, pleaded with Shuttlesworth, “We just wanna know how we can help [keep] Dr. King . . . outa here.” This was tantamount to a confession that the city was vulnerable to Movement pressure. It must have been music to Shuttlesworth’s twice-bombed ears.

Birmingham: Adjusting tactics

The operation began badly, with underwhelming turnouts. At the first preparatory “mass meeting,” only sixty-five locals attended. At the initial demonstration, on April 3, twenty people were arrested for parading without a permit. On April 5, ten were jailed. On April 7, Palm Sunday, it was twenty-six.

On Monday, April 8, King spoke to 125 Black ministers from the Birmingham area to ask for their support for his campaign. They declined to give it to him. 

King realized he was facing the prospect of tactical stalemate. He needed to change his approach somehow. But what, exactly? He sent for James Bevel, who was working in Mississippi. Bevel developed a novel tactical change: He proposed recruiting, training and deploying thousands of Birmingham schoolchildren. 

King had his doubts, but was persuaded when Bevel brought him to see about one thousand children packed into Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. King asked the students in the church how many planned to demonstrate. “He expected about 15 or 20 to respond,” Bevel wrote. Instead, “everyone in the church held up their hand. It almost caused him to faint. . . . He had to ask the question again. ‘All of you are going?’ . . . Yeahhhh!’ He’d never seen anything like it.”

The children marched that day, swamping the city’s jail capacity. They did it again the next day. Bull Connor responded with an escalation of his own, deploying firehoses and police dogs against the children. The counter-escalation through hoses and dogs hoses was exactly the wrong response for the city of Birmingham to take, because it alarmed both local citizens and people around the world. Connor and the local forces of white supremacy, to use a twenty-first-century term, had lost control of the narrative. To cap it off, a few months later, on a Sunday morning in September 1963, the nation was shocked when someone bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four girls and wounding 18 others.

In response, Diane Nash and James Bevel began working on a plan for a major campaign that would culminate in a march that would shut down Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. Again, King was skeptical. But the plan would come to fruition just 16 months later. 

The Selma and Montgomery campaign, 1965

Dr. King kicked off the SCLC’s campaign in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965, with a speech that stands as a classic nonviolent statement. “Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama,” he boomed out to seven hundred Black listeners at the town’s Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which would become the headquarters of the effort. “Give us the ballot! We are not asking. We are demanding the ballot. To get the right to vote, we must be ready to march. We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands. We will bring a voting bill into being on the streets of Selma.” He disclosed also that Selma had been targeted because it was “a symbol of bitter-end resistance to the civil rights movement.” Indeed, the county in which it was located was majority Black, but Blacks had almost no political power. 

John Lewis, Hosea Williams and their comrades, who were doing the day-to-day work of organizing marches in the city, possessed audacity. That quality alone was not enough most of the time, but on March 7, 1965, as the civil rights campaign reached its decisive point, it was sufficient. Sometimes who dares, wins. The enemy, paralyzed in its thinking, would take the bait. The Movement leaders led their marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and into a waiting phalanx of hundreds of state troopers, some mounted, and a group of angry white “posse men,” who formed little more than an armed mob. The segregationists charged, assaulting the marchers with bullwhips, clubs, tear gas, and rubber tubes wound with barbed wire

John Lewis and Hosea Williams emerged with a victory that day. That awful moment at the eastern approach of the Edmund Pettus Bridge had been the death spasm of a defeated system. After a year in which churches and houses had been dynamited and civil rights workers murdered, what made the day memorable for the nation was that it was captured on film. That night, the ABC television network interrupted its programming to show fifteen minutes of footage—clouds of nausea-inducing gas wafting through the scene, and horses charging marchers amid shouts of “Get the niggers.”

With that, the civil rights movement had won. The American public had been made aware, Bevel said, “in the most graphic way possible, that a sheriff in Alabama was beating law-abiding citizens whose only offense was asking for the right to vote.”

Indeed, attuned first by the events in Birmingham and now pondering what it saw from Selma, the nation was now ready to decide that segregation and disenfranchisement were doomed. The subsequent march from Selma to Montgomery would be a victory march—albeit one still plagued by occasional segregationist snipers. 

Takeaways for today

So what can the classical civil rights movement of more than half a century ago tell us about today? 

One of the major points of this essay is that that there are clear and concrete lessons we can take from it, especially from its focus on discipline and organization. But we need to be careful about how to present those. Judy Richardson, a veteran of SNCC and later one of those who created the wonderful Eyes on the Prize documentaries, observed, “Movement people will sometimes say, ‘You young people just aren’t doing diddly squat and da da da.’ Young folks don’t need to hear that. What they need to hear is, this is how we did stuff. This is how we got started. These were the difficulties that we had.”

The scholar Erica Chenoweth, who directs Harvard University’s Nonviolent Action Lab, has identified four key elements present in successful nonviolent movements around the world: “numbers, defections [from security forces], tactical innovations, and discipline.” 

Similarly, I would say that the civil rights movement succeeded as much as it did because of several aspects common to most of its campaigns:

• Training. Volunteers generally were subjected to intense training in how to prepare for demonstrations, how to maintain self-control in a demonstration, and how to act afterward, whether in jail or on the streets. All this kept them one step ahead of their opponents. We are seeing versions of this today, in the ICE Watch trainings proliferating across the country.

• Discipline. This word may sound strange to outsiders to a freedom movement, but not to anyone who is familiar with Gandhi, or who has read this essay. Protesters needed to be held to their training. Internal observers especially would monitor marches and try to stop anyone deviating into violence, which was essential to maintaining public support. This is also useful in deterring provocateurs working for the foe. Contemporary examples include the ICE watchers in Minneapolis, who continued recording with their phones even as federal agents tear gassed and abused them.

• Support structures. These ranged from employing those observers at marches to compiling lists of potential marchers who needed babysitters. There was little spontaneous about the civil rights movement, and that was a good thing. Logistics was the key—if unseen—aspect of much of the Movement. Support structures are key to sustainability, which in turn is the path to long-term success. Almost always, it is better 100 demonstrators for 500 days than 500,000 demonstrators for one day. 

• Planning. As James Lawson often said, you need to think through consequences: If we do this, and they do that, what do we do next? This is harder than it sounds.

• Strategy. They kept their eyes on the prize, the ultimate goal. But, of course, that goal first had to be identified through intense discussions that brought to the surface internal differences and examined them.

• Reconciliation. Making this the final step changes everything that precedes it. The goal is not to crush your opponents but to change them, to find a way to live together down the road. Reconciliation may not be comfortable, but it does show a way forward. This may be the hardest step to grasp and implement.

Featured image is Freedom Rider plaque, by Kevin